There’s a case to be made that the cuts to scientific research are even more damaging, but probably the most harmful part of Trump’s proposed budget is the cuts to foreign aid programs. Actual foreign-aid-as-aid-instead-of-as-bribery is a relatively tiny fraction of U.S. spending, and it saves millions of lives; there are more than ten million people on PEPFAR, Bush’s HIV/AIDS program, alone, and there are no private organizations remotely poised to fill the gaps if these programs get cut as planned. If you live in the United States, I think it’s worth your time to call your representatives and say that you don’t support those cuts.
Americans notoriously vastly overestimate how much of the government’s budget is spent on foreign aid. The average guess is 31% of the budget; 15% of people thought it was more than half of government spending. Only 3% of respondents correctly guessed that it was less than 1%. That is smaller than the share of respondents who will answer that they think a secret conspiracy of lizardmen rule the earth.
Foreign aid is tiny. Foreign aid that’s actually aid and not just aid-as-bribery is even tinier. And it’s the only thing the government does with my tax dollars that I’m unreservedly proud of. I encourage people to kick up a fuss about this one; even among a long list of bad budgeting decisions it stands out.
Yes, real foreign aid is tiny, but that just makes it more inexcusable. If so little government money is going to genuinely helpful aid, the private sector easily can step up to fill the gap, like they’re conspicuously doing with many other programs currently on the chopping block. It is not something to be proud of that the state takes money from people using threats and violence and gives it away to people on the other side of the world with no benefit to domestic taxpayers. It’s just token PR for a monstrous criminal organization currently bombing several of the countries most in need of aid. Instead of kicking up a fuss about the state not spending its ill-gotten gains the way you want and wasting time annoying congressional staffers who don’t care, why not work on organizing a replacement program that doesn’t depend on theft for its funding?
As I am sure you know, I devote lots of energy to increasing private charity and to making sure that it goes to impactful and well-run orgs. Cuts to foreign aid will not, as a question of actual fact, be replaced by private charity. I don’t care if it would be nice if that happened; it is simply not the case that if every American family got a tax refund for the whole amount spent on foreign aid (and they won’t; Trump’s proposed budget increases military spending by much much more than the savings from cutting foreign aid) they would direct that money to highly effective overseas aid programs.
That means that hundreds of thousands and possibly millions of people will die if foreign aid is cut. It means that millions more will experience losses to their potential because of poor childhood nutrition and starvation.
I consider preventing hundreds of thousands of people from dying and millions from growing up impacted by severe starvation to be really important. It outweighs symbolic considerations like whether saving those lives makes the U.S. government look better than it deserves; making the U.S. government look worse does not stop a million deaths. I enthusiastically invite all organizations with bad PR to save a million lives a year to try to improve their reputation, and I do not think foreign aid has distracted anybody from calling our country the murder industrial complex it is.
And calling your Congresspeople works. There is nothing the average person can do with the five minutes it takes to call their Congresspeople which does more to save a million lives than making it known you oppose cuts to foreign aid; lobbying for Giving What We Can is great, but a phone call is absolutely a better use of the first five minutes of the day dedicated to fixing desperate international poverty.
And, last, on the ‘taxation is theft’ thing. I think letting millions of people die while having basically no effect on the taxation rate is a singularly stupid place to take a stand about your conviction that all taxation is illegitimate. “This action is technically by definition a member of a category most of the members of which are illegal’ is not a convincing argument. It is meaningless wordplay. The way to convince me that something is bad is to convince me that it causes harm, not that it bears a symmetric or formal resemblance to things that cause harm (and the specific argument here would have to be ‘the $5 a month that every American pays for all non-bribery foreign aid is more important than millions of people starving’, not just ‘the existence of taxes in general does more harm than millions of people starving’).
So please call your representatives and tell them you oppose cuts to foreign aid; it really matters, and it’s not too late.
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A Middleground 