Foreign Aid On Chopping Block Again

The 1996 budget of the United States was published this week in four fat volumes and one new slim one. This last innovation is an easy-to-read Citizens Guide to the $1.612 trillion the world's richest country proposes to spend next year.


That $1.612 trillion would be sufficient to buy all the arable farmland in the United States -- twice. It would be enough to buy all the shares of the 100 biggest corporations listed on the New York stock exchange.


And tucked away in its provisions are $21.2 billion for the foreign affairs budget. There is $9.1 billion for bilateral international aid and another $6 billion for international security assistance. And as usual, by far the biggest portion of all this goes to Israel and Egypt, who share $5.24 billion.


The figures are so enormous that we tend to forget what they mean, and start talking of a billion here and a billion there as if we knew what this meant. There are two useful rules of thumb. President Bill Clinton gets a salary of $200,000 a year, and it would take him 5,000 years to earn a billion dollars. The other rule is to keep a copy of last year's budget handy to see what the policy trends are.


Last year, Clinton's final budget proposed $900 million in assistance to the Newly Independent States of the old Soviet Union, although Congress eventually approved only $719 million. This week, Clinton proposed just $788 million for 1996, and he is most unlikely to get Congress to approve that diminished sum.


Nor is the new budget entirely clear about the people that U.S. assistance is supposed to help. The Budget itself says it "gives new priority to programs that create opportunity for American business to invest, trade and develop partnerships in the region's emerging private sectors. "Nor is this cut in U.S. assistance compensated by any greater investments in the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. This year, the budget includes $2.3 billion for all the international financial institutions, but that sum includes $416 million of arrears. So the real contribution is less than $1.9 billion, which is a cut on the $2 billion that last year's budget proposed.


"The resources that we are requesting are the rock bottom minimum that we need to defend and to advance America's interests," said Secretary of State Warren Christopher. "They are a test of our commitment to lead."


Budget Committee chairman Senator Pete Domenici, however, welcomed the budget this week with the words: "If this budget ain't dead on arrival, it's on life support."


Then there is Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. He chairs a sub-committee on foreign operations, which decides whether there will be any foreign aid at all. McConnell wants to abolish the Agency for International Development altogether.


If he approves any aid at all, McConnell wants to condition it on Russian behavior in its near-abroad. His new Foreign Assistance Act would require the president to give an annual accounting of all Russian troops who are stationed beyond their borders. If the president asserts that they are there by invitation, he must provide documentation to prove it.


"In our own long-term interest we must continue to support and encourage the development of democracy and a free market in Russia and continue to reduce the nuclear threat from this region," says Clinton's budget.


Asked what he thought of the Clinton budget, McConnell said he was "not impressed."