It Is Time for USAID to Go

January 2001

Volume 3/ Number 2 

Dear Colleague:

Senator Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) has called for the elimination of the U.S. Agency for International Development and its replacement by an International Development Foundation that would make block grants to faith-based and private-sector organizations. We concur.

Steven W. Mosher

President 

It Is Time for USAID to Go

In a move that has sent shock waves through the foreign policy establishment, Senator Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) has proposed that the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) be shut down. The powerful Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, addressing an overflow crowd at the American Enterprise Institute, urged that international assistance in the future be handled by private charities and religious groups.

“The time has come to reject what President Bush correctly labels the ‘failed compassion of towering, distant bureaucracies’ and, instead, empower private and faith-based groups who care most about those in need,” Senator Helms said in a speech entitled “Towards a Compassionate Conservative Foreign Policy.”

Helms in the past described foreign aid as the equivalent of throwing tax dollars down a ‘foreign rat hole.’ He now proposes replacing USAID with an International Development Foundation, which would award block grants to private and community relief groups. “Private and faith-based programs do more good, with less money, for more people around the world than the entire U.S. foreign aid bureaucracy combined,” Helms said.

At present, perhaps only a quarter of the funds spent by USAID actually reach its intended recipients—the poor of the developing world—in one form or another. The rest goes to overhead and administrative expenses. Private-sector charities do better than this; religious-based charities do much better.

There is little doubt that under the administration of a quasi-governmental foundation, with a smaller staff, streamlined operations, and a program of block grants, much more of the $7 billion a year that the U.S. spends in economic and humanitarian aid would actually reach those in need.

But there is another reason why those concerned about life and the family should get behind Helms’ proposal.

Since the seventies, USAID programs have been driven by a population control agenda that harms women and families in the developing world. The indiscriminate promotion of sterilization and contraception that these programs entail poses a major risk to the health of malnourished women. And when contraception fails, as it invariably does, it often leads to abortion.

And consider this: This aid agency continues to spend massive amounts of money to further reduce the birth rate in countries in which the fertility rate is already in free fall. In Africa, where AIDS is decimating the population, population control budgets are actually being increased. Is it any wonder that African leaders are questioning our motives?

If we want to save lives in the developing world, the best way is by expanding basic health care, including maternal and infant health care, and through authentic economic development.

USAID’s population control policies are anti-woman, anti-child and anti-family and are causing increasing resentment against the U.S. in the developing world. It is time for them to go. 

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