Foreign Aid Isn’t Charity

Washington has a habit of confusing foreign assistance with charity, using American dollars to advance personal or ideological agendas. From climate change to drag shows, taxpayer resources are being misdirected away from projects that advance U.S. national-security goals. Foreign aid should be strategic. It shouldn’t be used to make Americans feel good about themselves.

Republican control of the House creates an opportunity to reshape foreign-aid efforts, which are largely managed by the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development. A conservative approach to foreign assistance should be fiscally responsible, ensuring that every dollar is wisely spent and achieves real results for the American people. For too long higher levels of funding have been mistaken for better outcomes.

The size of the foreign-aid budget has outpaced the government’s ability to manage it. USAID staff are stretched to the breaking point, unable to process billions of previously appropriated funds. Low morale has led to resignations. Staffing shortages have forced the agency to direct billions of dollars to an oligopoly of multilateral organizations and large contractors.

Minimal transparency and accountability for performance mean that much of this money is wasted every year. Some of it may even have been diverted to terrorists’ hands in such places as Yemen and Syria. Obama appointee John Sopko, special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, told Congress earlier this year that he couldn’t guarantee American aid isn’t “currently funding the Taliban.” In Ethiopia, USAID suspended food aid following Administrator Samantha Power’s testimony to Congress that a criminal network composed of “parties on both sides of the conflict” was stealing U.S. food aid.

We can no longer be played for fools. Congress must improve the accountability structure for foreign-aid payments, and conservatives should push funding to far more cost-effective local partners, require public reporting on all subawardees, and implement performance-based contracting.

There is no bigger threat to global economic development and political stability than the West’s climate ambitions. International financial institutions such as the World Bank will no longer finance fossil-fuel projects, and USAID is pressing poor countries to make a transition to green energy. These are self-defeating polices. Revenue from the oil and gas industries funds critical social services, generates employment, draws foreign investment and creates economic growth in Africa and Latin America. Accomplishing all this with aid transfers would require trillions of dollars from already heavily indebted donors. It’s obscene for aid agencies to demand that Africans forgo economic growth to satisfy Western fears of climate catastrophe. A conservative foreign-aid policy should prioritize real people over climate paranoia.

Our foreign aid should also embrace shared American values. Republicans and Democrats did so successfully for decades. Congress voted in 1973 to prevent U.S. tax dollars from being used to perform abortions in recipient countries. That consensus stuck because large majorities of Americans—regardless of their view on the matter at home—have long opposed using taxpayer money to pay for abortions abroad. The Biden administration’s insistence that abortion be included in all foreign-aid programs has upended bipartisan support for another round of funding for Pepfar, the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. This popular multibillion-dollar program initiated by President George W. Bush has saved millions of African lives.

Washington should devote its limited resources to programming that all Americans can support, not partisan pet projects. Pursuing the latter will only further divide a polarized country and result in poor outcomes around the world. African countries, for instance, resent tying aid to what they consider to be ideological colonialism and routinely point out that China attaches no such strings to its aid.

This raises another important point: U.S. foreign aid must be an integrated tool of foreign policy to promote the national interest. Specifically, it must bolster our national-security interests in the Indo-Pacific and counter the Chinese Communist Party’s aggression in the region. At the very least, it should support allies, such as Taiwan, Israel, and Jordan, while withholding aid to countries that cozy up to regional dictators.

The House Appropriations Committee has embraced many of these proposals as it’s begun to consider next year’s foreign aid and other spending bills. The Senate and White House should follow the committee’s lead and collaborate to craft a vision of foreign assistance that works for the American people and advances U.S. national security.

Mr. Richardson was director of foreign assistance at the State Department, 2019-21. Mr. Primorac was acting chief operating officer at USAID, 2020-21.