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GOP presumptive presidential
nominee Mitt Romney and
his running mate, Wisconsin
congressman Paul Ryan.
Photo by: monkeyz_uncle / CC BY-NC-SA
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Less than 90 days before Americans
cast their ballots for president, President Barack Obama maintains only a slim
lead over Republican challenger Mitt Romney in opinion polls. Amid the specter
of a mandatory spending rollback on Jan. 2, many in the U.S. aid
community have begun bracing themselves for even more belt-tightening should
Romney take office later that month.
“Let me tell you: We’re spending more
on foreign aid than we ought to be spending,” the former Massachusetts governor
argued in a Republican presidential debate in October of
last year.
Until this past weekend, however,
Romney has given little indication of his foreign aid budget plans. On
Saturday, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee named Paul Ryan as
his running mate, calling the 42-year-old congressman from Wisconsin an
“intellectual leader” of the Republican Party. From his perch as chairman of
the House Budget Committee, the staunch fiscal conservative has drawn national
attention as the architect of a controversial long-term budget
blueprint to dramatically rein in federal spending and restructure social
programs. By selecting Ryan, many believe Romney inevitably adopts his divisive
budget proposal and principles. Obama has instead proposed a combination of
modest spending reductions and a rollback of Bush administration tax cuts,
which he argues would more responsibly tackle the ballooning U.S. budget
deficit.
Political analysts say that an
election once widely expected to be a referendum on Obama’s economic record has
now become a choice between two competing visions over the role and size of
government. A victory for the Romney-Ryan ticket in November would leave
Republicans with a mandate – not to mention tremendous pressure from the
party’s increasingly dominant right flank – to adopt the Ryan budget’s sweeping
spending cuts, including slashes to U.S. foreign assistance. Over the next 10
years, the House Republican budget or Ryan budget would spend $40 trillion,
well below the $47 trillion proposed in the Obama administration’s spending
plan.
For fiscal 2013, the Ryan budget would
slash international affairs spending by 10 percent below actual 2012 levels to
$43 billion. The Obama administration, on the other hand, has requested $56
billion for international affairs in fiscal 2013. In recent years, above 90
percent of the U.S. international affairs budget has been allocated for the
State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development and their
foreign aid programs.
As the chart above shows, both the
Ryan budget and the Obama administration’s spending plan would impose cuts to
the U.S. international affairs budget in fiscal 2014. Under Obama’s plan, U.S.
international affairs spending would then rise each year from fiscal 2015 to
fiscal 2022. International affairs spending in the Ryan budget would continue
to fall until fiscal 2016, hitting just $38 billion compared to $51 billion for
the Obama plan that year.
After fiscal 2016, modest increases in
international affairs spending would be underway each year for both the Obama
and Ryan plans. Ten years from now, in 2022, U.S. international affairs
spending would reach $58 billion under the Obama spending plan, 24 percent
above the $47 billion target outlined by the Ryan budget.
While Obama’s proposed spending levels
for foreign assistance have been met with mixed reactions among the U.S. aid community, most nonetheless
credit the administration with keeping the U.S. aid budget largely intact in a
tightfisted environment. The president’s fiscal 2013 request of $56 billion for
international affairs would represent a 13 percent jump from his first budget
back in fiscal 2010.
In stark contrast, leading voices in
the U.S. development community have expressed dismay over the Ryan budget.
Gregory Adams, director of aid effectiveness at Oxfam America, describes the
Ryan plan as “small potatoes for Washington deficit math—yet devastating for
poor people in the field.” Meanwhile, the U.S. Global Leadership Council warned
that the Ryan budget would herald a “dangerous direction” in America’s global
engagement. House Foreign Affairs Committee Ranking Member Howard Berman
(D-Calif.) adds that the Ryan plan “fails to recognize” the importance of
development and diplomacy in U.S. national security.
Republicans in Congress have come to
the defense of the aid spending cuts championed by Ryan, making the case that
America’s fiscal challenges imperil U.S. foreign assistance in the long run.
“Those who complain about potentially
diminished levels of International Affairs funding need to ask themselves how
much less an insolvent United States of America would be able to do,” argues Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.), chairwoman of the
U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee.
Beyond its topline figures for international
affairs spending, the Ryan budget also outlined a number of recommendations on
how U.S. aid agencies might make do with a significantly diminished budget. The
Ryan budget calls for USAID to fully embrace the Millennium Challenge Corp.’s model of only disbursing aid
to countries which demonstrate a commitment to good governance, economic
openness, and social sector investment. The Ryan budget would even consolidate
USAID under MCC – a far less likely scenario given USAID’s size and standing.
Ryan would also eliminate Feed the Future, President Obama’s global hunger and food
security initiative. The vice presidential candidate argues that the program,
which focuses on agricultural development, overlaps with longstanding U.S. food
aid efforts.
Connie Veillette, former Director of
the Rethinking U.S. Foreign Assistance Program at the Center for Global
Development, disagrees with that assessment. “[Food aid] is not a long-term
program to promote food security. The majority of its funds are for humanitarian
responses to acute and chronic problems with regard to food availability and
access. It is a “feed the now” rather than a “feed the future” approach,” says Veillette.
Washington’s support for World
Bank-administered climate investment funds as well as the U.S. Complex Crises
Fund, which finances stabilization and conflict prevention activities
worldwide, would also be on the chopping block should a Romney administration
fully embrace the Ryan budget. Sizeable spending cuts would also be in store
for U.S. contributions to international organizations as well as USAID’s
international disaster assistance programming.
Of course, Romney is still the man at
the top of the ticket. While his advisers make clear that he supports the
tenets of the Ryan budget, they also emphasize that he intends to put forward
his own spending plans if elected. Thus far, unlike his running mate, Romney
has mostly steered clear of offering specifics on the possible makeup of U.S.
foreign aid in his administration.
The CEO-style structure of his
campaign, as reported by Politico, also suggests that a host of advisers will
have Romney’s ear. His advisers include some well-known foreign aid advocates –
among them veterans of the Bush administration global development initiatives –
who do not appear to share Ryan’s brand of fiscal conservatism.
Most notably, Romney has recently
appointed former World Bank President Robert Zoellick as head of his national
security transition team. Credited with modernizing the World Bank, Zoellick has urged developed
countries, including the United States, to maintain foreign aid flows even amid
the global financial crisis. Romney is also reportedly considering Zoellick as his Secretary of State. Romney’s
foreign policy and national security team also counts former USAID
Administrator Andrew Natsios and former MCC CEO John Danilovich.
While House Republicans remain
resistant to a watered-down version of the Ryan budget, the conservative
spending plan can claim some common ground with Obama’s aid agenda,
particularly in regards to an expansion of performance-based aid. The Obama
administration has tapped four countries (El Salvador, Ghana, the Philippines,
and Tanzania) for its Partnership for Growth program. Taking a page from the MCC,
the initiative aims to support broad-based economic growth in countries that
demonstrate a strong commitment to democratic governance and sustainable
development. In addition to recommending more performance-based aid, the Ryan
budget also emphasized the need for U.S. aid programs to transition to country
ownership. The administration’s USAID Forward reform agenda shares this commitment to
locally-led project administration and implementation.
Furthermore, Romney has also committed
to bolster economic ties with Africa, which would mark a continuation of the
Obama administration’s increasingly business-oriented strategy for engagement with the
continent. While compromise has been hard to find in Washington lately,
agreement on these areas could form a basis for bipartisan discussions on the
future of the U.S. aid program.
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