You Can Defend Foreign Aid, Democrats
It's not electoral poison to defend life-saving, interest-advancing agencies
Ready-to-Use Therapeutic Food saves lives. RUTF is shelf-stable; requires no mixing with potentially dirty water; and can be administered to starving children with no training. Rich in nutrition and calories, it is an effective treatment for famine and other forms of severe acute malnurition. If children don’t—or can’t—eat, they will die. RUTF helps millions of children eat every year.
When USAID purchased RUTF, it did so not only to save lives but also to benefit American farmers. RUTF, you see, is made from peanuts, and the United States is the world’s fourth-largest producer of peanuts. The MANA Nutrition plant in Fitzgerald, Georgia, received $200 million in contracts to produce RUTF in 2024 from USAID. Fitzgerald, Georgia, has a population of 9,006. That was a contract worth $22,000 for each person in Fitzgerald.
We might ask, reasonably, whether buying RUTF at home is the most efficient way to turn dollars into saved lives. Peanuts are grown in other countries—Sudan and Nigeria, for instance—and manufacturing can be done in lower-cost areas. Political calculations sometimes lead us to second-best alternatives, however. The calculation behind USAID’s purchase of RUTF from Georgia was that spreading contracts around to benefit American workers would build a coalition in favor of continuing that fighting.
Right now, USAID is being dismantled. Regardless of the fact that the president has no power to abolish the agency, it is functionally already dead. I could not even include links to USAID Web sites; they have been removed. Abolishing USAID is against statutory law and very likely unconstitutional. It is also being done in front of our eyes. And the fight that was supposed to accompany assaults on the agency’s budget is not being waged. Bickering about minor details regarding the efficiency of the agency would be beside the point.
Savvy, realistic Democrats are rushing to assure us that there’s no appetite to save USAID. (Many of them are fighting back, to be sure.) This is silly and self-fulfilling. Yes, foreign aid is unpopular in the abstract, although it is easy to exaggerate how unpopular it is. The most recent high-quality polling on the Roper database places providing foreign humanitarian aid at 71 percent very/somewhat important and 24 percent not too/not at all important. That’s not quite an 80/20 issue but it’s pretty darn good.
Support for foreign aid is less intense than support for Israel military aid or securing the border, but opposition to foreign humanitarian aid is in the same zone as those initiatives. You have to be a frothing extremist to oppose spending money on saving the lives of starving children. I looked at a lot of “most important problem” questions in the database, and foreign aid is about a 2 percent issue—that is, about 2 percent of Americans will list it as the most important problem. It’s not a winner and it’s not a loser. You can fight a battle on this terrain.
You can do this in particular because the U.S. public is not only interested in doing good. They also want to do well. An excellent paper by Tobias Heinrich, Yoshiharu Kobayashi, and Leah Long demonstrates that Americans are perfectly happy to trade aid for material benefits—even from regimes that commit human rights abuses.1 Aid, Americans understand perfectly well, is not just a humanitarian instrument but a tool of statecraft.
And it is an effective tool. When the United States funds anti-HIV/AIDS programs in other countries (that is, PEPFAR), it not only helps save lives but it massively improves foreign perceptions of the United States, as research by Benjamin E. Goldsmith, Yusaku Horiuchi, and Terence Wood demonstrates.
It is also politically effective at home. Research by Tobias Heinrich and Timothy Peterson demonstrates that members of Congress who promote foreign aid with local benefits will garner more support than legislators who do not—and that voters oppose aid cuts if it hurt local economies.2 Contracts like RUTF are meant to be triggers—but they still need to be pulled.
To be sure, Austin Scott, the Republican congressman representing Fitzgerald, Georgia, probably has little to fear; he won re-election by 69-31 in 2024. But if I were, say, Jon Ossoff, I’d be interested in learning that there’s electoral gains to be had for even attempting to save local benefits.
How does this square with the fact that everyone trots out when you bring up foreign aid—that the public thinks the U.S. spends too much on foreign aid? Yes, that’s real—but it’s not permanent. Experimental work by Reuben Hurts, Taylor Tidwell, and Darren Hawkins demonstrates that providing information about the low cost of aid can reduce aid opposition (in isolation) from 67 to 28 percent.3 Even if opposing messages reduces that effect, it still breaks through.
And what we’re dealing with now isn’t about cutting or raising a budget. It’s existential: should the United States do foreign aid at all?
Conceding the foreign aid fight without even considering contesting it is a terrible move—D.C. brain at its worst. Being afraid to stand up for foreign aid will let the worst impulses of isolationism win, and for the worst possible reasons and in the worst possible way with the most dire consequences for the beneficiaries of aid at home and abroad. If you can’t fight for starving kids, you shouldn’t be in politics; if you can’t fight for American workers, you shouldn’t be in American politics. Most important, if agencies can be abolished by diktat on the basis of misinformation without a spirited challenge that would have a good chance of winning over support, then the stakes are far graver even than the people helped by U.S. aid.
Tobias Heinrich, Yoshiharu Kobayashi, Leah Long, Voters Get What They Want (When They Pay Attention): Human Rights, Policy Benefits, and Foreign Aid, International Studies Quarterly, Volume 62, Issue 1, March 2018, Pages 195–207, https://doi.org/10.1093/isq/sqx081
Heinrich, T., & Peterson, T. M. (2020). Foreign Policy as Pork-barrel Spending: Incentives for Legislator Credit Claiming on Foreign Aid. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 64(7-8), 1418-1442. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022002719896838
Reuben Hurst, Taylor Tidwell, Darren Hawkins, Down the Rathole? Public Support for US Foreign Aid, International Studies Quarterly, Volume 61, Issue 2, June 2017, Pages 442–454, https://doi.org/10.1093/isq/sqx019