Today’s Congress is not exactly a well-oiled machine. Even picking a speaker has proven to be incredibly difficult for the House, which took as many floor votes on the matter in 2023 alone as in the previous 36 years combined.
But there’s one issue in which Congress has shown a surprising facility for bipartisan, bicameral cooperation: foreign aid.
Last year saw a historic deal to greatly increase funding for global health efforts, especially those targeting AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis — which together kill some 2.5 million people a year — as well as new bipartisan legislation introduced to reform the way the US Agency for International Development (USAID), America’s leading foreign aid agency, works.
2024 promises more bipartisan collaboration on the issue. This past week, Reps. Sara Jacobs (D-CA) and Cory Mills (R-FL) and Sens. Christopher Coons (D-DE), Tim Kaine (D-VA), Joni Ernst (R-IA), and Pete Ricketts (R-NE) introduced the Locally-Led Development and Humanitarian Response Act, another measure to reform USAID. Introduced in the House on March 19, it already passed the Foreign Affairs Committee by a unanimous voice vote on March 20.
The bill is meant to push USAID to distribute more of its budget to local groups in the countries where it works. The basic case for using more local groups is simple. US aid spending currently goes largely to a small group of very large contractors that are insulated from evaluation and tend toward bloated programs.
Giving the money instead to small local organizations would not only help develop civil society in developing countries, but likely achieve better outcomes at a lower cost. A recent review by development research group the Share Trust estimated that funding aid through local groups is roughly 32 percent more cost-effective than funding groups based in rich countries, largely because salaries and overhead in rich countries are significantly higher.
This isn’t new: USAID administrators going…
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