[While the final budget for the year remains
uncertain given the politics surrounding the special Congressional committee charged with finding more than $1 trillion in cuts
over all, it is clear that foreign aid will decline for a second year.]
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John Moore/Getty Images
A mother brought her son for treatment at an American-financed
clinic in Farza, Afghanistan.
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WASHINGTON — America’s budget crisis at home is forcing the
first significant cuts in overseas aid in nearly two decades, a retrenchment
that officials and advocates say reflects the country’s diminishing ability to
influence the world.
As
lawmakers scramble to trim the swelling national
debt, both the Republican-controlled House and the
Democrat-controlled Senate have proposed slashing financing for the
State Department and its
related aid agencies at a time of desperate humanitarian crises and uncertain
political developments. The proposals have raised the specter of deep cuts in
food and medicine for Africa, in relief for disaster-affected places like
Pakistan and Japan, in political and economic assistance for the new
democracies of the Middle East, and even for the Peace Corps.
The
financial crunch threatens to undermine a foreign policy described as “smart
power” by President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, one
that emphasizes diplomacy and development as a complement to American military
power. It also would begin to reverse the increase in foreign aid that
President George W. Bush supported after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, as part
of an effort to combat the roots of extremism and anti-American sentiment, especially
in the most troubled countries.
Given
the relatively small foreign aid budget — it accounts for 1 percent of federal
spending over all — the effect of the cuts could be disproportional.
The
State Department already has scaled back plans to open more consulates in Iraq,
for example. The spending trend has also constrained support for Tunisia and
Egypt, where autocratic leaders were overthrown in popular uprisings. While
many have called for giving aid to these countries on the scale of the Marshall
Plan that helped rebuild European democracies after World War II, the
administration has been able to propose only relatively modest investments and
loans, and even those have stalled in Congress.
“There
is a democratic awakening in places that have never dreamed of democracy,” Mrs.
Clinton said on Friday. “And it is unfortunate that it’s happening
at a historic time when our own government is facing so many serious economic
challenges, because there’s no way to have a Marshall Plan for the Middle East
and North Africa.”
With
the administration and Congress facing a deadline for still deeper cuts in
spending, government programs across the board face the ax, from public
education to the military, but proposed cuts to the State Department and
foreign aid come on top of an $8 billion reduction in April,
the single largest cut to any one department under the deal that kept the
government from shutting down.
Representative
Kay Granger, a Republican from Texas and chairwoman of the House appropriations
subcommittee overseeing foreign affairs, said that the budget crisis was
forcing “a fundamental change” in how foreign aid is spent. Lawmakers and
officials, she said, needed to prioritize spending according to American
national security interests and justify those decisions to Americans who are
generally skeptical of foreign aid.
She
recalled a State Department envoy’s informing her of $250 million in relief to
Pakistan after last year’s devastating floods. “I said I think that’s bad
policy and bad politics,” she said in an interview at her office on Capitol
Hill. “What are you going to say to people in the United States who are having
flooding?”
Spending
on international affairs, including foreign aid and the State Department’s
operating budget, reached $55 billion in the 2010 fiscal year, Mr. Obama’s
first full year in office, but declined by the end of the 2011 budget to $49
billion.
The
administration proposed spending $59 billion in the fiscal year that began on
Saturday, including $8.7 billion in a newly created contingency account for
operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Those operations will expand
significantly when the State Department takes over more tasks as American
troops withdraw from Iraq at the end of the year and prepare for a drawdown in
Afghanistan beginning next summer.
While
the final budget for the year remains uncertain given the politics surrounding
the special Congressional committee charged with finding more than $1 trillion in cuts
over all, it is clear that foreign aid will decline for a second year.
“We’re
going to have to do more with less — or less with less, depending on how you
look at it,” said Deputy Secretary of State Thomas R. Nides, who oversees the
department’s budget and operations.
The
House appropriations subcommittee, controlled by Republicans, proposed cutting
the administration’s request by $12 billion, or 20 percent, to $47 billion,
with $39 billion for operations and aid and $7.6 billion for the contingency
account for Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Even
the Senate’s version, passed by its Democratic majority, cuts the Obama
administration’s request to $53 billion. Setting aside the rise in contingency
spending in Iraq as the American Embassy bolsters its security in anticipation
of the troop withdrawal, the Senate’s proposal would amount to a reduction in
everything else.
Both
versions cut spending across the board, and around the world. The House’s plan
also reflects longstanding Republican views on matters of policy, for example
by prohibiting financing for organizations that perform abortions or provide
needle exchanges. It would also cut American contributions to international
organizations like the United Nations and its Human Rights Council, the World
Bank and the World Health Organization.
The
Republicans also attach conditions on aid to Pakistan, Egypt and the Palestinians,
suspending the latter entirely if the Palestinians succeed in winning
recognition of statehood at the United Nations. However, one of the largest
portions of foreign aid — more than $3 billion for Israel — is left untouched
in both the House and Senate versions, showing that, even in times of
austerity, some spending is inviolable.
The
last time American foreign aid declined so significantly was in the 1990s,
after the end of the cold war and the fight between Democrats and Republicans
that led to a balanced budget under President Bill Clinton.
John
Norris, a former official at the State Department and the Agency for
International Development, or U.S.A.I.D., said that the country could “be much
more selective” in delivering aid “without doing much harm to the national
interest.”
But Mr.
Norris warned that cutting too deeply could return the United States to the inward-looking
era before the Sept. 11 attacks, after which many people believed that the
country had done too little to address the roots of extremism.
“We
need to be a little less scattershot,” said Mr. Norris, who is now with the
Center for American Progress in Washington. “Every ambassador wants to announce
something or preside over a ribbon cutting, but in this environment that is no
longer possible.”
Jeremy
Konyndyk, the director of policy and advocacy for the international aid group Mercy
Corps, said that a retrenchment in aid could gravely erode not only
America’s influence but also its moral standing as a generous nation in times
of crises.
“The
amount of money the U.S. has or doesn’t have doesn’t really rise or fall on the
foreign aid budget,” he said in a telephone interview from Nairobi, Kenya,
where he was overseeing relief to the famine in the Horn of Africa. “The budget
impact is negligible. The impact around the world is enormous.”
A SIGNIFICANT OZONE HOLE IS REPORTED OVER THE ARCTIC
[“The Antarctic ozone hole is the drumbeat,” Dr. Fahey said. “We see it every year and it tells us that the stuff we did in the last two decades still matters” in terms of reducing the levels of ozone-depleting chemicals. Yet the ozone depletion recorded this year at the opposite end of the planet this year points to “the lack of predictability of what will happen in the Arctic,” he said.]
By Felicity
Barringer
While the extent of the ozone depletion is considered temporary, and
well below the depletion that occurs seasonally over the Antarctic, atmospheric
scientists described it as a striking example of how sudden anomalies can occur
as a result of human activity that occurred years ago. At its maximum extent in
February, the northern ozone hole reached southward into Russia and Mongolia.
Emissions of chlorinated fluorocarbons, or CFCs, once found in aerosol sprays,
and other ozone-depleting substances like the soil fumigant methyl bromide
produced the first
ozone hole over the
Antarctic, which was identified in 1985. Emissions of those compounds were
banned under the Montreal Protocol, which has been signed by
191 countries.
Since 2000, concentrations in the atmosphere have been declining, but
remain about 25 percent higher than when the ozone hole was identified, said
Michelle L. Santee, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and one of
the paper’s authors.
“The root cause is the residual products from the CFCs that were
released throughout the 20th century,” she said. “But they are very long-lived,
and it will take a few decades for them to be cleansed from the atmosphere.”
The appearance of a second ozone hole at the other end of the earth “is
a reminder that human activities can have a very significant impact and often
unintended consequences on the atmosphere,” she added.
In a telephone interview, Dr. Santee and a NASA laboratory colleague and
co-author, Nathaniel J. Livesey, were nonetheless cautious about linking the
cold temperatures in the upper atmosphere far north to the warmer weather that
has been unfolding closer to the earth’s surface. That warming trend led to one
of the greatest-ever reductions in the extent of Arctic sea ice this year.
Whether the cold snap in the stratosphere “is related to it being warmer
than it typically is lower down is intriguing,” Dr. Livesey said, “but the
connection has yet to be made.”
David Fahey, a physicist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Association and the author of a well-known pamphlet on the ozone layer, said the
appearance of a second hole in the ozone layer underlined the unpredictability
of atmospheric reactions, particularly in the far North.
“The Antarctic ozone hole is the drumbeat,” Dr. Fahey said. “We see it
every year and it tells us that the stuff we did in the last two decades still
matters” in terms of reducing the levels of ozone-depleting chemicals. Yet the
ozone depletion recorded this year at the opposite end of the planet this year
points to “the lack of predictability of what will happen in the Arctic,” he
said.
