WASHINGTON - Despite his administration's
growing concerns about preventing the collapse of
states in strategic parts of the world, US
President George W Bush has proposed cuts in
development and disaster assistance while
increasing the defense budget by almost 7%.
Under his 2007 budget request submitted to
Congress on Monday, Pentagon spending next year
would rise to some US$440 billion, not including
another $120 billion that the administration is
expected to ask for as a supplemental
appropriation to fund US
military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan
through September, when fiscal 2006 ends.
By contrast, Bush's proposed 2007
foreign-aid request will remain roughly the same
as last year's at some $24 billion, the equivalent
of what Washington spends in less than five months
in Iraq.
Moreover, the president is
calling for a nearly 20% cut in development aid -
from roughly $1.5 billion $1.26 billion in
development aid - and similar cuts in disaster
assistance and child-survival and health programs.
"This administration has said there are
three components to national security - diplomacy,
defense and development," said Mohammad Akhter,
president of InterAction, a coalition of some 160
US non-governmental organizations (NGOs) active in
developing countries. "We see that diplomacy and
defense are well taken care of, but development is
the weakest tool in our kit. Yet that's where our
long-term security lies."
While reducing
aid in those areas, however, Bush asked for major
increases in his two signature aid programs: the
Millennium Challenge Account (MCA), which was set
up to reward "good performers" among poor
countries, and his three-year-old PEPFAR
(President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief ), to
combat AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria - most of
which is to be spent in 14 selected countries in
Africa and the Caribbean as well as Vietnam.
He is asking for a total of $4 billion for
the latter, including only $300 million for the
Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and
Malaria - a multilateral agency especially favored
by AIDS activists who oppose US conditions on the
aid - and $3 billion for the MCA, an increase of
$1.25 billion from the current level.
While Congress has generally approved the
administration's AIDS-related requests, however,
it has not hesitated to slash requests for the
MCA, in large part because the fund has been very
slow to qualify eligible countries for the
assistance.
"Historical precedent suggests
that the Millennium Development Corporation [which
administers the MCA] may not come out with the
funding requested," noted Stewart Patrick, a
research fellow at the Center for Global
Development. He also said Congress was likely to
increase aid for child survival, as it has in the
past.
The defense and foreign-aid requests
were contained in a proposed 2007 budget that
totals $2.7 trillion, an increase of 2.3% over the
current fiscal year. Despite the increase, the
federal deficit, if approved, would decline from
this year's current estimate of a record $423
billion to $354 billion, according to the
administration. However, its deficit forecasts
have consistently proven over-optimistic.
With such a large increase in proposed
Pentagon (Defense Department) spending, Bush's
2007 budget calls for either holding the line or
reducing spending in social and education
programs, and even in community policing. In what
could prove especially controversial in an
election year, he is also calling for cuts in
anticipated spending for Medicare, a popular
health insurance program for elderly and disabled
people.
Bush combined the release of his
budget proposal with a new appeal to make
permanent tax cuts on corporations and the wealthy
that were enacted during his first term. In a
Washington Post column published Sunday, Bush's
former top economic adviser, Douglas Holtz-Eakin,
warned that tax increases were inevitable unless
the budget and the size of the government were
reduced.
With the Pentagon budget
trajectory still headed upward, however, such a
prospect looks increasingly doubtful. On Friday,
the Defense Department released its latest
Quadrennial Defense Report (QDR), which, while
rejecting calls to increase the size of its
over-stretched ground forces in the army and
Marines, urged major increases in its special
operations forces, which are particularly costly
to train and equip.
Also as part of its
"war on terror", which the Pentagon has renamed
"the long war", it is pushing full speed ahead on
expensive new weapons systems that can intimidate
potential rivals, such as China or Russia.
"Like the QDR, the fiscal 2007 budget
reflects the department's continuum of change as
we defend our nation, engage in the long war
against terrorist extremism and prepare for future
potential adversaries," Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld said on Monday.
The proposed
foreign-aid bill also suggested continuity with
the recent past despite Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice's recent call for major changes
in the ways Washington conducts its business
overseas, a process she called "transformational
diplomacy".
Apart from Bush's pet
anti-AIDS and MCA programs, the new foreign-aid
bill calls for a 70% increase in anti-drug
spending, to some $1.5 billion worldwide. Much of
that will be spent in Afghanistan which, since the
ouster of the Taliban in late 2001, has become by
far the world's biggest source of opium and
heroin. "The drug war comes out a real winner in
the budget allocation," Patrick said.
He
also expressed disappointment that development and
disaster-aid programs, which are designed to
promote good governance and help the poorest and
most vulnerable sectors in countries that risk
becoming "failed states", fared relatively poorly
in the budget request compared to the MCA, which
is targeted exclusively on countries that perform
well in both areas.
"It reaffirms the
fears of a lot of folks that the creation of these
signature programs, particularly PEPFAR and MCC,
will lead to a gradual decrease in some of the
other accounts that are critical for righting
poverty and advancing development," he added.
The point was echoed by InterAction's
Akhter. "It doesn't really make any sense to cut
that component because, until you provide
development assistance and health, people won't
arrive at a point where they can take advantage of
the MCA," he said.
State Department
officials said some of the declines in the
child-survival and health accounts will be made up
in the expanded PEFAR program. They also said
funding for malaria prevention would increase
significantly under the proposed budget.
Aside from changes in the overall spending
on development and disaster aid and counter-drug
assistance, most of the levels to both specific
countries and multilateral programs, including the
United Nations and peacekeeping operations, are
similar to those approved by Congress for 2006.
Economic aid to Central and Eastern
Europe, including parts of the former Soviet
Union, would decline. On the other hand, State
Department-administered economic assistance for
Iraq, previously part of an $18 billion package
controlled by the Pentagon, will skyrocket from
just $60 million this year to nearly $500 million
in 2007. Substantial increases in economic aid are
planned for Afghanistan, Sudan and Indonesia.
Some $6.2 billion altogether is earmarked
for countries that are considered key strategic
allies in the "war on terror".
Military
aid and sales overseen by the State Department -
nearly $5 billion - would remain roughly the same,
with the bulk going to Washington's two biggest
economic and military aid recipients, Israel and
Egypt.
Patrick said he was surprised the
budget did not feature stronger support for
democracy promotion and other political and
institutional initiatives designed to strengthen
states and make them more responsive to its
citizens, particularly given the administration's
recent rhetoric.
"A main premise of Rice's
transformational diplomacy is that the US needs to
marshal all of its resources to advance democracy
and good governance in weak and failing states,"
he said. "But it's not clear how this budget
request addresses the challenge."
A nearly
$100 million Democracy Fund established by
Congress last year will be parceled out to other
existing programs under Bush's proposal, while
mainly nominal increases are planned for Middle
East democratization initiatives, the National
Endowment for Democracy, and even public
diplomacy.
