Editorial Excerpts, June 2025

… As President Franklin D. Roosevelt once observed, “The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”
The ongoing effort to shut down the United States Agency for International Development by Elon Musk and President Donald Trump — bolstered this week by widespread layoffs with thousands more placed on administrative leave — runs counter to this value. …
If instead of describing USAID’s work dryly as “foreign aid” (or worse, that its programs are worthy of being fed into the “wood chipper” as Musk has gleefully described his budget cutting efforts on social media), Americans were actually given an opportunity to see first hand the good that such aid can do with less than 1% of the federal budget — like famine relief in South Sudan — we are confident that it would be broadly supported.
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Whatever our political differences, whatever our policy debates and whatever our personal preferences, the United States has a proud history of assisting those desperately in need. Let us not abandon our values — and our humanity — for what amounts to little more than a rounding error in the overall budget.

– The Baltimore Sun, February 26, 2025

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Plenty of good arguments can be made in favor of reforming foreign assistance — to make it more effective and efficient. But neither the president nor cost-cutter Elon Musk has articulated them. Their ridicule of specific aid programs only muddles the important debate over how to ensure that foreign aid serves its core mission: to improve the lives of billions living in the world’s most impoverished nations.
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There are plenty of good ideas for how to make American aid more efficient. For example, the United States could save a lot of money if it didn’t require much of its food aid to be grown by American farmers and shipped across the world on American ships. Trimming the layers of regulation and oversight that require a cadre of expensive experts to ensure compliance would also cut costs.
Indeed, the broad global conversation about what foreign assistance can achieve needs to be better focused. But aid is not “ridiculous — and, in many cases, malicious — pet projects of entrenched bureaucrats,” as the White House described it. Aid cannot be the solution for all of the problems that impoverished countries face. But it is a necessary building block for a better world.

– The Washington Post, March 26, 2025