Marcela Escobari, Columnist

How Foreign Aid Helps Grand Rapids, Michigan

What happens in Central America doesn't stay in Central America.

July 11, 2017 at 12:00 PM UTC

Marcela Escobari is a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution. She served as assistant administrator for the Bureau of Latin America and the Caribbean at the U.S. Agency of International Development under President Barack Obama. She previously served as executive director of Harvard University’s Center for International Development.

Your tax dollars at work.
Photographer: Ashraf Shazly/AFP/Getty Images

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“I need to explain why this expense makes sense for a family in Grand Rapids, Michigan,” said Mick Mulvaney, President Donald Trump’s budget director. He was attempting to justify why the administration’s 2018 budget request slashes foreign aid by more than 30 percent.

Fair enough. As someone who has worked for more than two decades in international development, including a recent stint at the U.S. Agency for International Development, let me help. The U.S. spent $33 billion on foreign aid in 2016. That's only 0.7 percent of the federal budget, but it's still a lot of money that could be used for other things. For Central America, a focus of my work, Congress appropriated $750 million, double the amount spent in 2014.