Foreign Assistance Cuts Will Cost Lives

Jeremy Kadden's picture
Submitted by Jeremy Kadden on Thu, 12/06/2012 - 5:05pm

 

Besides all the talk about the “fiscal cliff,” Congress still hasn’t passed any long-term spending bills for fiscal year 2013, which began on October 1, 2012.  While they have passed a stopgap “continuing resolution,” which would last until almost the end of March, that “CR” sets spending at essentially the same level as in 2012, so it is more of a “band-aid” solution than a final package. This means that funding for all sorts of programs – domestic, international, defense and otherwise – are stuck at last year’s spending levels.

Drilling down on foreign aid specifically, neither the House nor the Senate has passed a foreign aid-related spending bill for 2013 as of yet, though both the House and Senate appropriations committees have proposed and approved draft bills.

  • The Senate Appropriations Committee has passed a bipartisan bill, nearly unanimously, that provides critical funding for foreign assistance in key areas such as health, food security, education, sanitation, and migration and refugee assistance.
  • By contrast, the House appropriators wrote a spending plan that calls for significantly less funding for foreign assistance, particularly for the poverty-focused programs InterAction members care about most.

InterAction and MercyCorps have teamed up to produce and post data about just what the House and Senate packages mean, in terms of lives affected on the ground. The contrasting spending levels could quite literally mean the difference between lives saved or lives lost. Under the Senate bill:

  • Approximately 9 million more people could receive food assistance, while simultaneously reducing the need for future emergency assistance by helping families improve farming techniques and build self-reliance.
  • An additional 3.37 million children and their mothers could be supported in their fight against malnutrition.
  • More than 5 million more people could receive bed nets.
  • More than 6.9 million more child immunizations could be administered for tetanus, pertussis and hepatitis.

Learn more about these critical programs here.  And contact your elected officials and tell others to do the same (#cutscostlives).