The Foreign Aid Revolt

Showing that the Congress has not entirely run amok this session, the Senate Appropriations Committee has stuck $792 million back on the year's allocations for foreign aid. Yet cheered as the Administration must be at such a restoration it must already know that the final version of the aid bill will fall far below the $4.755 billion originally authorized. Mr. Otto Passman's subcommittee has done its work; it has persuaded the House that foreign aid is a dubious cause. When the joint House-Senate conference committee meets to consider the bill, the compromise will be less devastating than Mr. Passman might wish, but it will leave the President and A.I.D. bewildered and unhappy.

It is a peculiar irony that the House's faithless revolt should come just at the time when the Executive branch is beginning to understand the nature of foreign aid. The revolt is especially unexpected because the Congress--even though it rejected Mr. Kennedy's plea for longterm borrowing authority over five years last summer--had appeared to be educating itself to the newish concept of "sustained assistance."

Yet, like most political ironies, this one is explicable. James Reston recently gave one explanation of it when he suggested that Congressmen reduce appropriations because they see no excuse for Europe's reluctance to contribute more to the program and because they dimly suspect that Europe will begin to supply funds if the U.S. won't. That is understandable, and a part of what is going on, but the fundamental reasons are probably much simpler: Congress not only sees little evidence that the foreign aid program is working, but really does not know what it is for.

The ways in which Administration officials usually attempt to sell the program to Capitol Hill are roughly these: We give it because (1) it fights the Communists; (2) we are rich, and they are poor, and we must act for the relief of misery and the solace of our souls (This might be called the Bowles approach); (3) we wish to bring underdeveloped countries within our own sphere of influence.

None of these reasons, unfortunately, is particularly meaningful--or rather, each means far to much. The first approach, for example, can lead directly to the authorization of certain military aid programs whose well-publicized results are to encourage powerful military elites or rulers in some countries (like Pakistan or Argentina) and to offend other governments in neigh-boring countries (like Afghanistan or Thailand). It can also lead to Congressional veto of funds whose usefulness in the immediate bipolar cause is hardly obvious. The second approach has the advantage of subtly prodding the guilt-consciousness of Representatives or their constituents. But the Congress has sufficient sophistication to realize that aid administered for sheer compassion will be badly administered; it will usually involve the curious obeisance toward the explicit wishes of new governments for which the U.S. has gained a bad reputation.

The third approach is the closest to being usefully accurate, but like the first and second it is outrageously general. Granted that Mr. Passman's interrogation of aid officials is intended more to bait the State Department than to obtain information, it is still fair to say that the Administration has failed so far to point out convincingly that the reasons for foreign assistance to one country or another are highly specific. Principally the economic aid program wants to develop technocratic and fairly apolitical classes to supplant, gradually and delicately, the frequently irresponsible politicians and stubborn elites that now control poor countries. At the same time it must use the existing governing classes to stabilize economies to make savings and investment possible.

This is a fabulously complicated job. Its specific nature derives from the fact that the connection between political power and economic development varies enormously from country to country. The Administration has just come to understand this; its advisers are no longer theoretical growth economists fresh from the totally different conditions of reconstructing Europe. If one asks what sort of program is necessary to deal with such a business, the only obvious response is a program without definite answers for everything but willing to and capable of experiment.

Clearly, the U.S. has no choice but to continue to administer aid through foreign officials and official agencies. It is for exactly the purpose of finding out which officials and agencies are productive and which are not that A.I.D. needs experimental funds. These funds, to put it bluntly, often turn out to be wasted.

What the Administration has to do is to put the matter just as bluntly: Wasted allocations are a necessity of foreign aid. Their educational function is crucial. Admittedly the Hill may not grasp this idea, even if it is presented. After all, the Congressmen can repeat, the U.S. has wasted funds for years with no tangible results. Yet the point is not simply that Congress has made achieving results difficult through restrictive legislation; it is that instead of an aid program that has worked for many years, the U.S. has one that is just beginning to work. The last few years have been educational. A.I.D. now knows better than to pour funds down the old ratholes; but there are more ratholes still, and the only way to identify them is to pour a little down them also. Congressional recognition of how true this is would be worth even more than larger European contributions to overseas assistance. It would be not only the fulfillment of an economist's dream, but the real begining of sense and wisdom in American foreign aid.