Foreign Aid Budget Transparency

The Problem

The American people fund foreign aid programs but have no practical way to evaluate whether that money is achieving its stated goals.  Aggregate spending figures are available [2], but the connection between dollars spent and outcomes achieved is buried in agency reports [1] that few citizens will ever read.

This is not a question of whether foreign aid is worthwhile — it’s a question of whether the public can verify that for themselves.  Transparency is not a threat to effective aid; it is a prerequisite for public trust.

What We Propose

By Executive Order, we will create a persistent public website providing oversight of the costs of our foreign aid projects in both total dollars and as a percentage of total government spending.

We will explicitly list the particular goals of each program, provide a comparison of the results to those goals, and update the data no less than quarterly — and as frequently as developments merit.

See our working prototype below for what this could look like.

How We’ll Know It’s Working