Last Monday, as I was reading through Chimes, I couldn’t help but notice an article that discussed the current happenings around the United States’ temporary freeze of foreign development aid – aid that has been a large part of the U.S.-led world order since the Cold War. The article was critical of the move, characterizing it as “merciless,” “irresponsible,” “inhumane” and “contrary to the Christian faith.” After all, the Bible does say that we should be loving our neighbors as ourselves. According to the article, that’s what we did in 2003 when the George Bush administration, along with Congress, introduced and implemented the “U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief.” However, the situation with the United States and our foreign development aid today is very different than it was in 2003. It simply is not as cut and dried, Biblically or practically speaking, as the aforementioned article makes it seem. This week, I hope to introduce a healthy dose of pragmatic realism into the discussion.
I’ll start (somewhat circuitously) by establishing a foundation for all this – the reality of the purpose of government. The government exists “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” If that sounds familiar, it’s because that is a quote from Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. When President Lincoln said that government exists “for the people,” I believe that he meant for the people of the nation that a government serves, given that he was speaking to the people of the nation which his administration served. The fact is, the primary responsibility of the United States government is to make sure its own citizens are able to pursue the rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” which, according to the Declaration of Independence, are the unalienable rights of humans which are endowed by our Creator. In other, more incendiary words…the purpose of the United States government is to quite literally put “America First.”
The idea that a government’s foremost obligation is to its people, combined with the idea that people have a responsibility to their country before other countries, is known as “Nationalism.” I think that the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, Mr. Russell Vought, puts it well when he writes: “Nationalism is not just a patriotic love for one’s country, but a commitment to prioritize the needs and interests of one’s own country over others — not unlike parents who prioritize their family over others, or pastors who prioritize their local church over others.”
I think most (if not all) of us should be able to get behind Director Vought here. This is also a very clearly articulated Biblical principle. Paul writes, “Anyone who does not provide for their relatives, and especially for their own household, has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever” (1 Timothy 5:8, NIV). Just imagine being parents and feeding other children a meal while giving your own children the scraps – that would make you a highly irresponsible parent at best. This is not unlike being a citizen of a country, though of course there’s a difference in magnitude. The bottom line is this: if citizens put foreign countries’ interests before the interests of their own country, those citizens are irresponsible at best. This is how you get the Edward Snowdens of the world. Similarly, if a government prioritizes other citizens over its own citizens, that would make it an irresponsible government at best.
Now, I concede that this would be different if the United States government had the ability to provide vast amounts of global aid without significant consequences and revoked the aid anyway. This, however, is not the reality. The reality is that the United States, though objectively the most powerful country in the history of the world, has been a declining hegemon for decades by numerous metrics and also is approximately 36.2 trillion dollars in debt – the largest amount of debt on record.
The article from last week points out that only about one percent of the US budget is spent on foreign aid annually, so it wouldn’t lessen our debt substantially anyways to freeze it. And if you stop there, you once again miss the point and overlook reality. The reality is, the budget for Fiscal Year 2025 is 7 trillion dollars. One percent of that would be 70 billion dollars. To put that in perspective, that’s more than the entire budget of the U.S. State Department – not an insignificant amount of money despite what the aforementioned article would have you believe. Imagine being able to allocate 70 billion dollars toward affordable housing, domestic hunger programs, naval shipbuilding infrastructure, improving our nuclear arsenal, and so much more. With resources like that, the potential for domestic improvement is vast.
At the end of the day, when the Trump administration temporarily freezes aid and executes other cost-cutting moves, no matter how small – those are not vindictive, selfish moves. They have trade-offs, just like everything else. Not everyone will like them, and that is okay. Ultimately, these cost-cutting measures are simply acts of self-preservation that are designed to decrease our spending, little by little, to benefit the citizens that the government serves. In other words, the government is fulfilling its purpose as a government of the people, by the people, and for the people of the nation it serves.