The Foreign Service Journal, September 2015

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | SEPTEMBER 2015 17 SITE OF THE MONTH: FOREIGNASSISTANCE.gov N eat and user-friendly, this redesigned and much-improved website from the State Department enables both policymakers and the public to better understand the United States’ foreign aid budgeting and allocation process. This tool for informing the general public about the development work of foreign affairs agencies is espe- cially important at a time when most of the public mistakenly believes that approximately a quarter of the national budget goes to foreign aid (in fact, it is less than 1 percent!). Foreign assistance experts and novices alike can explore the world of American foreign assistance by downloading comprehensive datas- ets or by clicking on an interactive map to view statistics by country. The site presents, in simple terms, how budgets are formulated for each agency, as well as a primer on U.S. global development policy. The tool also breaks down funding by agency and nine sectors: peace and security, program management, economic development, health, democracy, human rights and governance, humanitarian assistance, education and social services, and the environment. You can find out how much is planned, obli- gated and spent in any given year since 2005, showing which implementing organizations received even the tiniest sums and for what purpose. There is even a handy glossary of relevant bureaucratic lingo, acronyms and abbreviations. Though more than 20 differ- ent agencies are involved in dis- pensing foreign aid, the website currently covers the expenses and activities of 10, account- ing for 98 percent of U.S. foreign assistance. They are: USAID, Peace Corps, Department of State, U.S. African Develop- ment Foundation, Millennium Challenge Corporation, Department of Agricul- ture, Inter-American Foundation, Department of the Treasury, Department of Defense and the Department of Health and Human Services. The United States became party to the International Aid Transparency Initiative in 2011, and the website’s managers have been working to provide U.S. data in an internationally comparable format ever since. This transparency will not only benefit the public, but the participating agencies who will be bet- ter able to track successes to be replicated and failures to be avoided, and to coordinate to avoid overlap. —Shannon Mizzi, Editorial Intern