Expert Commentary - Release of President Obama's FY 2011 Budget Request

In response to the release of President Obama's FY 2011 budget request to Congress, the Global Agricultural Development Initiative solicited commentary by leading global food security and U.S. foreign assistance experts to provide analysis of the budget's implications on U.S. development policy.

Todd Moss

Vice President for Corporate Affairs and Senior Fellow at the Center for Global Development; former Deputy Assistant Secretary in the Bureau of African Affairs at the U.S. Department of State.  Bio

Obama’s FY11 budget: How Development Friendly?

President Obama and Secretary Clinton have been promising, even before they took office, that “development” would be elevated within U.S. foreign policy. The community that follows such things have so far been deeply disappointed, not least because it took a full year to finally appoint an administrator to USAID, the nation’s top development official. The administration’s first full budget request, released on Monday, is another bellwether that is being picked apart for more clues. The budget is still just top-line numbers - many crucial details won’t be available for weeks - and Congress has yet to have a crack at it, so we are far from clear what the final outcome will be. But here are my few quick takeaways:

1. The good news is that the international affairs budget, by being placed within the broader national security budget, is being exempted from the freeze on discretionary spending. Out of the $3.8 trillion budget, international affairs get $58.5 billion or about 1.5%. This may sound miniscule, but is actually a modest increase of nearly 3% over last year (the FY10 budget, plus the supplemental).
   
2. To no surprise, the vast bulk of the increases go to Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq. These three “frontline states” already account for about one-fifth of the total foreign operations budget. This leaves about $2.5 billion in new money to be spread across anything new the administration wants to do. Most of this new money will go to a food security initiative and modest increases in global health investments and climate change.
3. The main bright spot, to my mind, is the roughly $900 million increase in financing for international financial institutions, a sensible response to the global financial crisis and its impact on poor countries.

The budget is not the time to announce to announce major new initiatives, so there is little to get excited about. Given the U.S. fiscal environment, a modest increase is perhaps the most to hope for. Yet, the budget will probably only add to the growing impatience among "developmentistas" who had been expecting so much more from an administration that had made such lofty promises about U.S. leadership in the fight against global poverty. The President’s recent state of the union address barely mentioned foreign policy, much less development. So if the budget comes with few surprises and elicits few complaints, it is against this backdrop of rapidly diminishing expectations.