Dianne Feinstein: “I rise to offer some comments on the bill before us, the foreign operations appropriations bill. Today we are…”

“I rise to offer some comments on the bill before us, the foreign operations appropriations bill. Today we are considering the fiscal year 2002 foreign operations appropriations bill. I ask my fellow Senators to consider this: The total foreign assistance spending in this legislation represents just .79 percent of the entire $1.9 trillion Federal budget. That is less than half of what it was just 15 years ago, and it is barely .1 percent of GDP. An even smaller amount of the bill's funding is for foreign development assistance, less than .6 percent of the budget. Anemic U.S. foreign assistance spending is not new news, but it is part of a very sad legacy of more than two decades of declining foreign assistance spending. But at precisely the time when the events of September 11 have driven home what an integrated and globalized world we live in, a world that requires us, I believe, to reexamine the basic underpinnings of U.S. national security policy, it is baffling that the United States remains on a course to tie a post-World War II low in foreign assistance spending and a 50-year low of overseas assistance as a share of Government spending. I do not mean this as any criticism of the managers of the bill. Given the administration's request and the allocations of the subcommittee, they have done an excellent job of putting together a $15.5 billion bill.”