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Whatever the outcome of this year’s federal budget struggle, bigger battles over aid will come this summer It’s crunch time on Capitol Hill on Friday. If an agreement on billions of dollars in spending cuts in this year’s federal budget is not reached today, the US will face the first government shutdown in 15 years. Though the dust will take time to settle, whatever the outcome, one of the casualties will almost certainly be US foreign aid, which constitutes less than 1% of the federal budget. According to the US Global Leadership Coalition , humanitarian assistance and disaster relief programmes would be cut down by 41%, food security and food aid programmes would be slashed by 30% and multilateral contributions would drop by 40%, under budget proposals put forward by congressional Republicans. Meanwhile, resources for global health programmes would fall by 11%, including a 43% reduction to US contributions for the Global Fund to fight Aids, TB and Malaria . Also on the chopping block is former president George Bush’s global Aids programme, PEPFAR . Republican budget proposals also aim to reinstate the Mexico city rule , which would block federal funding to family planning programmes in developing countries if they give help, or advice, on abortions. Many of these proposed cuts have come as a surprise, particularly as global health and food security have traditionally garnered substantial bipartisan support. The head of USAID, Rajiv Shah, a former medical doctor, warned Congress last week that the proposed spending cuts would lead to the deaths of 70,000 children: 30,000 from the scaling back of malaria control programmes and 24,000 from the lack of US support for immunisations; another 16,000 children would die at birth. “I believe these are very conservative estimates,” Shah said. In a separate congressional testimony last Wednesday, Shah pushed the argument that development assistance is a cheap and effective way to win friends abroad and establish markets for the future . “Our work in promoting national security is not just limited to active zones of conflict,” he said, referring to Afghanistan, where the aid agency works side-by-side with the military. “Throughout the world, USAID is deploying development specialists today to strengthen democracies, rebuild livelihoods and build strong health and education systems so that we do not have to deploy our troops tomorrow.” Under Shah, the aid agency has embarked on a period of extensive reform, USAID Forward , seeking to establish USAID as “the world’s premier development agency”. As part of these reforms, Shah places special emphasis on economic growth and private sector investment. In his testimony to Congress, he highlighted new partnerships with companies such as Kraft, General Mills and Wal-Mart in Ghana, Tanzania, El Salvador and Guatemala to connect farmers to food markets as part of the Feed the Future initiative , as well as USAID’s support for Coca-Cola’s work to promote Haiti’s mango juice industry. “Exports to developing countries have grown six times faster than exports to major economies and today they represent roughly half of all US exports,” Shah said, adding that “for every 10% increase we see in exports, there is a 7% increase in the number of jobs here at home”. President Barack Obama’s original budget request to Congress more than halved development assistance to at least 20 countries and terminated USAID missions in three. Today, agencies and programmes that rely on federal funding are waiting to see how a shutdown will affect their operations. According to the Cable’s Josh Rogin, a government shutdown would mean that about two-thirds of the State Department and USAID staff in Washington would be furloughed , forced to take a temporary leave of absence, though most personnel at US foreign missions would be retained. In November 1995, a week-long government shutdown furloughed 800,000 federal employees, followed by a second partial shutdown from 15 December 1995 to 6 January 1996 which saw the furlough of 285,000. Gawain Kripke, the director of policy and research at Oxfam America, says the threat alone of a federal shutdown causes disruption and damage. “Important development and anti-poverty programmes have already been put on hold due to the uncertainty,” he said on Monday. “For example, the launch of an innovative food security programme that is expected to include a focus on rice production in Cambodia has been indefinitely postponed.” Whatever the outcome of this budget struggle, though, bigger battles will come this summer in Congress. The 2012 budget proposed on Tuesday by Paul Ryan, the Republican chairman of the House budget committee, would reduce federal spending by $5.8 trillion over the next decade: a 29% cut next year to international affairs and foreign assistance, and 44% by 2016. Defence spending would rise by 14% over the same period. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the Republican chairwoman of the foreign affairs committee, is also expected to submit a bill next week that would overhaul the way the US pays its dues to the United Nations. While the 192-member UN general assembly currently decides how much each country should pay, Ros-Lehtinen wants Washington to be able to decide which programmes to fund. Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general, travelled to Capitol Hill on Thursday to defend the work and justify the multi-billion-dollar cost of the UN. Another longer-term challenge facing US humanitarian assistance lies in the relatively widespread public support received by proposals to cut the foreign aid budget. A recent Gallup poll, for example, suggests that foreign aid is the only part of the federal budget that most Americans think should be cut . So the future of American international aid will remain uncertain, regardless of how today plays out. However, according to data released on Wednesday by the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, the US was still the world’s biggest aid donor in 2010 , spending $30.2bn – the largest aid disbursement ever recorded by a single donor, which is still less than 1% of the federal budget. US Congress United States US foreign policy US federal government shutdown Aid Claire Provost guardian.co.uk