How Foreign Aid Is Passed

By Allan Kellum

Early this month the Reagan Administration formally will submit its foreign aid requests to Congress for fiscal year 1986. Press reports have said that the Administration is proposing to give Israel, which already receives more U.S. aid than any other country, approximately $3 billion—$400 million more than the $2.6 billion it has already received this fiscal year.

The figures for both years may grow even higher. Israel is asking $800 million in supplemental funds for this year (FY 1985), and $4.05 billion for next year (FY 1986). Press reports indicate it will probably ask the same level for two succeeding years. Since Israel has many friends in Congress who have succeeded routinely in winning more aid for Israel than the Administration has first proposed, it is quite possible that Israel will receive $3.4 billion this year and $4.05 billion during each of the next three years, regardless of the levels requested by the Administration.

Congress is now only beginning the complicated process of approving Israel's aid and the foreign aid bill in general. Those who wish to follow the foreign aid bill as it works its way through Congress might better understand the process by using the "road maps" provided on page nine. They show how the process worked last year-when a "continuing resolution" was used to fund the foreign aid program because lawmakers did not complete work on a separate foreign aid bill—and how the process worked in 1981, the last year that Congress followed the "textbook rules" for passing an aid bill. In approving this year's bill, Congress will follow one of these two models, with perhaps only minor variations.

As with other spending bills, foreign aid legislation has to go through both an authorizing and an appropriating process in the House and in the Senate. The foreign affairs committees, which are responsible for authorization, set policy provisions—such as disallowing aid to certain countries and setting conditions on arms sales—and spending ceilings. The appropriations process is handled by committees bearing the same name and it is their job to write the bill which actually frees up the money from the U.S. Treasury, once the bill has been signed by the President.

The appropriations committees are not supposed to take final action on their bill until the authorization process has been completed. However, it hasn't worked that way in recent years due to the failure of the foreign affairs committees to adopt an authorization bill. What ultimately is approved by the Congress instead is a continuing resolution, a catch-all spending measure that is hurriedly enacted with little debate to continue funding all the government programs for which regular money bills were not approved. When this happens, the appropriations committees—and particularly their foreign operations subcommittees—become the chief architects of the foreign aid bill, setting both aid levels and policy provisions. This is exactly what happened last year, and you'll see by looking at the "road map" just when the authorization process came to a dead-end—and, by contrast, how it was completed in 1981.

It's now too early to tell whether the process this year will follow the 1981 or the 1984 model. Just remember, newspaper headlines in February and March about aid to Israel, Egypt, or any other country are not the final word. As with baseball, the "foreign aid game" isn't over until it's over.

Allan Kellum is editor of the Mideast Observer. A sample copy of his publication may be obtained by writing Mideast Observer, P.O. Box 2397, Washington, D.C. 20013.