WASHINGTON -- The head of the U.S. foreign aid agency warned the Republican-controlled Congress yesterday that ill-considered cuts in his programs would aggravate food shortages, disease, illiteracy and environmental damage around the world and increase post-Cold War disorder.
"Those who suggest that our nation can afford to reduce our foreign aid budget still further are playing with fire," said J. Brian Atwood, director of the Agency for International Development. He spoke yesterday to the Center for National Policy, a Democratic think tank.
The independence of Mr. Atwood's agency is under threat both from Capitol Hill and from inside the Clinton administration, where budget-cutters, trying to pay for President Clinton's anticipated middle-class tax cut, have dusted off earlier proposals to merge AID into the State Department.
While howls of protest are a traditional response from bureaucratic budget victims, Mr. Atwood's speech was unusually strong and expansive in warning of the potential threat of cuts in aid to U.S. interests overseas.
The speech was far more confrontational than were statements Tuesday by Michael McCurry, a State Department spokesman, who indicated that the department would adjust to political realities and work with the new Congress.
"What I fear is that we may lose much of the international leadership shaped by a bipartisan consensus over the past 48 years in the first 100 days of the next Congress," Mr. Atwood said. "We will wake up one day next spring and ask ourselves, 'What happened to a bipartisan foreign policy that has served us so well?' And then it will be too late. Someone will then write a book, perhaps entitled, 'While America Slept.' "
Natural disasters, political breakdowns, refugee movements and lack of infrastructure, Mr. Atwood said, combine to form a "strategic" threat to U.S. interests. He said the United States could stop trying to alleviate them only at its own peril.
Mr. Atwood also argued that foreign aid helps build up economies overseas that become good U.S. trading partners and boost American jobs. He cited South Korea and India, among other countries.
Foreign aid, with the notable exception of aid to Israel, Egypt, Greece, Turkey and, in recent years, the former Soviet Union, has long been unpopular in Congress and in the country. The amount spent each year is now roughly 1 percent of the federal budget.
The United States, which was virtually the only donor nation in 1946, supplies less than one-fifth of the world's foreign aid today -- and it now gives less money, per capita, than any other donor nation, Mr. Atwood said.
Although he did not name him, Mr. Atwood appeared to be directing his comments mostly at the incoming chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Jesse Helms of North Carolina, who has dismissed most foreign aid as pouring money down foreign ratholes.
He specifically avoided criticizing Sen. Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican who is the incoming chairman of the appropriations subcommittee on foreign aid. Mr. McConnell has proposed a sweeping reorganization of the foreign aid program that would abolish AID and slash, among other programs, aid to Africa.