Tracking a Few of My Favorite Things: US Foreign Assistance Dashboard Data

Raindrops on roses, whiskers on kittens, data on the US Foreign Assistance Dashboard? Yes, the one-stop-shop for US foreign assistance budget data is on my list of favorite aid things, and our Rethinking US Foreign Assistance team has a new US Foreign Assistance Dashboard Tracker to encourage each of the twenty-some US government agencies and departments to report their data, and applaud them when they do.  We won’t mind if it creates some healthy competition among the agencies to share more, too.

In the run-up to the 2008 US presidential elections, it seemed everyone—from then-presidential candidate President Obama to the Republican Party Platform—agreed the United States needed to make sense of its fragmented foreign assistance policies, operations and budget that were spread across more than twenty executive branch agencies and departments. While hopes for major structural or budget reforms are off the table for now, the Obama administration launched a US Foreign Assistance Dashboard to get all foreign aid budget (and eventually program) data in one place. It’s an important first step to understand where and how the United States allocates foreign assistance. In time, it should better inform decisions about where the next, or last, aid dollar should go.

Getting comparable data from dozens of different (and clunky) federal systems hasn’t been easy. It takes dedicated staff time, when staffing and budgets are shrinking; the State Department coordinates the Dashboard data but can’t by itself compel other US federal agencies to report; tracing foreign aid dollars in agencies that have primarily domestic focuses (like the US Department of Agriculture) is tricky; and capturing a variety of  aid delivery mechanisms in a comparable format and not double counting along the way creates real, technical challenges.

But five agencies have reported some—if not all—data to the Foreign Assistance Dashboard: the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), State Department, USAID, and as of last week, the departments of Treasury and Defense, too. Our US Foreign Assistance Dashboard Tracker aims to give a clear picture of what data is currently available, what’s still missing, and give gold stars for the agencies that are doing the most to share their data. Right now, MCC and Treasury are leading the way.

In my mind, it’s a make or break year for the Foreign Assistance Dashboard. It’s a hugely important endeavor that would bring long-overdue clarity to US foreign aid. But the data has to keep coming and be complete from all agencies relatively soon lest users get a partial or skewed view of where US foreign aid goes. Again, the incremental approach is a smart one but timeliness matters. My colleagues and I hope the US Foreign Assistance Dashboard Tracker encourages agencies to keep moving towards more open aid data so that the Foreign Assistance Dashboard ends up on your list of favorite—and useful—things, too.

Check out the US Foreign Assistance Dashboard here and tell us if we missed anything!

 *Thanks to Sarah Rose, Will McKitterick, Emily Putze and Steve Perlow for their help creating the US Foreign Assistance Dashboard Tracker!