 So let's get some basic facts about foreign aid. Foreign aid basically comes in two categories. There's the money that the State Department spends on development projects, and then there's the money that the Pentagon gives out in military aid. We give about $30 to $35 billion a year from the State Department and about $10 billion in military aid. The gives and perspective, the total budget for the State Department, which covers all the different diplomatic work it does, is a little over $55 billion. All federal spending last year amounted to about $3.8 trillion. So foreign aid, even if you count the military aid, is less than 1% of the total budget. We do spend the most of any donor country, and over the last decade, how much we've been spending has been going up, adjusting for inflation, to be the most since we rebuilt Europe after World War II through the Marshall Plan. So who do we give the aid out to? Many goes to the kinds of countries you'd expect, largely in Africa, the Middle East, some in South Central America, some in Asia, and a couple of countries in Eastern Europe. Not a lot of aid goes to richer nations, though we did give $6 million to China and $78 million to India. The biggest block of countries together, getting high amounts of aid, come in the bottom half of Africa, with the totals ranging anywhere from $150 million to $600 million. The three countries that got the most aid were Afghanistan, Egypt, and Pakistan, with Iraq also getting a pretty significant amount. As for military aid, in 2015, three quarters of it went to Israel and Egypt, and the rest went to a collection of countries mostly in the Middle East or Africa, with Iraq, Jordan, and Pakistan rounding out the top five. Worst boy band ever. So what do countries do with the money we give them? For the non-military aid, the biggest piece goes to health, mostly to projects dealing with AIDS. And the next biggest piece is economic development, building roads, internet lines, and power grids. The third largest priority area goes to aiding refugees. Some of the aid is for wartime projects which haven't finished yet in Iraq and Afghanistan, and then there's a collection of smaller projects of all kinds which include things like training and eye drug police or environmental preservation. As for military aid, it's spent on weapons and equipment, usually made by US companies. Some argue that this is a way to spend federal money to create American jobs. So what conditions and accountability do we put on foreign aid? There have been criticisms of how much aid we distribute and how we monitor it coming from both parties. One example people use is that Pakistan continues to receive military aid despite suspicions that they have been aiding the Taliban in Afghanistan and that they knew where Osama bin Laden was hiding while we were searching for him. Since 1961 the US hasn't been allowed to give aid to governments which consistently violate human rights, though there's been criticism that this requirement is hard to enforce. Obviously, this is a huge concern when we're giving out military aid. Doing the monitoring and reporting is difficult, especially because the recipient countries often don't want to be watched. So some complain that the State Department and the Defense Department basically either don't do it or do a bad job of it. There are more requirements that come with a sensitive country like Pakistan including having the President certify that the aid is in the national interest, though there are some waivers to the certification when health risks or national security risks are involved. In 2016, a new law was passed to require the federal agencies to develop a way to monitor foreign aid systematically and determine if the projects we fund are meeting their goals. And those reports are supposed to be published where the public can read them. This won't start happening though until sometime in 2017. This 2016 law also created a new website called foreignassistance.gov so that anyone can serve how much money is given out to which countries to do what, though some information can be left off if the agency provides a justification to Congress about how disclosure will harm the health or security of the recipient. And there you have it.