Speaking earlier today at a U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) event in New York City, Hillary Clinton said that while she was Secretary of State, she would have loved the U.S. foreign aid budget to make up 20-25% of federal spending:
CLINTON: “Thirdly, it’s a question of keeping support for the work of development. You all know that the polls continuously show that most people in our country think we spend 20-25 percent on foreign aid and I would have loved that to have been the case when I was at the State Department but in fact our entire diplomatic and development budget it slightly over 1 percent.”
A February poll by the Pew Research Center found that foreign aid was the top U.S. government expenditure that voters wanted to cut, preferring cuts to increases in foreign aid by a 48% to 21% margin.