SLAMMING American foreign aid is a favorite theme for republicans, and the amount of our federal budget going to foreign aid is often distorted and manipulated then used to deceive the uninformed and xenophobic to believe our government cares for foreigners more than they care for most of us. Promising to cut foreign aid to provide more for Americans gets cheers and votes, but the funds are not directed to Americans who need assistance. marco rubio, tea-baggin neo-nazi fascist pig republican senator from Florida, sets the record straight while discussing the federal budget and the cuts he (and all the remaining republican presidential candidates including the deceptively mild and civil john kasich) feels need to be made to education, health care, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, veterans benefits, child and family nutrition, all social safety net programs as well as massive cuts to federal funding of the American social contract. They will all leave intact or increase and improve corporate welfare, corporate tax loopholes, tax cuts for the 1% and war profiteering. This from +PolitiFact .....
Foreign aid "is less than 1 percent of our federal budget."
Marco Rubio says foreign aid is less than 1 percent of federal budget
Florida has the highest percentage of senior citizens in the United States, so Social Security was one of the big topics during the March 10 Republican debate in Miami.
Most candidates spoke of how they would modify the program when discussing the balance sheet for Social Security. Donald Trump, though, suggested the United States cut back on foreign aid and other military spending in order to keep Social Security solvent.
Marco Rubio responded that people often argue that a lot of taxpayer money can be saved by cutting back on foreign aid. That’s not reality, though.
"I'm against any sort of wasting of money on foreign aid, but it's less than 1 percent of our federal budget," Rubio said. "We can't just continue to tip-toe around this and throw out things like I'm going to get at fraud and abuse. Let's get rid of fraud, let's get rid of abuse, let's be more careful about how we spend foreign aid. But you still have hundreds of billions of dollars of deficit that you're going to have to make up."
We wanted to fact-check whether foreign aid is less than 1 percent of the federal budget.
According to the latest White House budget, the 2014 international affairs budget was $46.7 billion on a total budget of $3.5 trillion. That's 1.3 percent, but that includes all money for the "conduct of foreign affairs."
International development and humanitarian assistance made up $23.5 billion and international security assistance made up $11.4 billion. Those two items total $34.9 billion, very close to the 1 percent Rubio cited.
In addition, we found multiple reports that put the figure in the ballpark of what Rubio mentioned.
The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget wrote in 2015 that "foreign aid represents a total of 0.7 percent of the budget, or 1 percent if military aid is included. That means fully eliminating foreign aid would save only $35 billion or $40 billion per year – a very small fraction of projected annual deficits."
That’s not much different than historical figures.
A Congressional Research Service report in 2011 stated that foreign assistance spending represents about 3 percent of the discretionary budget authority and just over 1 percent of total budget authority each year since 1977. For the 2010 fiscal year, foreign assistance totaled $39.4 billion, or 1.1 percent of the budget,
Our ruling
Rubio said foreign aid "is less than 1 percent of our federal budget."
Several reports put the amount of foreign aid in the ballpark of what Rubio said at the GOP debate -- and it has been consistently in the single digits or less.
We rate this claim True.
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