1948 — Present

U.S. Foreign Aid

1.3%of the budget

What foreign aid actually costs. Americans guess 26%.

Americans think foreign aid is a quarter of the federal budget. It's about one percent. When surveyed, the average guess is 26% — and that guess is higher than aid has been in any year since records began in 1946, including the peak of the Marshall Plan. Since 1948, U.S. aid has been an instrument of strategy as much as generosity: it rebuilt Europe to stop communism, followed every war the country fought, and became a treaty obligation to Israel, Egypt and Jordan. In 2025 an administration abolished the agency that ran it. In 2026 a Republican Congress refused to cut the money. This is where it actually goes, and why 1% is so hard to kill.

Share of the federal budget

1.3%

FY2024 · $85.8B of $6.7T in outlays (ForeignAssistance.gov ÷ OMB)

The public's average guess

26%

86% overestimate (KFF, Feb 2025)

Total annual foreign aid

$85.8B

FY2024 obligations, all agencies

Largest recipient

Ukraine

$24.8B — 29% of all FY2024 aid

Economic vs military

65 / 35

$55.4B economic · $30.4B military (FY2024)

The gap

Ask Americans how much of the federal budget goes to foreign aid and the average answer is 26%. The real figure for FY2024 is 1.3% — aid obligations of $85.8 billion against $6.7 trillion in federal outlays. Eighty-six percent of adults guess too high; more than half guess above 10%. This is not a small polling artifact. It is a twenty-fold error about a basic fact of the budget, and it is remarkably stable across decades of polling.

The sharpest way to see the size of the error: the public's average guess is higher than foreign aid has been in any single year since record-keeping began in 1946 — including 1949, the peak of the Marshall Plan, when aid really did consume 21.4% of the federal budget. Americans aren't describing a program they dislike. They're describing 1949.

And the error is load-bearing. When KFF told respondents the real number, the share saying the U.S. spends "too much" on foreign aid fell from 58% to 34% — a 24-point collapse triggered by one sentence of accurate information. The opposition is not primarily ideological. It is arithmetic.

Foreign aid as % of the federal budget1946 — 2025

Aid obligations (ForeignAssistance.gov) ÷ total federal outlays (OMB Historical Table 1.1). 1946 is the earliest year the source reports. FY2025 is still incompletely reported and will revise upward.

What each party thinks aid costs

Average estimate of foreign aid's share of the federal budget · KFF, Feb 2025

Republicans guess31%

Independents guess24%

Democrats guess23%

Actual (FY2024)1.27%

Telling people the real number moves them

58%

→

34%

Share saying the U.S. spends “too much” on foreign aid, before and after being told it is about 1% of the budget. A 24-point swing from a single fact.