Foreign-aid advocates and fiscal hawks all like Trump’s nominee to head USAID

Mark A. Green serves as a rebuttal to the hyper-partisanship of Washington. From across the ideological spectrum came effusive praise for the Trump administration’s announcement Wednesday that it will nominate the former Republican congressman from Wisconsin and ex-ambassador to Tanzania to head the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Fiscal hawks in Congress said Green would work to make sure programs receiving tax dollars were run more efficiently. Aid groups that focus on development and disaster relief welcomed someone who cares about foreign economic aid to argue on their behalf.

Republicans said Green would promote liberty and human rights. Democrats said he would work in a bipartisan fashion.

“There’s a sense of relief,” said Scott Morris, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development. “In the environment we’re in, with real alarm being expressed by advocates for foreign assistance and engagement, people were desperate for something like this — to be reassured the whole aid enterprise was not simply going to disappear.”

Green’s nomination comes as the Trump administration is proposing drastic budget cuts of about 30 percent for the State Department. A large proportion of those are expected to come from USAID, the lead agency for U.S. economic assistance.

Read the whole story from The Washington Post.

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