Next year will be 20 years since we first published the ‘Bumper Book of Government Waste’. It put public spending under the spotlight, challenged Whitehall and local government to up their ante and encouraged people to hold ministers and budgetholders to better account. It won an Atlas Award in Washington DC in the process, for shifting the public agenda.
That’s plenty of time to ponder what government waste looks like, and how much it matters. That starts with adding some shading to the black and white, because not all public sector spending is waste. Some is indeed starkly political and contentious.
At the centre of today’s policy tornado on wasteful spending is President Trump, who through Elon Musk’s DOGE initiative has pulled the rug on USAID, and with it some $40bn of the $72bn US foreign aid budget. This may not mean that all development aid is permanently axed, but at the minimum it seems that a massive winnowing may now follow.
Washington should have been less surprised at this. After all, what is this but a return to Trump’s first-term manifesto pledge, largely unfulfilled, to ‘drain the swamp’? The emerging case studies do seem to show repeated evidence of ludicrous politicisation, whether in staff recruited or campaigns funded. Ultimately this is a wound self-inflicted by the Left, and on a scale where the tempting, and simplistic, option is Ripley’s policy in ‘Aliens’: ‘I say we take off and nuke the site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure’ – a route that may appeal to the SpaceX in Musk.
Strategically, there may now follow other gains. It certainly lays down unambiguous markers to Congress about tolerating pork barrel lard in future budgets. If (admittedly a big assumption) basic and unpoliticised aid gets restarted and proves more effective, its remarketing may actually increase US soft power, meaning the US gets more credit for its largesse. A hardnosed reboot may also kick shins over such issues as how US copyright mechanisms subsidise cheap medicine supply to poor countries. At risk of crystal ball gazing, this could also turn out to be a necessary refresh in the competition for influence with China, particularly in Africa.
But at this stage, the end state is unclear and ‘good’ aid is the collateral. So let’s consider the drivers, and what lessons we might take from it all in a UK context.
If we return to first principles, the inevitable question is: should be any development aid at all? Does charity begin – and end – at home, as far as the public purse goes? This is a legitimate question. It is, however, unappealing to argue that prioritising housing one homeless person, because of their common nationality with the donor, trumps keeping thirty people alive during a drought.
That is not to suggest that there is an obligation on any country to be the world’s caretaker, but rather that preferring proximity over triage is a poor argument for inaction if that is the only argument you have. The vocabulary around applying ‘ethics’ to foreign policy became tainted under Robin Cook, and I prefer a less politically correct one: engagement is the Christian thing to do.
A more fundamental argument is that there is often enlightened self interest involved as well. Set aside for a moment those territories where there is a direct cultural and social link, not least the UK’s overseas dependencies. Stopping an outbreak of a contagious disease at source halts its spread. Supporting moderates in a country rocked by extremism can steady a strategic ally and undermine terrorism. Stabilising food production reduces the risk of famine, and the mass migration that could follow.
Even strict devotees of a ‘Britain First’ approach to policy should accept, therefore, that binning our overseas aid budget wholesale would be myopic. That remains true even if you think putting an arbitrary aid-to-GDP target of 0.7% into UK law was lunacy, and that current migration policies and asylum processes are similarly unhinged.
I would suggest the quick fix answer to dividing ‘good’ vs ‘bad’ spending lies in Maslow’s celebrated pyramid. At the base of the cone are the core needs that keep people alive, like food and water and basic shelter from the elements. When you get toward the top, however, into the realm of ‘esteem’ and ‘self-actualisation’, help is less necessary, increasingly subjective and impossible to provide without entering the realm of social engineering.
The Maslow approach may also help fix UK attitudes. Whitehall has long had problems even with the PR side of aid. Take Afghanistan. In the centre of Lashkar Gah there was a water tower, with ‘USAID’ plastered over the side. Every Afghan local stepping into the street knew exactly who they had to thank for their home’s water supply. By contrast, a few streets away the UK’s then-Department of International Development (DfID) spent money on a park as a safe space for women and their children so they weren’t cooped up in their compounds. It was a nice idea in theory, but the flagship ferris wheel needed power and maintenance, and was seen as a Taliban target, so it didn’t get used. This was the same DfID that opposed British commanders trying to tap small sums for community impact to win hearts and minds if it fell outside of narrowly-defined economic brackets; and also the same chunk of Whitehall who ran scared of supporting Christian minorities overseas because their faith might suggest they were getting preferential treatment, at least before Jeremy Hunt made it a Foreign Office priority.
Too much of the old DfID ‘morally’ objected to branding UK aid under the British flag, forgetting the soft power imperative. I wonder if this lingers on today after staff got senior diplomatic posts in the merger of DfID with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to create today’s FCDO. I rather fear the 2.5 billion at-cost doses of AstraZeneca sent to 170 countries ended up with less PR credit for UK plc than Russia aggressively chased with its own Sputnik V.
Aid needs reform, then, not nuking from orbit, and there are clear dangers with Musk’s kind of aid reset. Undertaken at speed and with a small and inexperienced team, there’s the prospect of attacking a complex system with a blunt instrument, and losing ‘the understand’ as to what some funds are actually meant to achieve. Relying on a dangerously oversimplified worldview to make consequential decisions that affect millions of people risks repeating the kind of error that bedevilled the neocons post-9/11.
Nor is that risk restricted to aid. Rather, it is the danger shadowing Trumpian foreign policy more widely. Take the spats with Canada and Mexico over trade: go way back, and the original Nafta trade deal was conceived in part as a mechanism to increase trade with Canada, weaken protectionist blocs and mutually generate wealth; with Mexico, the aim was to export jobs – in order to reduce immigration.
All of which should remind waste-hunters everywhere to apply some common sense before definitively lobbing the naphtha bomb. In the UK, we’ve seen in recent days the Spectator flag up an anti-corruption study in Jamaica as worthy of inclusion in a ‘fail list’, as well as an anti-waste feed on X shouting at shrimp. The latter case was over £50,000 to study ‘Shrimp health in Bangladesh’. Literally ten seconds of Googling reveals that this is a significant disease concern that also impacts on SMEs.
Simply put, if their objective is to convince the public of the imperative to slash bad aid spending, then waste-watchers and fraud-frolickers need to sift and sieve before picking their examples. Otherwise they are just dumping project headline titles like they are Julian Assange with a memory stick after six pints down the pub.
By all means, show how our money is spent, but poor examples cited as cases of actual waste discredit the campaign.
By rights, UK campaigners should have a head start. The media have been covering public sector waste on and off for years. The debate over the EU in particular raised many absurd examples. Local civil servants had no sense of ownership of the pooled monies being disbursed, and so no sense of responsibility either. The result was years of headlines of wine lakes, dead end bridges, turtle-killing seaweed farms and olive monorails.
As the gloriously mad example of the HS2 bat tunnel has however proved, the fact of Brexit has of itself not fully delivered on the obligation to review our statute books and pull the plug on core legislation that obliges tick-box spending in the UK on marshy causes.
The obligation to spend wildly, on diversity or precautionary or human rights grounds, is too often planted directly into British law. It is defended by subsidised lobbies, vouchsafed by politically-charged lawyers and urged on by sponsored bubbles of academia.
Unlike President Trump with his stock of pens, a Prime Minister can only go so far with the Statutory Instrument. A ranging Great Reform Bill is needed. Labour’s new Office for Value for Money promises to help the Government ‘realise the benefits from every pound of public spending’. Believing in such promises is akin to expecting a Whitehall revolution from a paper put out by the Institute for Government, or proposals for EU decentralisation from a Commission Directorate General, or economic reform from Leningrad University’s Department of Marxism-Leninism.
Trump-style change to cut government waste in the UK will need true outsiders. The team needs to go under a Cabinet-level minister who is directly responsible to the PM, whose output is not lost in the currents and churn of cross-departmental responsibility. To see why, consider that a ministerial decision to end aid to China and India still saw money going out ten years later.
Perhaps, however brutal Trump’s – and Musk’s – medicine for the moment appears, this political laxative will successfully purge carbon unilateralism, woke apologetics and pseudo-liberalism. But not in the UK. At least, not yet.
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