Where your tax dollar goes
Foreign assistance, by country
Checking the foreign-assistance record…
Government · FY2024 disbursements
Dollars abroad
$72 billion went to 179 countries — about 1.5% of everything the federal government spent. The ten largest recipients:
Your share
Per $10,000 of federal tax, about $150 went abroad. Roughly the price of a month of groceries for one person.
How this was counted
Figures are disbursements, not commitments, from ForeignAssistance.gov, with the Congressional Research Service used for the budget share. Military financing sits in a separate account and is included where the recipient country is named; where it is not, the page says so rather than estimating.
The live table, reporting its own state
The bars above were hand-checked against ForeignAssistance.gov for the design. The table below is the live pipeline, and until its loader runs it says so — “we have not loaded the figures” and “nothing was sent” are different claims.
How we will not present it
We have not loaded the figures. That is NOT the same claim as the United States sent nothing, and on a page that simply showed no chart the two would be indistinguishable.
- waste or generosity
- Whether any of this is money well spent is the argument the country is having. We publish the amounts so people can have it with the same numbers in front of them.
- us versus them totals
- 'We gave country Y more than we spent on Z at home' compares a programme to a budget line and is built to land, not to inform.
- ranking by deservingness
- Ordering countries by anything other than the dollar amount is an editorial position with a table around it.
- rounding to a scarier number
- Amounts are shown as reported. No rounding up to the next billion and no dropping of the decimal that makes a figure look bigger.
- obligations labelled as spending
- Quoting the obligated figure and calling it spending is the single commonest error in foreign-aid graphics. The unit is always named.