El-Sayed - Israel and USAID Funding Comparison - FY2016-FY2025

What the comparison establishes

USAID’s worldwide managed portfolio was larger than reported assistance to the single recipient country Israel throughout FY2016–FY2025. This supplies budgetary context for El-Sayed - AE-004 - USAID Restoration and Domestic Affordability. It does not establish that either category is wasteful, that either caused inflation, or that El-Sayed endorsed restoring a particular historical budget.

The two series use the same funding phase, currency basis, and fiscal years. Their geographic and institutional scopes differ: Israel is a recipient-country total across agencies; USAID is one managing agency’s worldwide total. Some USAID activity can also fall within the Israel country series, so these are not components to add together.

Attached chart, preserved

Read the original chart with these qualifications

Its ten orange USAID labels match the downloaded official obligations series rounded to one decimal. The legend’s word “Spending” should be read as obligations, not disbursements. Its Israel bars use a different basis across the timeline: the early bars match narrower country totals, while the FY2021–FY2025 bars match broader CRS figures including missile defense. The image itself is retained unchanged.

Consistent ForeignAssistance.gov series

Nominal US dollars, billions. Source downloads were retrieved November 6, 2026, US Eastern; the server dates both underlying objects to September 2, 2026. The current website’s indexed update date is later, so this note identifies the actual downloaded edition rather than asserting that all history reflects that later update.

The table has five columns. The last two preserve the attached chart’s Israel labels and a separately identified CRS comparison; they are not substituted into the consistent FA.gov series.

CRS column: Table 1 in the May 28, 2025 edition of U.S. Foreign Aid to Israel: Overview and Developments since October 7, 2023. That table aggregates the pre-2021 years; dashes here mean those individual years were not checked against that table, not zero aid.

Why the Israel values differ

1. FY2024: the FA.gov country download reports $6.819773792 billion. CRS Table 1 reports $6.8 billion military aid plus $5.7 billion missile defense, totaling $12.5 billion. The chart’s $12.5 billion bar matches that broader CRS definition.
2. FY2022: the attached $4.8 billion matches CRS’s $3.3 billion military aid plus $1.5 billion missile defense. The FA.gov country series is about $3.321 billion.
3. FY2021, FY2023, FY2025: the attached $3.8 billion bars match CRS’s $3.3 billion military aid plus $0.5 billion missile defense.
4. FY2016–FY2018: the attached $3.1, $3.2, and $3.1 billion labels match the downloaded FA.gov country totals rounded to one decimal. This demonstrates the timeline’s change in coverage.
5. FY2019–FY2020: the attached $3.8 billion labels differ from the country download. This note does not claim an independent year-specific reconciliation from CRS Table 1, which aggregates these years.

CRS expressly notes that Greenbook figures exclude Department of Defense missile-defense funding. Its broader table uses several sources. Differences in coverage, edition, small additional activities, and rounding mean the country download and CRS military subtotal need not match to the dollar.

Scale, without changing definitions

• Ten-year totals, FA.gov: USAID worldwide $272.879 billion; Israel country assistance $36.190 billion. The worldwide-agency total is about 7.54 times the single-country total.
• FY2024, consistent FA.gov definitions: USAID worldwide is about 5.20 times the Israel country total.
• FY2024, broader CRS Israel comparison: $35.439 billion divided by $12.5 billion is about 2.84 times. This uses a different Israel coverage definition and is labeled separately.
• These ratios describe budgetary scale across different scopes. They do not measure effectiveness, net benefits, domestic affordability effects, or the cost of the restoration proposal.

Definitions that matter

• Obligations: financial commitments, distinct from disbursements. Do not add requests, planned amounts, obligations, and disbursements as though they were separate expenditures.
• Nominal/current dollars: use current_amount throughout. Do not add the inflation-adjusted constant_amount column to it.
• Fiscal year: October 1 through September 30, named for the calendar year in which it ends.
• Managing agency: the agency that obligates and disburses assistance directly or through a partner; it can differ from the agency receiving the appropriation. USAID-managed obligations are not simply the agency’s administrative budget.
• Net values: retain negative adjustments. Sum selected rows rather than deleting deobligations or using only positive values.
• Geography: the USAID total includes all reported country, regional, and unspecified-location rows. It is a global portfolio, not an Israel program.
• Domestic versus overseas: these accounting totals do not identify how much cash physically leaves America. Procurement, administration, and implementing arrangements require separate analysis.
• Recent-year movement: FY2025’s smaller USAID total alone does not quantify the causal effect of a policy change or determine a future restoration budget.

Sources and reproducible calculation

• ForeignAssistance.gov data-download catalog.
• Official country-summary CSV.
• Official managing-agency-summary CSV.
• Official data dictionary; local copy: Attachment (file not included in this release).
• CRS RL33222, May 28, 2025 edition; local copy: Attachment (file not included in this release). Table 1 is on printed page 1.
• Library of Congress record identifying the ForeignAssistance.gov download host.
• Attachment (file not included in this release) · Attachment (file not included in this release) · Attachment (file not included in this release).
• Attachment (file not included in this release) · Attachment (file not included in this release).

The Israel calculation selects Country Code = ISR, Transaction Type Name = Obligations, and FY2016–FY2025. The USAID calculation selects Managing Agency Acronym = USAID, the same funding phase and years, then sums current_amount across the selected geography rows. There are 10 country-summary rows and 1,581 managing-agency rows in the saved inputs. Totals use decimal arithmetic.