Helms Wants Religious Groups to Funnel Foreign Aid
By ERIC SCHMITT
WASHINGTON, Jan. 11 ó Senator Jesse Helms, the most
powerful critic of foreign aid in Congress, said today he would
champion an increase in international assistance ó but
only if all future United States aid were funneled to the needy
through private charities and religious groups instead of a government
agency.
Mr. Helms, a North Carolina Republican who heads the Foreign
Relations Committee, said he modeled his proposal after President-elect
George W. Bush's campaign theme of empowering private relief
groups to help the poor. If Mr. Helms's plan is adopted, it would
mark one of the most dramatic shifts in decades in how America
helps the world's indigent.
Mr. Helms proposed abolishing the United States Agency for
International Development and transferring its $7 billion in
annual aid to a quasi-governmental foundation that would deliver
grants to private relief groups.
Some relief groups reacted with stunned disbelief and others
with enthusiastic support.
For many years, Mr. Helms has been a searing critic of American
foreign aid, complaining, as he did today, that government-organized
aid has only "lined the pockets of corrupt dictators, while
funding the salaries of a growing bloated bureaucracy."
"The time has come to reject what President Bush correctly
labels the `failed compassion of towering, distant bureaucracies'
and instead, empower private and faith-based groups who care
most about those in need," Mr. Helms said in a speech at
the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative research group.
Under his plan, Mr. Helms said the groups that could receive
grants include World Vision, Save the Children, Hadassah, Catholic
Relief Services and Samaritan's Purse, a North Carolina organization
run by the Rev. Franklin Graham, the son the Rev. Billy Graham,
a close friend of the senator.
"I'm delighted to hear of Senator Helms's call for dramatically
improving and increasing foreign aid to poor and hungry people
around the world," said the Rev. David Beckmann, president
of Bread for the World, the nation's largest grass-roots anti-hunger
lobbying organization.
But Bruce Wilkinson, a senior vice president for World Vision,
which distributes $900 million in aid a year, 10 percent from
A.I.D., to 100 countries, expressed concern that the longstanding
partnership between the government and private relief groups
could be severed.
A.I.D. has working relationships with more that 3,500 American
companies and more than 300 private voluntary organizations based
in the United States.
Gen. Colin L. Powell, the secretary of state-designate, met
with Mr. Helms earlier this week, and while he was not briefed
on the details of the senator's proposal, he expressed support
for increasing the foreign aid budget, Senate aides said.