The Wall Street Journal‘s lede lays out the general idea:

The US was the world’s largest funder of foreign aid for decades—propping up education, health services and human rights in developing countries and supporting the militaries of strategic allies.

And the next paragraph led with this:

Programs often associated with foreign aid, such as humanitarian assistance, made up a large slice of the total.

There are a lot of useful data in the article, but it’s incomplete.

Two questions the WSJ didn’t address: of all that foreign aid for “developing countries,” how much went directly to the nominally intended recipients in the target nation’s people? Of the foreign aid that went to the target nation’s government, how much of that flowed on through to the nominally intended recipients in the nation’s people?

It’s interesting, too, to see that of all the OECD nations, the US is last, in percent of GDP terms, in handing out foreign aid. It would be good to see the answers to those two questions for the other member nations.