Since I’ve written on foreign aid funding in a number of different places, I frequently get emails from readers who challenge the facts undergirding my arguments. Many are genuinely astonished to hear that the USA only spends 1 percent of the federal budget on aid. These emails should probably be unsurprising, since polls routinely show that Americans are wildly misinformed about the amount we commit to foreign aid each year. They usually estimate that we spend an average of 20-25% of the budget on aid, and they respond (on average) that we should spend only 10% of the budget on those programs.

So—even though I shouldn’t be surprised (q.v. “these emails should probably be unsurprising”), somehow I always am. There’s no shortage of available information to clear up most of the misunderstanding. How is it that foreign aid is always the public’s red-headed fiscal stepchild?

So with all that said, here are some resources for those of you who want to learn more about the foreign aid (and international affairs) budgets:

• The U.S. Global Leadership Coalition (USGLC). The guys with the facts. They always have the most recent data on the budget. Their “Budget Center” is the best place to get started.
• The USAID Foreign Aid Dashboard. More detailed facts, broken down country-by-country.
• The Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network (MFAN). A good source for non-intuitive defenses of foreign aid and how to improve it (e.g. “Why Conservatives Should Care About Foreign Assistance Reform“).
• Oxfam’s Aid Reform Division. Gregory Adams has some top-notch ideas for how to make foreign aid better (and why we should commit more resources to it).
• InterAction. This is an organization of aid and development NGOs with an interest in helping improve and maximize America’s foreign aid budget.