Foreign assistance is a fundamental component of the international affairs budget and is viewed by many as an essential instrument of U.S. foreign policy. On the basis of national security, commercial, and humanitarian rationales, U.S. assistance flows through many federal agencies and supports myriad objectives, including promoting economic growth, reducing poverty, improving governance, expanding access to health care and education, promoting stability in conflictive regions, countering terrorism, promoting human rights, strengthening allies, and curbing illicit drug production and trafficking. This book provides an overview of the U.S. foreign assistance program by answering frequently asked questions on the subject. It also provides a description of U.S. international food aid programs under current law; discusses several important policy issues related to U.S. international food aid; and describes Administration and congressional proposals intended to change the nature of U.S. food international aid.

The Moving Energy Initiative's flagship report, Heat, Light, and Power for Refugees: Saving Lives, Reducing Costs, investigates the current state of energy use among the forcibly displaced. Using a purpose-built model, the study provides the first-ever global estimates of energy use among forcibly displaced people, and the costs incurred for using this energy. It outlines potential scenarios for doing things differently, and urges change through specific recommendations for humanitarian agencies, donors, and host governments. Ultimately, the initiative argues that using cleaner, more sustainable forms of energy can provide benefits for the displaced, for host governments, and for the environment, and can also save humanitarian agencies money in the process.

Terror by Rail is the compelling true story of a major catastrophic event: the Amtrak 188 accident on May 12, 2015. After the accident, Lynn's journey and passion for answers caused her to ask questions about train safety and the bigger global issues that are challenges of the rail. A must read for anyone who travels, lives, or works near a rail system, Lynn's Terror by Rail is a wakeup call. As the phrase goes: See Something Say Something, and Lynn is doing just that! A born connector as a recruiter, puts the puzzle pieces together, and readers are blown away by what could have been the headline for that day had the story gone just 50 feet differently. This story of a single mom's heartbreaking journey through hell and back will give everyone facing challenges in their life a bit of hope that nothing is permanent, and it is possible to come through the pain to the other side.

At no time during the Great Depression was the contradiction between agriculture surplus and widespread hunger more wrenchingly graphic than in the government's attempt to raise pork prices through the mass slaughter of miliions of "unripe" little pigs. This contradiction was widely perceived as a "paradox." In fact, as Janet Poppendieck makes clear in this newly expanded and updated volume, it was a normal, predictable working of an economic system rendered extreme by the Depression. The notion of paradox, however, captured the imagination of the public and policy makers, and it was to this definition of the problem that surplus commodities distribution programs in the Hoover and Roosevelt administrations were addressed. This book explains in readable narrative how the New Deal food assistance effort, originally conceived as a relief measure for poor people, became a program designed to raise the incomes of commercial farmers. In a broader sense, the book explains how the New Deal years were formative for food assistance in subsequent administrations; it also examines the performance--or lack of performance--of subsequent in-kind relief programs. Beginning with a brief survey of the history of the American farmer before the depression and the impact of the Depression on farmers, the author describes the development of Hoover assistance programs and the events at the end of that administration that shaped the "historical moment" seized by the early New Deal. Poppendieck goes on to analyze the food assistance policies and programs of the Roosevelt years, the particular series of events that culminated in the decision to purchase surplus agriculture products and distribute them to the poor, the institutionalization of this approach, the resutls achieved, and the interest groups formed. The book also looks at the takeover of food assistance by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and its gradual adaptation for use as a tool in the maintenance of farm income. Utliizing a wide variety of official and unofficial sources, the author reveals with unusual clarity the evolution from a policy directly responsive to the poor to a policy serving mainly democratic needs.