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About the Dashboard

The Foreign Assistance Dashboard was created in response to the principles of the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness and President Obama’s Open Government Initiative. The goal of the Foreign Assistance Dashboard is to enable a wide variety of stakeholders, including U.S. citizens, civil society organizations, the Congress, U.S. Government agencies, donors, and partner country governments, the ability to examine, research, and track U.S. Government foreign assistance investments in an accessible and easy-to-understand format.

The Dashboard is still in its early stages of development. Future versions will incorporate budget, financial, program, and performance data in a standard form from all U.S. Government agencies receiving or implementing foreign assistance, humanitarian, and/or development funds. Those agencies include but are not limited to:
  • Department of Agriculture
  • Department of Commerce
  • Department of Defense
  • Department of Energy
  • Department of Health and Human Services
  • Department of Homeland Security
  • Department of the Interior
  • Department of Justice
  • Department of Labor
  • Department of State
  • Department of the Treasury
  • Department of Transportation
  • Environmental Protection Agency
  • Federal Trade Commission
  • Inter-America Foundation
  • Millennium Challenge Corporation
  • Peace Corps
  • U.S. African Development Foundation
  • U.S. Agency for International Development
  • U.S. Trade Development Agency

The Dashboard currently contains foreign assistance budget planning data for the Department of State, and budget planning, obligation and expenditure data for USAID and the Millennium Challenge Corporation. The addition of other agencies and more detailed data will take place in phases.

Foreign assistance investments are presented through a variety of user-friendly graphics on this site, including funding by country, by sector, and by year. However, the data set can be filtered and sorted in a variety of additional ways. Users are able to generate their own tables through manual queries and download machine-readable data sets. The Dashboard is not an accounting tool, but a way to help the U.S. Government be more transparent. Thus, it may not always be possible to trace funded amounts through the stages of the U.S. financial processes (appropriation, obligation, disbursement) on a dollar for dollar basis within the Dashboard data.

To understand the information presented in the Foreign Assistance Dashboard, users are encouraged to read the supplementary information under the What You Should Know section, especially the Top Ten Facts list.