“While perusing the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2013, we were disappointed to find six lines under the innocuous heading ‘transportation cost reimbursement’ that effectively reduces U.S. food aid by tens of millions of dollars,” Kimberly Ann Elliott, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development (CGD), and Erin Collinson, a policy outreach associate at CGD, write in the center’s “Rethinking U.S. Development Policy” blog. They briefly summarize the legislation, discuss proposed changes to the U.S. food aid program, and state, “Overall, a budget deal that avoids a shutdown, and hopefully tempers the effects of sequestration-mandated spending cuts on foreign assistance, is better than no deal at all. But Congress could save more lives without spending a dime more by modernizing U.S. food aid” (12/16).