The U.S. sends taxpayer money to 177 of the 193 recognized countries in the world (≈91.7%).
Executive summary
The claim that “The U.S. sends taxpayer money to 177 of the 193 recognized countries in the world (≈91.7%)” is plausible as a shorthand but not precisely supported by the publicly available data cited here; official U.S. reporting instead states that roughly 175 countries and territories received U.S. foreign assistance in fiscal year 2023 [1] [2], and counting methods (countries vs. territories, year-to-year changes, and what counts as “taxpayer money”) change the tally [3] [4] [5].
1. What the official data actually says about reach
U.S. government data compiled on ForeignAssistance.gov is the authoritative public source for which countries receive U.S. foreign assistance and how much, and that dataset is the basis for most secondary reporting [3] [4]; using those sources, Congressional Research Service notes that “approximately 175 countries and territories received U.S. assistance in FY2023” [1] [2]. Pew also used ForeignAssistance.gov to report total disbursements ($71.9 billion in FY2023) while noting the site as the main source for recipient and budget details [5].
2. Why a flat “177 of 193” claim is brittle
Two measurement choices make the 177/193 ratio fragile: first, whether the count includes territories and non‑sovereign recipients — CRS and other U.S. sources explicitly count “countries and territories,” not just UN‑recognized sovereign states, which inflates recipient counts compared with a strict “193 recognized countries” denominator [1] [2]. Second, annual policy shifts and emergencies change the recipient list year to year: FY2023, wartime and humanitarian packages (for example large Ukraine assistance) and short policy pauses across administrations affect which entities receive funds and when [5] [1] [6].
3. The political and programmatic context behind the numbers
Beyond bookkeeping, the distributional story matters: a small number of recipients get a large share of funds (Pew and CRS reporting show top recipients account for a substantial fraction of total obligations), and different agencies—DoD, State, USAID and others—deliver aid for security, economic development, and humanitarian purposes [5] [7] [8]. Recent policy changes and pauses—such as the January 2025 pause and reviews of foreign aid and shifts in multilateral funding—have created temporary gaps and uncertainty that can reduce both the universe of recipients and annual totals [9] [6] [10].
4. Alternative readings and limitations in available reporting
Some secondary aggregators and visualizations produce country rankings and lists that can be interpreted to support high counts of recipients [7] [11] [12], but these often draw from the same ForeignAssistance dataset and may differ in how they count recipients and disbursements. The available sources here do not provide an exact citation to confirm the precise “177 of 193” figure; instead, the best-documented public number in these sources is “approximately 175 countries and territories” for FY2023 [1] [2]. If the question requires an exact current percentage against the 193‑country universe, the dataset would need to be re‑queried with an explicit inclusion rule (sovereign-only vs. territories, and which fiscal year) on ForeignAssistance.gov [3] [4].
5. Bottom line
Claiming that the U.S. sends taxpayer money to roughly 91.7% of the world’s countries is directionally correct in the sense that U.S. assistance touches most countries, but the specific number 177 versus 193 is not verifiable in the provided reporting; the best-supported, authoritative phrasing from U.S. sources is that about 175 countries and territories received U.S. assistance in FY2023, with actual counts varying by year and definitional choices [1] [2] [5]. Further precision would require a fresh, rule‑bound extract from ForeignAssistance.gov that specifies whether territories and non‑sovereign recipients are included [3] [4].