Four years ago, President Obama promised in a United Nations speech to "change the way we do business" with foreign aid and "seek partners who want to build their own capacity to provide for their people." A year earlier, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton complained that "a lot of these aid programs don't work" and lamented their "heartbreaking" record of failure. However, Mr. Obama, like numerous prior presidents, is more devoted to boosting aid spending than to fixing its flaws.

The Agency for International Development (AID), the largest foreign-aid bureaucracy, was caught last week massively suppressing audit reports revealing waste, fraud and abuse. More than 400 negative findings were deleted from a sample of 12 draft audit reports, The Washington Post reported. In one case, more than 90 percent of the negative findings were expunged before the report was publicly released. Acting Inspector General Michael Carroll buried the embarrassing audit findings because he "did not want to create controversy as he awaited Senate confirmation to become the permanent inspector general," according to some AID auditors.