The Senate soon will vote on H.R. 4426, the U.S. Foreign Operations appro- priations bill for fiscal year 1995. The House already has voted on it; after the Sen- ate vote, differences will be resolved by a joint conference of the House and Sen- ate. An important element of this legislation will be its provisions for aid to Rus- sia and the other New Independent States (NIS) of the former Soviet Union. De- spite billions of dollars in aid, the economies of these countries still are in deep trouble. While there are many reasons for this, one of them surely is the ineffec- tive way in which aid has been dispensed by the United States and other donors. To ease the transition to a f1ree market in these countries, U.S. programs should be restructured to make them more effective and timely. The American people are entitled to be skeptical about the effectiveness of U.S. aid to Russia and the NIS. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 the U.S. has promised $16 billion in aid to the former Soviet Union and RussiO The U.S. from 1990 to 1993 pledged an additional $12 billion to these countries through multilateral lenders like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The total amount of aid Russia has received from Western donors since 1990 is $90 billion. Nonetheless, the economic situation in most of these countries, particularly Rus- sia and Ukraine, continues to deteriorate. In 1993 alone, industrial output in Rus- sia declined by 29 percent, while the annual inflation rate topped 500 percent. 2 By comparison, the U.S. economy shrank by 30 percent over three years during the Great Depression of the 1930s.