Washington is in the middle of a rare and long-overdue debate about whether U.S. military aid actually serves U.S. interests. From Sen. Lindsey Graham to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, lawmakers have recently called—to varying degrees—for the end of U.S. aid to Israel, forcing a reckoning with how the United States uses military assistance as a foreign-policy tool.

But Israel is not the only relationship that deserves scrutiny. Egypt has received $1.3 billion in U.S. military financing every year—and has for nearly four decades—despite bribing a U.S. senator, imprisoning Americans, and ranking among the world’s worst human rights abusers.

If the U.S. Congress is finally asking the hard questions about what U.S. military dollars buy, then Egypt belongs in that conversation. At least since the 2013 military coup led by Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, U.S. military aid to Egypt has failed to deliver a meaningful return on investment, advance U.S. interests, or meet the principled and strategic standards embedded in U.S. laws. Instead, assistance to Egypt has become an exercise in inertia: requested, appropriated, and obligated with little consideration beyond tired bromides about promoting regional stability and supporting long-standing partnerships.

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U.S. military aid to Egypt began in 1979 after the signing of the peace agreement between Israel and Egypt, not as a legally binding and formal part of the treaty, but as an informal understanding to sweeten the deal and overcome security concerns. Despite pushback, the Reagan administration signed an agreement in 1987 with Egypt’s powerful defense minister, Abdel Halim Abu Ghazala, to coproduce the M1A1 Abrams tank in Egypt. Every year since then, the U.S. president has requested and Congress has appropriated $1.3 billion in foreign military financing (FMF) for Egypt, making it one of the largest recipients of U.S. military aid in history.

Proponents of the assistance have advanced several myths about U.S. aid to justify and sustain its continuation. They have argued that U.S. aid is necessary to maintain the peace agreement with Israel, keep Egypt from turning toward U.S. adversaries, and ensure U.S. access to Egyptian airspace and priority passage through the Suez Canal. Yet none of these arguments inherently require U.S. military equipment and training to maintain.

In fact, each argument cuts the other way. Egypt maintains peace with Israel out of its own national security interests, not because Washington is writing it a check—and the two militaries already cooperate directly on shared threats. No adversary, including Russia or China, is lining up to replace U.S. cash transfers, nor do they have any incentive to do so. As for Suez access, U.S. vessels already pay transit fees—which Cairo depends on—independent of any military assistance package. These aren’t strategic levers that Washington holds over Cairo; they are relationships that Egypt maintains because it also benefits.

Meanwhile, over the past decade, Egyptian policies have repeatedly conflicted with publicly stated U.S. interests and deepened relations with U.S. adversaries. In 2017, Egypt sought to covertly buy more than 30,000 rocket-propelled grenades from North Korea, which was in violation of international law. In 2023, Egypt tried to secretly provide 40,000 rockets to Russia to support its war on Ukraine. Both plans were eventually thwarted after being exposed. Egypt has also supported controversial actors in regional conflicts, including backing Libyan warlord Khalifa Haftar and the 2021 military coup in Sudan.

Most brazenly, the Egyptian regime has repeatedly targeted Americans and U.S. institutions directly. Between 2018 and 2022, it bribed then-Sen. Bob Menendez, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, for favors, including the release of conditioned military aid. In 2025, Egyptian security agents attacked two Americans outside one of Egypt’s diplomatic facilities in New York City on the orders of Egypt’s foreign minister, and, in 2022, it unleashed an unregistered spy to target dissidents on U.S. soil.

Even where U.S. assistance is intended to support shared security goals, such as Sinai security and border security, its effectiveness has been questionable. Egyptian military operations have repeatedly been marked by credible reports of gross human rights violations, including mass graves, extrajudicial killings, and collective punishment, undermining claims that U.S. assistance is advancing its stated security objectives. In other cases, U.S.-supplied equipment has been implicated in tragic incidents, such as the 2015 attack on a tourist convoy in the Western Desert that left 12 dead and one American survivor severely injured.

Egypt’s procurement choices also raise questions about the value of U.S. assistance. Roughly half of U.S. aid supports the maintenance and sustainment of legacy systems—such as those M1A1 tanks—that are ill-suited to Egypt’s security threats and are increasingly obsolete. At the same time, while the United States provides billions for military hardware through FMF, Egypt chooses to use its national funds to purchase arms from other countries. It even pursued purchasing Su-35 fighter jets from Russia until U.S. authorities threatened to levy sanctions under the 2017 Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act. More recently, it has been reported that Egypt is considering purchasing advanced Chinese fighter jets, which were flown over Egypt during the two countries’ first joint air force exercise.

Under Sisi, Egypt’s military has expanded its grip on the economy, controlling critical industries and driving economic policy. This has brought unsustainable debt, systemic corruption, and repeated financial crises. In response, fearing mass migration and regional instability, the international community has continued to step in and bail out Egypt, including $57 billion in 2024. U.S. military aid policy has done nothing to interrupt this cycle. In fact, by empowering the Egyptian military, it is undermining Egypt’s stability.

But most concerning is Egypt’s human rights record, which ranks among the worst globally. The government’s widespread repression, arbitrary detentions, and restrictions on civil society have become defining features of Sisi’s regime. These abuses have denied Egyptians their fundamental freedoms, destabilized society, and thwarted economic development.

They have also repeatedly affected U.S. citizens and their families. Egyptian authorities have wrongfully detained Americans, including three currently. One American died in Egypt in 2020 after six years in wrongful detention, suffering through horrible prison conditions, ill treatment, and medical neglect. Countless others have experienced transnational repression by the regime, including retaliatory arrests in Egypt of family members of exiled activists, regional extraditions, and digital and physical harassment. Under U.S. law—including Section 502B of the Foreign Assistance Act and Section 6 of the Arms Export Control Act—such patterns of gross human rights violations should trigger restrictions on military aid to Egypt. Yet these provisions have been repeatedly ignored by Democratic and Republican administrations, undermining U.S. rule of law.

Congress has never genuinely questioned ending assistance as the law should require. However, in 2008, Congress for the first time placed conditions on a portion of Egypt’s military assistance in response to its deteriorating human rights record. Nearly every year since, Congress has maintained human rights conditions, and for the better part of a decade, it has continued to strengthen them each year to demonstrate its growing concerns. Nevertheless, except on rare occasions, each U.S. administration waived those conditions, claiming that preserving the assistance advanced U.S. national security interests.

Following the 2013 military coup, U.S. President Barack Obama ended cash flow financing, which allowed Egypt to commit not-yet-appropriated U.S. military aid to pay for arms purchases on a predetermined schedule instead of the full amount upfront. This is a privilege that only Israel now maintains. But after a temporary pause, the Obama administration resumed aid in violation of a U.S. law, commonly referred to as the “coup clause,” that prohibits assistance to any country that overthrows its democratically elected government.

In 2017, the Trump administration reprogrammed $65.7 million in FMF and withheld $195 million more over human rights and national security concerns. Within a year, the administration released the withheld aid and, shortly thereafter, U.S. President Donald Trump admiringly referred to Sisi as his “favorite dictator.” The Biden administration withheld $130 million in each of its first two years over human rights concerns and $85 million in its third year, only to fall back on releasing all aid in its final year, including somehow certifying that the Egyptian government had made “clear and consistent progress” on releasing political prisoners, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Conditionality was never a silver bullet that would bring systemic reform to Egypt, but when it was applied, it did deliver tangible results, including the exoneration of individuals ensnared in the infamous “foreign funding” case and the release of hundreds of political prisoners. None of the administrations sustained the pressure, sending a clear signal to Cairo that U.S. red lines are negotiable.

The cumulative result is an aid program that operates less as a strategic tool and more as an entitlement. Repeated administrations’ willingness to continue assistance despite the legal constraints and strategic pitfalls has created a moral hazard in which the Egyptian regime has frequently ignored U.S. concerns and directly challenged U.S. interests. It is only in the rare instances when Egypt has been held accountable that we have seen its regime change behavior. Importantly, on the occasions when the Trump and Biden administrations did withhold aid, or even when Congress blocked some assistance over human rights concerns, it never led to tangible consequences for U.S. national security or the bilateral relationship.

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Over the past 47 years, the United States has provided Egypt nearly $60 billion in military aid. The result is a military, which, on a number of indicators, has the equipment and capabilities to provide for its own security. In fact, Egypt has recently provided fighter jets to the United Arab Emirates to help it repel attacks from Iran. At the same time, with no other country willing or able to provide Egypt with a $1.3 billion annual check, it will force the regime to more critically assess its security priorities.

Ending military aid to Egypt does not mean abandoning the relationship. Instead, it would create an opportunity to recalibrate it on more sustainable and effective terms. A structured, conditional phase-out of FMF over the next two fiscal years—aligned with the expiration of the current U.S.-Israel memorandum of understanding (MOU)—would better align U.S. policy with U.S. interests than the Republican-controlled House Appropriations Committee’s push to have the Trump administration sign an MOU with Egypt. Further, the United States can preserve targeted security cooperation in areas of mutual interest, including joint exercises such as Bright Star, and intelligence-sharing. These tools allow for continued engagement without the distortions created by large-scale arms transfers.

And FMF is not the only source of U.S. leverage. The United States’ economic and political clout, as well as its ability to use targeted sanctions and human rights designations, provides incentive or coercive avenues for influence. In many ways, the continuation of military aid has hindered the effective use of these tools, signaling a tolerance for behavior that would otherwise carry consequences.

As U.S. policymakers reconsider long-standing commitments to Israel, the time has come to apply the same scrutiny to Egypt. Ending the annual $1.3 billion in military aid is not a radical departure but a necessary adjustment—one that aligns U.S. policy with its laws, interests, and principles.