Nye Goes From USAID to Congress
FrontLines - March 2009
Rep. Glenn Nye (D-Va.) at USAID headquarters, Baghdad, Iraq.
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The newly elected Democratic congressman from Virginia Beach, Va., Glenn Nye, was settling
in to his new office on Capitol Hill in January, far away from the
dusty streets of Baghdad—where he spent much of 2007 as a USAID development
officer.
“USAID seems a long time ago—before the campaign,”
said Nye, a photogenic, athletic man propelled by voters into his office at the Cannon House Office Building.
“So far I’ve found USAID has a good reputation up here,” he said in a recent interview with FrontLines. “Most times when I mention I worked for USAID, people say it’s good. They are pleased to hear it.”
Nye was a Foreign Service Officer at the State Department who left for the grittier work of development projects in Afghanistan and Iraq because he loved to be out in the field. A search of congressional
employment records shows that Nye is apparently the second USAID employee to subsequently become a member of Congress. The first was Rep. Sander Martin Levin (D-Mich.) in 1983.
“I like the hands-on work of USAID field work—you see the results immediately,” he said. “I’d never trade the years in development, even in Iraq. Our program was part of the solution—
improving things.”
He caught the development bug when his father, a cardiologist,
took him to the Middle East with a Physicians for Peace humanitarian project. He graduated
from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service in 1996, interned at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and joined the State Department’s Foreign Service in 1999.
Nye served as a consul and liaison to the Albanian communities
in Macedonia and Kosovo during a violent period, once using his contacts to free a U.S. hostage from Albanian militia. But then he was sent to do economic
work in peaceful Singapore where he “missed the edge of work in a conflict zone—I wanted to go where the real cutting edge of work was,” Nye said.
Rep. Glenn Nye (D-Va.)
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Congressmen who served in USAID:
- In 1964, Maine Democratic Rep. Frank Morey Coffin served as deputy administrator following his term in Congress.
- In 1967, Colorado Democratic Rep. Roy McVicker served
contract consultant to the Agency and North Dakota Democratic Rep. Rolland Redlin was the war on hunger consultant for USAID following their terms in Congress.
- From 1977 to 1981, former Democratic Reps. Sander Levin of Michigan and John Gilligan of Ohio served, consecutively, as the Agency’s administrators, Levin before his service in Congress and Gilligan afterwards.
Source: Senate Historian’s Office
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In 2002, he volunteered to go to Afghanistan with USAID and worked for a year for the Asia Foundation, which ran elections for delegates to the convention (Loya Jirga) that wrote the constitution,
and Afghan presidential
elections. He was fortunate that it was a time of relative peace and he was not bottled up in a secure compound.
“I lived in a house in Kabul that we rented from Afghans and I rode my bike to work at the Asia Foundation,” he said.
In the fall of 2004, he returned to Washington to organize
absentee balloting for Iraqis in the United States for the International Organization for Migration and the International Federation for Electoral Systems, funded by USAID.
But the desire to return abroad surfaced and Nye next went to the Middle East as a project manager for USAID’s Office of Transition Initiatives, working on community development across the West Bank and Gaza.
In 2007, Nye returned to Iraq as an advisor on the Community Stabilization Program, which created
70,000 jobs and provided grants to small businesses—all in the hope of keeping young men from joining the insurgents. He worked in Baghdad, Ramadi, Faluja, Mosul, Kirkuk, and Baquba. Keeping a low profile to avoid attracting the bad guys, the program also set up sports teams and vocational training.
To be sure he supports the interests of his constituents—many of them active or retired military personnel around Norfolk and Virginia Beach—he sits on the Armed Services Committee. This will enable him to be involved in military-civilian
relations in aid programs as well as “talk about the best way to fight terror and insurgency,” he said.
President Barack Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, and Defense Secretary Bob Gates all have spoken about “smart power” being more effective at times than military force alone, said Nye, who plans to bring his USAID development experience into that equation. . ★ - B.B.
Ashtar Analeed Marcus contributed
to this report.
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