Congress Debates US Aid Reforms
FrontLines - September 2009
By John Waggoner
USAID is more critical to achieving U.S. foreign policy objectives than ever before but a steady, two-decade-long decline has eroded the Agency’s capacity
to fulfill its mission, said principal sponsors and witnesses at a congressional hearing on the Kerry-Lugar bill that seeks to reform foreign assistance.
“The issues that we face today—from chronic poverty and hunger to violent acts of terrorism—
require that we work seamlessly
toward identifiable goals,” said Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
“The U.S. has increased development funding and elevated
its priority. Yet USAID has been allowed to atrophy. Many new programs are located outside USAID in roughly two dozen departments and agencies. We don’t really know whether these programs are complementary or working at cross-purposes.”
Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), the committee’s chairman, expressed confidence that the bipartisan Kerry-Lugar bill “would go a long way toward improving our immediate
ability to deliver foreign aid in a more accountable, thoughtful, and strategic manner.”
The bill has three core components.
It strengthens USAID by creating an internal evaluation and knowledge center that can evaluate foreign assistance programs
across government. This would restore the once “highly regarded” voice of USAID in these matters that has been allowed to wane since the 1980s.
The bill also designates the USAID mission director as responsible for coordinating all development and humanitarian assistance in a foreign country.
And the bill calls for a high level task force to advise on critical personnel issues such as new investments in staffing and expertise at USAID. The bill also encourages increased training and inter-agency rotations to build expertise and effectiveness.
Witnesses at the hearing
included former USAID Administrator Peter McPherson; Jeffrey Sachs, head of the Earth Institute at Columbia University and a special adviser to the U.N. Secretary General; and the Rev. David Beckmann, president of Bread for the World.
Sachs took some aback when he suggested that “we have dropped the ball by focusing too much on my profession, economics.” He said the analytical
capacity of USAID needs to be rebuilt to diagnose the obstacles to sustainable economic development. This means investing
in cross-disciplinary expertise in agriculture, climatology, hydrology, disease control, ecology,
and physical infrastructure, as well as in economics, he explained.
Official development assistance
has to be put under “one programmatic roof,” he said. “And that is the leadership of USAID.” Moreover, he continued,
“in my very strong view, not shared by everybody,” the USAID administrator should be elevated to Cabinet rank, directly reporting to the president.
McPherson cautioned that, without the reforms the bill envisions
and control over its budget and policy, USAID risks becoming
“a super-contractor and not really an agency at all.”
Beckmann added that, given the support of Congress and the priority that the president and secretary of state have placed on development, “now is the time” for foreign assistance reform.
Subsequent to the Kerry hearing
on the Senate side, Howard Berman, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, released a draft outline of a new Foreign Assistance Act, signaling plans to substantially rewrite the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961.
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