This is an archived USAID document retained on this web site as a matter of public record.
Administrator J. Brian Atwood
House International Relations Committee
Oral Statement
Washington, D.C., February 25, 1997
U.S. Agency for International Development
Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
But I do thank you for all of your kind comments
and those of Mr. Gejdenson, and I certainly will try to
address the question that Mr. Bereuter raised.
The first thing I'd like to say is that I very much
want to work with this committee, and I believe I speak
for the entire administration in saying that we want this
committee to pass an authorization bill, a Foreign Aid
Authorization Bill, a State Department Authorization Bill,
and one that the president can sign. We, I think, have lost
something in our foreign policy process over the years
when this committee isn't able to do that and when the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee is not able to do
that. I think that the people who want to serve on this
committee have a much more natural interest in our
foreign affairs, in our foreign policy, and want to
contribute to it. And I think it's very, very important for
the administration to do everything it can to help you to
do your job, and I think the feeling is mutual on your part;
you want to help us do our job. So I want to work with
you very, very closely.
I want to thank you in particular, Mr. Chairman,
for setting up a session this afternoon for new freshmen
members of Congress to talk about our foreign aid
programs. I'm going to be there with General Nash, who
has been our chief commanding officer in Bosnia; and
former AID administrator Peter McPherson (sp); who
served for six years during the Reagan administration;
Julia Taft (sp), the head of Interaction; and Terrence
Bracy (sp), who is the head of the Business Alliance in
support of federal aid. I think that's a -- you've provided
us with a very important opportunity to talk to freshmen
members of Congress who have not yet had an opportunity
to get into these issues in depth. So I really believe that
symbolizes the fact that we're getting off to the right foot
in this new Congress.
The budget request that we've submitted, Mr.
Chairman, I believe will help us achieve equilibrium at USAID. We've gone through some very, very difficult
years. We've had very severe budget cuts in fiscal '96.
We've had to have a reduction in force. And you
mentioned that we have overall reduced our presence
around the world. I think we've gone too far in that
direction and now it's important for us to begin to build
back our program so that we can indeed serve America's
interests. The total increase that we are requesting
for USAID managed programs in this budget totals $476
million. This includes $292 million for the Eastern
European and NIS countries; $135 million for important
transitional countries under the Economic Support Fund;
and $65.5 million for development assistance, the bulk of
which is for a very new food security initiative. And I
want on that point to stop and emphasize the word
"agriculture." Agriculture is an important part
of development assistance. It's an important part of
America's interest, as well. We have had -- because of
various pressures on our budget over the years, we've had
to reduce our contribution to agricultural development.
The consequence has been that emergency food assistance
has gone up, and increasing tensions have existed in
countries as diverse as Rwanda and South Africa in recent
years. And so it's extremely important, especially in
Africa, that we contribute to the food security of these
nations.
These nations suffer from urbanization and the
types of agricultural policies that have been pursued by
certain governments, slash and burn techniques that have
forced people away from farms and into the cities.
And I believe it's extremely important for us to
serve our own agricultural interests. Our farmers plant
one out of every four acres for export abroad. Forty-three
of the top 50 importers of American agricultural products
were former AID recipients. So we can really tie our own
agricultural interests to our development overseas.
The final point I would make is that in many of
these developing- world countries, 80 percent of their
GNP is in the agriculture sector. So if we can't help them there, we're really not going to be leaders in the
development community. It seems to me that our budgets
in the past few years have gone a bit out of balance and
that we need to build back our capacity to do work in the
agriculture sector. Mr. Chairman, over the last few
years, obviously, one of the great worries that I've had is
that we were losing our leadership capacity in the
development field. Now our nation leads because we have
ideas, because we have new approaches, because we are
optimistic as a people, and because the world needs our
input. We are, as the president has said, an indispensable
nation because of that optimism and because of the rich
vein of intellectual accomplishments that we represent.
But it is has been even more difficult to lead
when we are not contributing resources to comport with
the size of our own economy. We have traditionally been
close to last place in terms of the percentage of our GNP
that we contribute to official development assistance. We
are in dead last place now, with only .1 percent of our
GNP going to development assistance. More importantly,
though, we've fallen to fourth place, behind nations that
have economies half the size of ours, in terms of our
overall contribution to development assistance. We're
now behind Japan, France and Germany. It seems to me
that those countries are not more altruistic than we are.
They, however, are pursuing their own interests through
development assistance programs. We need to also
pursue our interests in that way.
I'm very proud in the last year that the
Development Assistance Committee of the OECD has
adopted a report that was largely driven by our country.
It's entitled, "Shaping the 21st Century, the Contribution
of Development Cooperation." This report sets various
goals for the entire donor community, including the World
Bank and the UNDP and all of the other bilateral donors.
The goals are such important items as reducing by
one-half the number of people living in extreme poverty.
That now today is 1.3 billion people living under $365 per
year. That's about a dollar per day. That report also
urges us to make sure that everyone has access to
universal education. There are many girls, in particular,
in the developing world who do not have access to that. It
calls for every nation to have a national environmental
policy, and it goes on and lists several other goals that I
think are reachable in the next 20 years if we are going to
be at the forefront in leading.
This is the U.S. approach. We don't believe in
simply counting what we do in foreign aid by establishing
an arbitrary goal for resource contributions. The goal that
had been set previously was .7 percent of our GNP. What
we want to do is to see results achieved, no matter what
the costs. And so the world has now adopted our approach.
I'm also very pleased that I can come to this
committee and to the Congress and ask for less operating
expense money than we spent last year. We're asking for
$15 million less than you appropriated last year. That is a
direct result of what you had suggested, that we have
overhauled the agency from top to bottom. We didn't
close it, but we did rebuild it. We have adopted a
strategic approach. We have reorganized and we have
changed the management. We've demanded that our
programs produce demonstrable results. And since 1993,
to be exact, we have reduced our staff by 2,700 people.
We've cut senior management by 38 percent. We've
reduced project design time by 75 percent. We've reduced
our regulations by 55 percent. We've closed 26 overseas
missions and will close six more by the end of fiscal year
1998. And USAID is one of the pioneering agencies in
implementing the Government Performance and Results
Act.
All of these actions are designed to assure that
every dollar appropriated to our agency can bring
taxpayers the best possible return on their investment.
We also feel very proud of where we are in
deploying the most modern, integrated management
system in government.
Now, Mr. Chairman, you have indicated that there
are flaws, that there are problems, and that you are
undoubtedly hearing from some of our employees about
the difficulties of changing the way they do business and
operating with this brand-new management system, this
new computer system that has modules covering many
aspects of the way we manage our business. Let me tell
you, Mr. Chairman, that you would not be hearing
complaints from other government agencies about their
computer systems, because they're not at the stage yet of
actually deploying the system. When you try to introduce
a new system of this type, yes, you're going to get
complaints. And we're very well aware of them. We're
trying to deal with them. But we feel, as my written
statement gives you in some detail, that we've made great
progress, more progress than any other government
agency. And I feel very good about where we are.
We're not going to be isolated from the State
Department. In fact, with my friend Secretary of State
Madeleine Albright in that office, we're going to be closer
to the State Department than ever before.
But let me tell you that moving into a new
building doesn't even physically separate us. We now have
11 different buildings -- I think the State Department has
closer to 20 -- scattered all over Rosslyn and Washington,
DC. We're trying with the State Department to
consolidate our operations. We'll be able to collapse our
11 different buildings, all operating under the agreements we've reached for commercial rental rates, into one
government building, the Ronald Reagan Building.
Now it was Congress and the executive branch
that built that building. It is a government building. It is
an important government building, in the sense that it is
going to be focusing on international trade. And I think it
underscores the fact that our agency makes a major
contribution to international trade. Over the long run
we're going to be able to save money by doing this, Mr.
Chairman, and I don't at all apologize for the fact that we
are moving into the Ronald Reagan Building.
Most importantly, Mr. Chairman, I'm very proud
that I can assert that our agency today serves our people's
interests. We serve our foreign policy interests by helping
to prevent, to mitigate, and to transit from crisis
situations. Our long-term development aid clearly has an
impact on preventing crisis. Our humanitarian relief aid
certainly helps to mitigate the many crises that we're
fighting all over the world, and we have really developed a
capacity to help our government and to help other
governments transit from crisis situations, as is the case in
Haiti and Bosnia and South Africa and Cambodia and the
West Bank and Gaza, et cetera.
We also serveAmerica's interests, as Mr.
Gejdenson indicated, by creating a demand for American
exports in the developing world. The development
successes that we've had over the last 30 years are the
reason that we have been able to double the amount of
exports in the last 10 years and why the fastest-growing
export market for American goods is the developing
world.
We also serve America's interests in providing
our citizens protection from global health and
environmental threats. We watched with great fear as we
saw the outbreak of the ebola virus. This is only one of
many diseases that threatens the American people. Just
the other day, I met with the head of the Rotary
International to talk about our efforts to eradicate polio
around the world. We're making a major contribution
there, and when we achieve that goal, sometimes around
the year 2000, Mr. Chairman, we'll be able to stop
spending about $230 million a year to immunize our
children against polio. We've done that in the case of
smallpox, and I think it should be a major goal of our
country to help in the effort to eradicate polio.
Mr. Chairman, my written testimony offers many
examples of specific programs that serve America's
interests. Let me sum up here by saying that USAID is
not, if it ever was, a Cold War relic. We're dealing with
today's threats to America. We're dealing with today's
opportunities for increased exports in a global economy.
We're dealing with today's foreign policy challenges. The
end of the Cold War gives us a unique opportunity to attack development challenges with good partners
overseas. We don't want to work with partners that have
frittered awayithe resources that they've had available to
them. We don't want to work with governments that abuse
human rights. We don't want to work with governments
that don't accept the need to reform their economic
systems and their political systems to achieve market
democracies. And we want to achieve tangible results
with the taxpayers' dollars. Never again do we want to
expend taxpayers' dollars in a country where the
government's conduct undermines development.
So I think there have been major changes. We
have achieved equilibrium. We are at the stage now
where we must be more creative than ever before to make
the dollars that we have go further. We must begin to use
modern information technology such as the Internet to do
the development job. And I think we can succeed in
doing that.
But the most important thing we must do -- and
the president's budget this year reflects it -- is to maintain
American leadership in the development field because
without that leadership, we will not see those goals set by
the DAC (sp) report achieved. We will continue to see,
in a world that will have 2 billion more people in the next
two decades no matter what we do -- really suffering with
food-security problems, with refugee migrations, and with
increasing threat of disease and environmental
deterioration. Mr. Chairman, I believe that this
program serves America's interests. I believe that the
president's budget request warrants your support. I thank
you very much.
This is an archived USAID document retained on this web site as a matter of public record.
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Last Updated on: July 18, 2001
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