Maybe I’m jumping ahead a bit by giving some background on past efforts and starting to build the foundations of a critique, but I think it’s important to have this grounding now before I delve deeper. In my next column, I will “take a step back” and explain just why foreign assistance is so important to our national interest. For now, however, take pleasure in a (not so) subtle trashing of a part of the Bush legacy that many regard to be one of its few positives. Truly, this is just another example of an extisting problem exacterbated by his administration.
“No objective supporter of foreign aid can be satisfied with the existing program – actually a multiplicity of programs. Bureaucratically fragmented, awkward and slow, its administration is diffused over a haphazard and irrational structure covering at least four departments and several other agencies. The program is based on a series of legislative measures and administrative procedures conceived at different times and for different purposes, many of them now obsolete, inconsistent and unduly rigid and thus unsuited for our present needs and purposes. Its weaknesses have begun to undermine confidence in our effort both here and abroad.”
Know who said that? John F. Kennedy in 1961. While this quote may be half a century old, if one did not know any better it would seem to be an effective critique of foreign assistance today. The problems Kennedy described have returned in a more acute form than ever before. His solution holds important lessons for today as well. It required personal commitment and political capital to fundamentally transform the system. The reform embodied bipartisan consensus and transformation aligned government structures to reflect new challenges at the time.
Through this effort, USAID’S presence abroad during the Cold War was far more significant than it is today. Leaders in the Kennedy administration and those following it realized that the agency’s staff was one of the most powerful instruments of soft power the U.S. government had at its disposal. In many places, USAID is the most visible face of the U.S. government; its influence at the level of civil society is far greater than the State Department’s or the Pentagon’s, whose representatives tend to remain in capital cities. USAID officers have daily interactions with civil-society leaders.
For much of its existence, USAID had substantial resources and autonomy, but in recent decades these have largely been stripped away. For example, the State Department was given responsibility for U.S. foreign assistance programs in central and Eastern Europe in 1989 and in the former Soviet Union in 1992, with USAID placed in a subordinate role. Eventually, in 2001, the State Department took over USAID’S account and its direct relationship with the Office of Management and Budget. As a result, USAID lost staff, programmatic flexibility, and influence with Congress, other government departments, other aid donors, and recipient nations.
Policymakers began to look for other vehicles to implement their development initiatives. When the Millennium Challenge Corporation was set up in 2004, the Secretary of State–rather than the USAID administrator–was named to chair it. At first, the MCC was discouraged from even working with USAID; when the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) was set up in 2003, it was placed in the State Department, with USAID and the Department of Health and Human Services given only supporting roles.
Many new players in the foreign assistance arena–the Centers for Disease Control, the MCC, and now even the Defense Department, through its new Africa Command–have created independent organizational structures to carry out their programs. Not surprisingly, this has led to policy incoherence, a lack of integration across programs and issue areas, inefficient and overlapping bureaucracies, and endless conflicts over roles and responsibilities–not to mention confusion among recipients and among other donors about who represents Washington on development issues. These new development players are now even using the same contractors as USAID. All of this organizational chaos has significantly increased the costs of implementing foreign aid programs, delayed their implementation, and reduced their impact. There is no evidence that this broad array of new development agencies has done any better than the old, more unified USAID, and much evidence that this organizational structure has done worse.
Large presidential initiatives and congressional earmarks for health care, HIV/AIDS, K-12 education, microfinance, and the environment have in recent years crowded out other development interventions, such as anticorruption measures, agricultural assistance, democracy-promotion programs, and infrastructure-enhancement measure. The narrower, more focused programs are politically appealing because they appear to have a direct, measurable impact on identifiable individuals. But such a concentration on the short-term delivery of goods and services comes at the expense of building sustainable institutions that promote long-term development.
The impact of this approach to development can best be understood at the country level. Ethiopia, one of the poorest countries in the world, has a largely agricultural economy and suffers from periodic famines. Yet in 2007, about 50 percent of U.S. assistance to Ethiopia went to HIV/AIDS prevention, 38 percent to emergency food relief, and 7 percent to child survival, family planning, and malaria prevention and treatment. Only 1.5 percent went to agriculture, 1.5 percent to economic growth, 1.5 percent to education, and 1 percent to improving governance. Such distorted profiles of development aid are unfortunately quite common. Strategic needs on the ground should dictate the nature of the programs, but currently, allocation decisions are determined by earmarks, presidential initiatives, or diplomatic pressures.
Dozens of studies on foreign aid show that aid programs rarely succeed when they are not customized to the poor countries they are designed to help and built on local ownership. The centralization of the U.S. government’s aid programs in Washington may satisfy the needs of key players in both the executive and the legislative branches for command and control, but it increases the risk of program failure and invites attacks from critics, who insist foreign aid is ineffective under all circumstances. Some assert that because Africa has been “fed” aid for the past sixty years, it has become addicted. Like any addict, it need and depends on its regular fix, finding it hard to contemplate an existence in an aid-less world. This is not true in all circumstances or for all countries, but it is a fair statement overall. Aid needs to be delivered in a way that helps the country become independent from aid and it must be sent to actors than can be trusted to dispense it to the places of greatest need.
