November 18, 2010 (WASHINGTON) – This statement is delivered on behalf of the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network (MFAN) by Co-Chairs David Beckmann and George Ingram:
The leaked summary of Secretary Clinton’s Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review (QDDR) shows positive movement towards a more streamlined, coherent, and coordinated approach to development by the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Taken together with the recent Presidential Policy Directive on Global Development (PPD) and internal reforms being led by USAID Administrator Raj Shah, the QDDR is another sign that the Obama Administration is committed to getting better results out of U.S. foreign assistance. However, the summary leaves some issues unresolved.
The most important positive elements of the summary include:
- Supporting the PPD: Key principles of reform, which were recently laid out in the PPD, are reiterated in the summary.
- Elevating and Strengthening USAID: The Agency will assume immediate control of the Feed the Future, the Obama Administration’s economic growth-focused food security initiative. USAID development professionals, particularly Mission Directors, will be given a leadership role in creating country-specific development strategies that strengthen overall U.S. diplomatic and defense efforts. USAID’s staffing and capacity will be bolstered at both the headquarters and country level.
The concerns:
- Durability of Reforms: The summary does not include a strong call for collaboration between the Administration and Congress – key leaders of which have been instrumental in advocating for elevating development, including Representative Howard Berman and Senators John Kerry and Dick Lugar – to turn the suggested reforms into legislation that will have lasting impact.
- Vagueness: There are still contradictions between the Administration’s goal of making USAID the world’s “premier development agency” and the lines of authority for policy development and budgeting (although progress seems to have been made). The QDDR focuses only on State and USAID, so the White House still has work to do to clarify how development programs and activities will be managed across the entire government.
We applaud the hard work that has been done by committed professionals at the State Department and USAID on the QDDR thus far. We look forward to the release of the review’s full findings soon.
Tags: coordination, Presidential Policy Directive on Global Development, QDDR, State Department, USAID
USAID Senior Foreign Service managers have some serious concerns about the QDDR which are not surfacing because of the very closed circle surrounding Administrator Shah. It is felt that while the prose is clearly supportive of USAID’s role as the “premier development agency,” actual operational steps, such as the reorganization underway in State of its USAID- equivalent Democracy and Economic Growth Bureaus and the Administrator’s decision to narrow USAID’s leadership role to new initiatives under “USAID Forward” that will be targets of cuts by the new Congress, threatens USAID’s very existence. Mid-level Democracy and Economic Growth officers see State’s encroachment on their role as evidenced in Pakistan and Afghanistan, which the Administrator is quoting as “models for USAID,” as now being operationalized through training initiatives underway in State for their Econ officers on grants management, development theory, and evaluation and monitoring, and the creation of these two new bureaus. We have been trying to point out these trends and dangers of narrowing the definition of development and where USAID presence should be (20 “focus” countries for Feed the Future”, 15 for GCC, and maybe the Global Health Initiative in HIV/AIDS prone countries), essentially the bottom one third of the development continuum, and ignoring the rest, which in the end will not be ignored because these are countries in Asia, Latin America, and Eastern Europe that are of strategic and economic interest to the US. These will be taken up by State to pursue public diplomacy goals. But noone seems to be listening to these concerns, or putting two-and-two together. The so-called budget authority given to USAID is extremely limited and shrinking, despite the language in the QDDR: State is retaining its “assistance coordinators,” (a new one was just appointed in January 2011 to coordinate assistance in Haiti). These units, headed by former State Dept Ambassadors retaining their Ambassadorial rank, make the in-house decisions on behalf of the Secretary as to which agency gets what funding. The Eastern Europe assistance coordinator’s office is a vivid example of this, swelling in ranks over the last year, micromanaging the assistance budget with no transparency, pressured by numerous USG agencies to give them money, and not following a consistent development approach or using development evaluation criteria to determine aid effectiveness. How could they when they have noone on their staff with development experience. Finally, the QDDR lays the authority of development assistance decisions with the “Chief of Mission,” which is the Ambassador who reports to the Secretary of State.
So, we truly hope someone out there is watching this unfold because from the inside, we have been silenced and asked to follow the company, i.e., QDDR, line. Recently, the Administrator sent out a notice to all executive managers that their assignments would be influenced by how well they are judged in implementing the QDDR and USAID Forward. We are all extremely committed to what we do and work long hours doing it. But we are concerned about the naiveite that Administrator Shah seems to be showing when it comes to the bureaucratic moves underway to reduce USAID’s influence in the development arena.