Is the United States prepared to respond to the international assistance needs of today and tomorrow? This blog is part of MFAN's new series, "Moving Us Closer to Operational Readiness: Critical Needs for U.S. International Assistance." This series draws on the expertise of MFAN's members to explore the specific core functions needed at the State Department to manage effective development and foreign assistance programs.
Over the past ten months, the Trump administration has swiftly dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), dramatically reducing the overall amount of foreign assistance, and merge remaining functions into the State Department. As the State Department has assumed responsibility for this portfolio, stakeholders have raised concerns that the Department lacks the resources, expertise, and processes necessary to enable proper implementation and oversight. The Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network (MFAN) in a recently released report sought to identify ways in which the State Department can strengthen its core functions in order to effectively manage foreign assistance.
A critical weakness of the State Department—regardless of administration—is in strategic planning, an area where USAID brought significant resources and expertise. This will only be more acute as the Department undertakes its new role in directing and implementing foreign assistance. Understanding this gap requires examining both the Department's existing planning apparatus and the fundamentally different planning culture that USAID developed over decades. The State Department will need to address these gaps and build its own expertise in order to develop a new international development framework that integrates development and humanitarian assistance functions into its traditional diplomatic mission.
State Department Strategic Planning Functions
Historically, the State Department has two internal offices that provide high-level strategic planning for foreign assistance: 1) the Policy Planning Staff (S/P) in the Secretary’s office; and 2) the Office of Foreign Assistance Resources (F). These two entities have played very different roles and would need to acquire different expertise and resources to develop a strategic planning function like what existed at USAID.
The State Department's Policy Planning Staff (S/P), created in 1947 by George Kennan at Secretary of State George Marshall's request, serves as a source of independent policy analysis and advice for the Secretary of State. S/P's mandate includes strategic planning and coordination, helping to shape the Secretary's priorities, and leading State’s input into the National Security Strategy and other long-term planning initiatives. S/P also serves as the Secretary of State’s speechwriting shop. This high-level strategic function differs fundamentally from the detailed program planning required for foreign assistance delivery. The Policy Planning Staff is typically a mix of career government officials and outside experts. While intellectually diverse, this composition reflects an orientation toward conceptual policy development rather than operational program management.
The distinction is critical: S/P excels at"big picture" strategic thinking—identifying long-term trends, framing policy options, and articulating grand strategy. For example, during the Obama administration, S/P led the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review (QDDR) process that sought to replicate the Defense Departments’ Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) and set a clear direction for U.S. foreign policy.
The Office of Foreign Assistance Resources (F) was created by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in January 2006 to coordinate U.S. foreign assistance with an emphasis on budget preparation and management, performance, and data transparency. F allocated much of its staff and resources toward the preparation of the annual State and Foreign Operations budget, seeing this as an important statement of an administration’s foreign policy priorities. F also played a role in policy and performance review and a limited role in monitoring, evaluation, and learning. Under the State Department’s reorganization plan, the old F has become the Office of Foreign Assistance Oversight and it is unclear what kind of resources it will manage going forward. For example, F had over 40 USAID staff on secondment who were eliminated under the administration’s reduction in force at the agency.
Gaps in State’s Capacities
The State Department has several critical gaps in its capacity to manage an effective strategic planning process for its new foreign assistance mission. This includes: 1) moving from planning to implementation; 2) sector and geographic specific planning; and 3) performance management and learning. These gaps are areas in which USAID had significant capacity prior to January 2025, and the State Department will need to find ways to develop and strengthen its own functions. I explore these gaps in more detail below:
Moving from Strategy to Implementation
The need to improve strategic planning and implementation has been highlighted in every major State Department reform initiative since 1992, with one problem being that many at State believe they have "policy" responsibility while "strategic planning" and"implementation" are someone else's concern. This cultural mindset creates institutional blind spots precisely where foreign assistance management requires greatest attention.
A 2018 article in the Journal of the American Foreign Service Association noted: "failure to prioritize top foreign policy objectives and plan strategically has led to ad hoc decision-making, ineffective allocation of human and financial resources.”Foreign assistance demands what could be called "operational strategic planning”- the ability to move from policy goals ("support democratic governance") to programmatic strategies (specific activities, budget allocations, implementing partners, performance metrics, risk mitigation approaches) to execution plans (procurement schedules, staffing assignments, monitoring protocols). The State Department's planning infrastructure operates primarily at the first level, with limited capacity for the detailed middle and execution layers.
Sector and Geographic planning
State's organizational structure centers on regional bureaus, reflecting its diplomatic mission. USAID maintained regional bureaus and functional technical bureaus that provided sector and technical expertise to the regions and country-level missions. Within these technical bureaus, USAID maintained specialized planning capacity across different technical sectors—health, education, agriculture, economic growth, democracy and governance, environment, humanitarian assistance. Each sector had technical experts who understood how to design effective interventions, knew evidence-based approaches, maintained relationships with research institutions, and could assess program feasibility. This structure enabled USAID to conduct planning at multiple levels: regional bureaus and missions developed country strategies tailored to local contexts, while functional bureaus contributed sector-specific technical guidance and ensured programs incorporated global best practices.
The State Department lacks equivalent sector planning depth and the multiple levels of planning that happened at USAID. Its planning staff focuses on cross-cutting diplomatic and security priorities rather than technical development sectors. A Foreign Service Officer rotating through economic affairs may understand trade policy but typically lacks expertise in designing value chain development programs or small holder agriculture interventions.
State must now replicate this matrix planning capacity without USAID's functional bureaus. Regional bureaus may develop country strategies reflecting diplomatic priorities but lack technical depth to ensure programs employ evidence-based approaches. Creating functional planning capacity while maintaining geographic focus requires organizational redesign and new coordination mechanisms.
Performance management and learning
Effective strategic planning cannot be divorced from performance measurement and learning. USAID developed systems forth is integration through establishing performance indicators during planning, collecting data throughout implementation, conducting evaluations, and feeding lessons back into strategy revision. This planning-implementation-learning cycle represents mature strategic management, although USAID’s approach was far from perfect and could have benefited from improvements.
State's performance management infrastructure, while adequate for diplomatic activities, operates differently. Diplomatic outcomes - strengthening bilateral relationships, building coalitions, negotiating agreements - often resist quantification and unfold over long timeframes. Development programming requires specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound objectives with regular data collection and analysis. These represent fundamentally different performance management philosophies. The Department must now build capacity for results-based planning, including defining clear development objectives, establishing indicator frameworks, setting targets, planning data collection methodologies, and designing evaluation strategies. This requires specialized staff (monitoring and evaluation specialists, data analysts, evaluation managers) that State traditionally hasn't employed in significant numbers.
Strategic planning depends on institutional knowledge: what has worked in specific countries, lessons from program evaluations, technical guidance from research, and understanding of implementing partner capabilities. USAID built extensive knowledge management systems preserving this institutional memory. State must rapidly develop equivalent systems: databases of past programs and results, libraries of evaluation reports, repositories of technical guidance, and communities of practice where planners share expertise. Without these knowledge infrastructure elements, strategic planning becomes reactive and disconnected from evidence.
Looking Ahead
The Trump administration has handed the State Department one of its largest increases in responsibility in modern memory. Secretary of State Rubio and other administration leaders have repeatedly said that foreign assistance is not going away, it is simply being better aligned with the administration’s foreign policy.
To be successful, the State Department will need to put forward a high-level vision for foreign assistance, similar to the previous Joint Strategic Plan, while simultaneously strengthening its strategic planning capabilities for foreign aid operations. This will require actually moving to implementation, setting targets, creating measurement indicators, designing projects, and the other hard work that USAID performed.
Addressing these strategic planning deficits requires the State Department to acknowledge that foreign assistance demands distinct planning competencies beyond a traditional diplomatic strategy. This will require that it hire the right people (and hire more people than currently envisioned), properly resource this function (including resource and knowledge management), and create the systems and processes that will allow the Department to move from planning to implementation at the regional and country level. The Department needs sector specialists, program designers, performance measurement experts, operational budget planners, and knowledge managers. Without this fundamental capacity building, strategic plans will remain aspirational documents disconnected from the operational realities of effective assistance delivery.
