Obama's Foreign Aid Mess

Right now, there’s a fairly widespread consensus on the need to beef up American development assistance. In 2007, according to a report by Jeffrey Sachs, Gayle Smith, and Leo Hindery, Jr., defense received 95 percent of national-security outlays, while development got just 3 percent. Even military men see this as a problem. Last March, Marine Corps General Anthony Zinni and Navy Admiral Leighton Smith, representing a group of over 50 retired officers, testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee asking for more support for development. “We must match our military might with a mature diplomatic and development effort worthy of the task ahead,’ they said, adding, “Our military mission has continued to expand as funding for the State Department and development agencies has been inadequate to the tasks they have been asked to perform.”

USAID, which was started during the Cold War, has been severely weakened since its founding. Last year, the former heads of USAID under Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush collaborated on an article about the agency for Foreign Affairs. In it, they assailed the way the agency has deteriorated in the last two decades. Among other things, they noted that USAID has suffered “from crippling staff cuts. In 1980, the agency had 4,058 permanent American employees. By 2008, the number had dropped to 2,200.” Nor is the problem just one of numbers. Once a fairly autonomous agency, USAID has been folded into the State Department. Like many observers, the former USAID administrators see this as a mistake, resulting in stifling new layers of bureaucracy. But, given all the overlapping crises in which the United States is embroiled, its unclear when reform will actually happen, and how much independent authority the new head of USAID will eventually have.

Meanwhile, American foreign aid has increasingly been militarized. As Frumin wrote in a report released by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in June, between 1999 and 2005, “the share of official development funds channeled through the Department of Defense increased from 3.5 percent to 21.7 percent.” The share funneled through USAID fell from 65 percent to less than 40 percent.

No one seems happy with this arrangement, but USAID has become so weak and demoralized that it’s hard to make the case for giving it more responsibility. “I honestly think I spent more time fighting the aid bureaucracy than any sort of battle with Afghans good or bad,” says Frumin. “It’s so much hassle to get through the aid bureaucracy. USAID’s first response is always no.” While the military can contract with local people and grassroots organizations, regulations force USAID to work through international NGOs. Those NGOs may well subcontract with the same people on the ground that the military would have hired, but the whole process is far more expensive and cumbersome.

“It’s a vicious cycle, because USAID doesn’t have human resources to do what it needs to do, it doesn’t have the instruments to do what it needs to do, and then it gets blamed for doing a bad job,” says Frumin.

Turning such an organization around is going to be a monumental task. Since Paul Farmer is a rock star in the world of foreign aid, the possibility of him taking over the beleaguered agency generated lots of excitement. Ultimately, though, as Farmer himself reportedly realized, he’s no bureaucrat and certainly no Washington infighter. He was put off by the labyrinthine vetting procedure he would have had to go through, but ultimately the job itself was a bad fit.

Still, the vetting process is such that even someone ideally suited to the position will likely have a hard time surviving it. And the prize is leadership of an agency in severe disrepair, one with an uncertain future but responsibly for an absolutely crucial piece of American foreign policy. The administration needs to find someone soon to fix USAID, but getting the right person will be hard as long as USAID is broken.

Michelle Goldberg is the author of The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power and the Future of the World and Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism. She is a senior correspondent for The American Prospect, and her work has appeared in The New Republic, The Nation, the Los Angeles Times, Glamour, and many other publications.