Obama's Foreign Aid Mess

Haraz N. Ghanbari / AP Photo President Obama promised to double foreign aid, but USAID is languishing without a leader in part due to his administration’s unreasonable vetting process. Michelle Goldberg asks if Obama can still fulfill his pledge.

The saintly, visionary public-health physician Paul Farmer is going to work for a Clinton—just not the one everyone expected. Until last week, Farmer was rumored to be Hillary Clinton’s choice to head USAID, the foreign-aid agency that has languished without a leader for almost seven months. Then he bowed out, and Wednesday came news that he’s going to be the U.N. Deputy Special Envoy to Haiti under Bill Clinton. It’s probably a much better position for him—Farmer isn’t a bureaucrat, and Haiti, where he founded the pioneering Zanmi Lasante hospital, is by all accounts where his heart is. But it raises a question that’s being asked with increasing urgency within development circles—why can’t the Obama administration fill the void at the top of USAID?

Candidates have to detail every foreign citizen they know, a daunting task for anyone with real global experience.

Foreign aid, after all, is a crucial part of the Obama administration’s ambitions for the globe. During the campaign, Barack Obama promised to double aid, and his entire approach to the world is based on emphasizing diplomacy and development in addition to military defense. As secretary of State, Hillary Clinton also pledged to make aid a priority. Speaking to USAID employees on her second day on the job, she said, “I wanted to come here today with a very simple message: I believe in development, and I believe with all my heart that it truly is an equal partner, along with defense and diplomacy, in the furtherance of America’s national security.” In Africa last week, she promoted aid for agricultural development as a “signature element” of the administration’s foreign policy.

Yet without leadership at USAID, not much progress can be made, and with Farmer out, it’s unclear who else is in the running. Among people who work on aid issues, impatience is giving way to disappointment and anger. “There was so much talk about how military might alone will not get us out of some of these armed conflicts that we’re involved in, and that we need to focus on civilian capacities. There was a lot of lip service to that,” says Amy Frumin, who served as USAID’s field officer in Afghanistan until two years ago. “By virtue of the fact that we haven’t appointed a new administrator, it seems we’re not taking action on that front.”

Even Hillary Clinton, who as secretary of State has always swallowed whatever disagreements she might have with the White House, spoke out last month. "The clearance and vetting process is a nightmare and it takes far longer than any of us would want to see," she told a meeting of USAID employees. “It is frustrating beyond words. I pushed very hard last week when I knew I was coming here to get permission from the White House to be able to tell you that help is on the way and someone will be nominated shortly…The message came back: 'We're not ready.'"

It’s possible to view the vacuum at USAID as symptomatic of tension between Clinton and Obama. Many people in the aid world speculate about the same list of possible candidates, some of them obviously Clinton people, others clearly associated with Obama. One name that often comes up is Wendy Sherman, who worked in Bill Clinton’s State Department and is now at the Albright Group, a firm founded by Madeleine Albright. Another is Gayle Smith, a former senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, and one of two leaders of the administration’s foreign-assistance transition team.

But the real problem in finding a leader for USAID goes deeper than mere rivalry.

The USAID that Obama inherited, almost everyone agrees, is a mess. It’s desperately in need of restructuring, and there are a number of plans in the works to do just that. But that means whomever is offered the job can’t quite know what they’re going to be leading.

Meanwhile, the vetting process for government officials has become preposterous. Among other things, candidates for the USAID post have to detail everywhere they’ve lived in their adult lives, and every foreign citizen they know—a particularly daunting prospect for people with lots of global experience. It’s as if it were designed to weed out anyone who hasn’t lived their entire life with a federal appointment in mind. It all adds up to a kind of case study of Washington dysfunction.