USAID Finally Gets a Chief
Journalist: David Gauvey Herbert
Original Post: USAID Finally Gets a Chief
Type: Journal Article
November 13, 2009 — President Obama ended a 10-month leadership vacuum at the nation’s leading foreign-assistance program on Tuesday when he tapped Rajiv Shah, a 36-year-old wunderkind, to lead the U.S. Agency for International Development.
The White House’s delay had drawn intense fire from the development community, given the president’s early commitment to double aid to $50 billion a year by 2012, halve global poverty by 2015, and make international development a centerpiece of his foreign policy. USAID’s supporters are relieved that the White House finally named an administrator, but they say that the agency still needs a firm mandate to retake the reins of foreign-aid policy after two decades of declining influence.
Initial reactions to Shah’s nomination have been cautiously optimistic. His youth and résumé—he is undersecretary of Agriculture for research, education, and economics; and a former director of agricultural development at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation—are pluses, said Sheila Herrling, director of the Rethinking U.S. Foreign Assistance program at the nonprofit Center for Global Development. “All that you read about him in terms of being a hotshot whiz kid is right on,” said Herrling, who worked with Shah when he was at the Gates Foundation. “He’s a really smart guy.”
The Detroit-born Shah, whose family emigrated to the United States from India, is a medical doctor. He managed the Gates Foundation’s $1.5 billion vaccine fund and now leads Agriculture’s work on the administration’s food-security initiative. He also has some political chops, having campaigned for Obama and served as a health care policy adviser for Al Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign.
Shah navigated the administration’s vetting process when he was appointed to Agriculture, a factor that may have boosted his USAID nomination. The White House had hoped to nominate Paul Farmer, the Harvard professor and celebrated public health crusader, for the job this summer, but he withdrew his name in August. In July, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton blamed the administration’s vetting gantlet for the delay, calling it a “nightmare,” “ridiculous,” and “frustrating beyond words.” Shah breezed through his nomination and confirmation in the spring and is expected to face no obstacles this time.
Still, many in the development community worry that his lack of bureaucratic experience may be a liability, particularly given the belated appointment. Moreover, Shah arrives amid a brewing turf war between the State Department and USAID.
Some of the agency’s staff, budget, and policy functions have been rolled into the State Department in recent years, diluting USAID’s voice in guiding policy and beefing up State’s role. Foggy Bottom’s star had previously dimmed somewhat, and wielding billions of dollars of aid money has helped it regain some influence, said Patrick Cronin, who was assistant administrator for policy and program coordination at USAID from 2001 to 2003.
Clinton has stressed that American national security is composed of three “d’s”: defense, diplomacy, and development. But she has also made it clear that she believes State ought to control the last two. The secretary seemed to reinforce that sentiment in a statement on Shah’s nomination this week, saying she looks “forward to working closely with him to advance the president’s agenda and to elevate and integrate development in our foreign policy.”
USAID needs more autonomy, Cronin said, but added, “I don’t blame Hillary Clinton for one second for wanting to retain this relationship. If you’re the secretary of State, you’re asking, ‘What exactly are my authorities?’”
Not everyone shares Clinton’s vision. Some advocates want USAID elevated to an independent, Cabinet-level department—but failing that, they’ll settle for giving the agency more authority over the budget and more policy planning responsibilities. “If you have an administrator of USAID who doesn’t have control of his own budget, the person has no credibility,” argued J. Brian Atwood, who held the job from 1993 to 1999.
Sens. John Kerry, D-Mass., and Richard Lugar, R-Ind., seem to agree. They have introduced legislation that would liberate USAID from the State Department’s sway by rebuilding the agency’s policy and strategic planning capabilities.
Dueling administration studies are also competing to map USAID’s future. A presidential study directive, conducted by the National Security Council and due in January, is expected to suggest bigger development role for the aid agency. The State Department’s quadrennial review of diplomacy and development, also slated for next year, will likely suggest expanding development’s role, but within the confines of the present State-USAID union.
Shah is entering late in that game, Cronin said. “Those reviews are well under way, and he’s going to walk into a huge bureaucratic fight. I think he’s going to have a bruising time in the next year just figuring out what he can control and what he can’t control.”
Shah’s relationship with the State Department, at least for now, appears solid. He reportedly helped write a speech on food security for Clinton in September. He also has a connection to Deputy Secretary of State Jack Lew. Shah’s boss at the Gates Foundation, Sylvia Matthews, was Lew’s deputy at the Office of Management and Budget under President Clinton. (Aid advocates fear that a possible reorganization of USAID might have the agency’s administrator report to Lew instead of directly to Hillary Clinton, further marginalizing its voice.)
The State Department has coveted USAID and the influence it wields for years. The aid agency redesigned its logo in 2005—two clasped hands and the tagline “From the American People.” The design effectively branded the agency’s programs and contributed to the doubling of the U.S.’s approval ratings in Indonesia after tsunami relief efforts.
In fact, the clasped hands symbol was so effective at raising USAID’s profile in the developing world that officials at the State Department and in the PEPFAR program— the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief——tried to nix it. On at least three occasions, State and PEPFAR officials lobbied to replace the USAID logo with their respective agency seals or another design. USAID successfully fought their efforts, but the episode showed that the agency’s newfound visibility threatened some in Foggy Bottom.
“They weren’t trying to hijack it,” Andrew Natisos, who served as the agency’s administrator from 2001 to 2006, said, referring to the logo. “They were trying to kill it.”
Still, totally delinking development and diplomacy is unrealistic, contends Gordon Adams, a foreign-policy professor at American University. During USAID’s supposed heyday in the 1960s, the agency was operating myriad programs in Vietnam as part of America’s war effort, he noted. “We have kind of a mythology about USAID that it is and should be disconnected from U.S. foreign policy,” he said.
Foggy Bottom’s grip on the agency isn’t USAID supporters’ only concern. The Foreign Assistance Act, which birthed the aid agency in 1961, is badly outdated, and congressional efforts to rewrite it have repeatedly failed. The agency consequently suffers from a decades-long buildup of sometimes-conflicting priorities and missions.
USAID can’t, for example, train police overseas today because Congress in the 1970s imposed a ban on the practice after it came out that agency advisers had taught Latin American officers harsh interrogation methods, which were later used on Latin American peoples. That ban has undermined attempts to build muscular development policies in Nigeria and Indonesia, and caused headaches in coordinating similar efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
On another front, Cronin supports Congress’s efforts to direct foreign aid toward “child survival” efforts and programs to combat HIV/AIDS, but he argued that those programs have been funded at the expense of economic development. PEPFAR, begun under President George W. Bush, has become as untouchable as entitlement programs such as Medicare and Social Security, he said, because cutting costs would essentially consign thousands of HIV/AIDS patients to death, something no lawmaker is likely to propose.
“We’ve overinvested in certain areas because of earmarks and mandates,” Cronin said. “Those earmarks and mandates become rigidities around which development professionals need to work in the field.”
Meanwhile, the agency’s staff has dwindled from 17,000 in the late 1960s to about 2,300 full-time employees today, according to Harry Edwards, a USAID spokesman. Foreign-aid dollars have increased in recent years, but much of that growth has funded issue-oriented subagencies such as PEPFAR and the Millennium Challenge Corp., which the Bush White House and successive Congresses found easier to create than to address fundamental USAID reform. The resulting constellation of assistance initiatives, spread across at least 24 agencies and 50 programs, lack coordination, former officials said.
“I think the question is, ‘What would you not reform?’ ” Herrling said. “It’s almost like starting from scratch.”
Related:Topic(s): Development and Diplomacy
People: Dr. Patrick Cronin
