Global Development: Views from the Center

Sheila - Prompt reporting and all the right questions! Thanks.

My personal view? The foreign aid reform effort was ill-conceived and insufficiently ambitious to deal with the underlying problems. Ambassador Tobias was in an impossible position: named by the administration to be the coordinator of U.S. foreign assistance, and yet specifically not given authority over the administration's very own pet projects: the MCA and PEPFAR.
I have no idea why Ambassador Tobias resigned, but I would not be at all surprised if he came to see this job as impossible.
One can only hope that out of the ashes of this mess something better will arise. Let the debate on how to restore U.S. leadership on global poverty reduction (and much else) begin.

Ambassador Tobias in an impossible position?

Yup. Between "gals" he called in to his apartment to give him "massages".

Yet another hypocrite in the Bush administration bites the dust!

Definitely personal reasons. Washington Post, ABC, NBC and others are reporting Tobias resigned after admitting his name turned up as a patron of a D.C. escort service.

I guess his reasons were quite personal!

'On Friday, Randall L. Tobias resigned as deputy secretary of state one day after confirming to Brian Ross of ABC that he had patronized the Pamela Martin firm. Speaking yesterday on "Good Morning America," Ross said Tobias told him Tobias's number was on Palfrey's phone records because he had called "to have gals come over to the condo to give me a massage." There had been "no sex," Ross quoted Tobias as saying, and that recently he has used another service, "with Central American gals," for massages.'

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/28/AR2007042801192.html

Why is there no outrage at the politicization of US Foreign Assistance under President Bush and Tobias? Why are people not enraged, as you state above, about "the subordination of long-term development investments to short-term political purposes and a centralization of decisionmaking in State that has marginalized USAID to date"? This is the hypocrisy. This is where America's moral leadership has truly failed us. I'm more embarrassed that American commentators only prove how provincial we are as a nation when we only can view every political event through a simplistic, "moral majority" lense. In the worse HIV affected regions, this administration will only promotion abstinence, rather than birth control, which has undoubtedly resulted in lost lives & further spreading of this horrible disease. Yet, we only have shrill commentary about Tobias requesting an escort service. Sad.

I hope that the flurry of interest in the Tobias resignation is not over. It is indeed poetic justice that Randall Tobias be caught out engaging in behavior contradictory to his public platform and purported policies, but let’s focus for a moment on what happened to development assistance under his leadership and what is likely to happen after he is gone.

Here are a first few questions of my own (with of course a few comments of my own added on).

Was Tobias correct in the rapid change in development strategy that he created within USAID that put so much emphasis on PEPFAR and the MC while taking away from other assistance areas? Didn’t this change disregard the existing skills of the government funded employees and their systems used to implement the previous programs? For one thing, if this plan had been well thought out, I would have at least thought there would have been a planned evolution of skills within USAID to take out those no longer needed and bring in more of the different skills required (like monitoring/evaluation, computer skills, specific technical skills, etc.) to take on the new type of workload that comes with PEPFAR, the MC and their reporting requirements. Furthermore, was the analysis adequate to demonstrate whether or not this new somewhat narrow approach to development assistance by the USG was correct and inline with the assistance coming from other sources and the existing capacities with USAID and the receiving countries?

What about these government funded employees now? They have been breaking their backs for several years to keep up with all the “new ways of doing business” that we seem to have to go through every few years and now the whole thing will probably be changed again. People are already feeling an enormous amount of strain. The number of senior technical (particularly health, myself included) officers who have retired or quit over the past year is truly unfortunate. Many others who are at various stages in their careers within USAID are concerned for their health and mental stability resulting from all the stress and long hours. Who is going to take care of their wellbeing, so critical to the sound implementation of our efforts, if yet again the inevitable “new ways of doing business” are imposed? Is this a lose/lose situation for USAID and USG funded/supported development assistance as we know it?

Sorry a bit of a mouthful of questions and comments but hopefully food for thought.

I hope that the flurry of interest in the Tobias resignation is not over. It is indeed poetic justice that Randall Tobias be caught out engaging in behavior contradictory to his public platform and purported policies, but let’s focus for a moment on what happened to development assistance under his leadership and what is likely to happen after he is gone.