There should not be a seat on the NSC. Development is development not foreign policy, not strategic concerns!!

I never agreed with almost anything the late Senator Jesse Helms from North Carolina ever said, but on U.S. AID I think he was correct. The agency should be abolished. It is hopelessly disfunctional. Any attempt to reform it will be undermined by its current crew of bureaucrats and the “Inside the Beltway” bandits who feed off the status quo. U.S. development assistance certainly needs a complete overhaul, but I think we really need to start with a clean slate if it is to be effective.

A reformed and strengthened USAID is very much needed and the Administrator should have a place at the NSC table because development is a core strategic interest. However, reformation of the agency will not bring new or better results without a commitment from this Administration and Congress to create a policy framework that better defines US development objectives and decreases the impulse of Presidents and Members of Congress to create one-off, single issue initiatives and programs/offices that then take on bureaucratic lives of their own. A policy framework that is guided by evidence of greatest need in health, education, etc., in addition to other strategic US interests would be refreshing. Couple that with a commitment to build local capacity in the places of greatest need and USAID could perform successfully.

Emphasis given to INDEPENDENT tracking, monitoring and evaluating USG foreign aid assistance deserve strong support. The urgent need to improve knowledge management by our organizations must also come to the forefront. Mistakes will be made, but at least let’s be creative by making fresh ones, and not repeating what has not worked in the past. Academicians should be welcomed to research more effective tracking, monitoring and evaluation tools, specially to find solutions that shorten timelines and neutralize exogenous changes. ..Practitioners, however, must run operations in order to ensure that findings inform decision making, and are not relegated to journal articles. Do establish
eferee boards, where project evaluations and design as well as strategies, could be analyzed by the best experienced minds in the respective themes. . So called impact evaluations should form an integral part of any development rethinking as well as the mechanisms to ensure they inform decisions. Why? To gain a more efficient use of resources? That is good. But why? Those evaluations should be the steering wheel guiding our programs to a clear end game: the abolition of US foreign assistance, because it is no longer needed.

Should we hope, that as part of the reform, a more pragmatic framework is followed by Congress in their relationship with the USG development programs and strategies? There is a tragicomic inflation of results promised in exchange for meager funding. Don Perignon taste is good, but do not expect the bubbly on a Dr. Pepper budget. Please, all the friends advocating reform of our foreign assistance apparatus should agree on one common theme: development takes time. As I was told in Mozambique, we have the clock, they have the time. Cultures move at different speeds. A New York minute has significantly less time content than a Congo minute. One of the most onerous jobs in managing foreign assistance is to act as a clutch: bring those two “speeds” into harmony.

Any revamping must seek increased flexibility to the straightjacket forced on our foreign assistance community by the FAR (Federal Acquisition and Regulations) and the ADS, governing USAID and MCC procurement and assistance vehicles. More flexible and really accountable instruments must be found beyond the project management unit. Reality cannot be sliced into projects; when these artificial constructs end, what are the enduring results? Who is accountable for results after end of project. ? The all important replication of success and avoidance of repeated failure is extended….how? Experiment with national or regional open architecture funds, which could be financed from several sources, have a longer time line, and can be made more accountable for verifiable results

More responsibility and authority should be given to management, primarily Mission Directors and Country Representatives. Personnel management should be revamped, with more tailored performance benchmarks and increased “life of service” training. Foreign Service appointments should not be granted as life long engagements, but as an opportunity to learn, serve, and as a wise step in proper career progression—in an increasingly global economy, that experience is worth its weight in gold. The Peace Corps observes a five year limit, perhaps a similar limit should also be set to foreign service careers in development assistance? On the flip side, capitalize on the human capital existing on
etirees who are often willing to serve our foreign assistance interests on a pro-bono capacity. Those retirees may be part of the solutions to an inescapable need: provide better mentoring to the young blood entering the dicey foreign assistance field.

The USG must strike a more prudent balance between officers and contractors; mechanisms should be put in place to protect our officers when they make a call on poor contract performance. Alas, problem finders are abhorred by the personnel evaluation system (and their senior managers–bring me solutions, so goes the mantra).Again, officers should have well defined boundaries in their responsibilities. How good is the investment of taxpayer money if when a carefully selected team of specialists present findings and recommendations, and an inexperienced CTO (the horrific title given to USAID line officers these days) unilaterally decides that such advise should be ignored? Enter a technical referee board? Programs in the field should be guided by capable Mission Directors, and not by second guessing from Washington and special, often well intentioned, interest groups. Yet, these MDs should be accountable for development achieved, not for fast disbursement. The fast flow of funds in Iraq and Afghanistan worries many of us, old salts.

A premium must be placed on innovations, and finding new approaches and new partners in the development arena. Will doing more of the same with the same cast of characters result in more of the same? By freeing them from their paper chase, officers should be allowed to really oversee design and implementation,. Could the paper chase be outsourced to rural centers in our heartland? Our agencies should be at the forefront of ICT applications, and not lag at the tail end.

The whole of government approach to development and diplomacy must be strongly encouraged. But, let’s be aware of the existing tension between each organization’s primary mandate and their development responsibility. (e.g. USDA, an organization which has always contributed greatly to development, must answer primarily to its agricultural and powerful agribusiness constituency). Farmers tend to have very short term interests (who is buying my crop by how much; they have short term payments to make) and the very large markets being developed for their products in emerging economies may not be that convincing in terms of their rushing cash flows.

Others may not have a good fit in development at all. The Pentagon primary mandate is to kill our enemies, not to deal with starving children. Leave that to the professionals in those fields (paraphrasing the old joke: Is military development to development what hip hop is to Mozart?).

As President Obama and Sect. Clinton just noted during their recent trips to Ghana and Kenya: shared responsibilities, shared opportunities. The MCC philosophy comes to the fore: those countries moving forward should find us at their side. If the countries do not have the minimum will to develop, do not invest our development funds there—call those funds something else, not foreign assistance.. Country ownership must guide levels of effort and our investment in their development. Local organizations, like those engaged in national agricultural research (NAR) should be reinforce as a first wave, external solutions should be considered only after local and regional options have failed to meet requirements. And then the programs should work towards a concrete goal: build up the national capacity to solve their own problems, in the concert of nations (no nation is self sufficient in knowledge generation).

Impossible as it may appear now, label funds appropriately. Aid to Nigeria is to protect our oil interests there, not to pursue development. This country has enough wealth to buy out our whole foreign assistance program.

As a retired foreign service officer I can assure everyone that, beyond byzantine discussions, in the field, US foreign assistance is a powerful arrow in our foreign policy quiver. Our diplomacy solves our problems in the short run, our development assistance ensures that our influence and power will even be greater tomorrow. Yes, reducing child malnutrition, bringing potable water to a village, saving that woman from oppressive abuse, seeing the shining eyes of students when they first touch a computer, opening up markets for those poor farmers, enabling the small and medium enterprises to grow and prosper, fostering the creation of productive jobs, and building up the capacity of our host governments to provide ever improving services to their people, to expand its revenue base, and to attract investments—all those achievements point in one direction: A more powerful and greater America in a more peaceful, prosperous, healthier planet.

Foreign policy does reflect our national values. And Americans are among the most generous people in the world, they care about the poor, the vulnerable and the children trapped in hopeless cages of degrading poverty. That caring forms part of our national values; those values shape foreign policy. State, USAID, MCC, USDA, and others could be well qualified to address those intrinsic elements of our foreign policy–each one on its specialization, all working together to achieve our national objectives (yes, hope springs eternal–even the hope that entrenched bureaucracies could one day work together). Let’s improve what should perform better, and avoid the pitfalls of unending restructuring: the poor in the global village deserve better, our country deserves better.

Felipe