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Too Big to Succeed? Why (W)Hole-of-Government Cannot Work for U.S. Development Policy
October 5, 2010
This post originally appeared on the Huffington Post.
While talking beautifully about its development plans, the Administration is really not living up to its rhetoric of elevating development to equal status with diplomacy and defense, the so-called 3Ds. If development is really such an equal partner alongside defense and diplomacy, why is USAID increasingly a minor subcomponent of the State department? The promises of making USAID the “world’s premier development agency” are ringing embarrassingly hollow. How can an agency be influential when it doesn’t even control its own budget or set its own strategic priorities? Even in areas where USAID has traditionally been very strong—disaster relief and food security, for instance—the State Department has taken over. (The Feed-the-Future initiative is effectively directed by State and, despite early promises that USAID would lead on Haitian earthquake relief and reconstruction, it was recently leaked that a State coordinator is running the show.) And it should hardly be surprising that USAID is getting its lunch eaten in the interagency when it had no head for a year and, nearly two years in, still has less than half of its top managers on the job.
But what if the problems of the 3Ds aren’t really about the staff vacancies, the battle of Washington egos, and an empire-building State Department? What if the real problem is that the much-vaunted “whole-of-government” approach is fundamentally unworkable in the United States?
The idea behind whole-of-government seems sensible enough: lots of federal agencies have skills and resources and experience that can be brought to bear on complex problems. If we can get everyone in the same room and all in the same boat, then the USG effort can be greater than just lots of agencies all running around doing their own thing, right? This seems especially attractive in development policy, where the United States may be involved in helping foreign countries improve health, education, agriculture, transportation, democracy, security, financial regulation, and loads more. If we want to help entrepreneurs in Liberia, why not bring in USAID, the Treasury, the Commerce Department, the US Trade Representative, and the Small Business Administration? If we’re fighting HIV/AIDS in Uganda, let’s use the expertise of HHS, CDC, NIH, and the FDA, right? We’ve now got at least 26 agencies involved in foreign aid of one kind or another. But the room is starting to look a bit crowded now. (Brody, you’re gonna need a bigger boat.)
Let’s charitably assume that whole-of-government may work for the Swedes, Australians, and maybe even the British. They all use some kind of interagency apparatus to a tackle a range of issues, from fragile states to counter-terrorism to development. This is possible in some cases because the governments and budgets are small enough to be manageable. In the case of the UK, its Department for International Development is autonomous, well-staffed, has its own strategies and budget, and is led by a cabinet minister, so it can hold its own on Whitehall.
But in the United States—with its sprawling federal structure and huge agency staffs and budget—just getting everyone around one table is perhaps too much to ask. The interagency process in any country is a strain. (Managing those tensions is actually what policymaking is all about.) Yet the process can become convoluted and bogged down when the scale is out of whack. Simply put: when you have too many people at the table, nothing gets done.
During my short time in government (at State 2007-08) I lived through this regularly, but I think of one surreal experience often. A minor interagency decision over the trade program eligibility of Comoros (population 600,000, annual trade with the U.S. less than $3 million) became deadlocked over a minor issue by a minor agency. A seemingly trivial decision absorbed hours upon hours of staff time by dozens of government officials over many months, with the intransigence of one agency forcing the decision up the ladder until it finally reached the Secretary of State. It was a sad example of dysfunctional decision making, at root because the process (in this case, dictated by Congress) put far too many people with divergent interests in a position to block any resolution.
The current confusion and holdups in U.S. development policy are usually explained, like the gossip pages, as who is elbowing whom. But the problem is not just the difficult personalities in every administration. The dynamics of interagency negotiating make this kind of deadlock all too common. Intransigence is simply built into the system. Each staffer in the interagency is sent with the same clear instructions: push our agenda and protect our equities. Understandably, no one wants to go back to their boss to say “I caved, so we lost.” The result is frequent paralysis. These problems usually can get worked out informally, through backchannels, if enough of the players know each other and can find a quiet compromise or horse-trade. But that breaks down completely if there are two dozen or more people in the room and they are strangers. The size of the crowd alone can lead to stalemate.
The worrying thing is that under the current administration, this seems to be getting worse. Rather than limit the players around the table in order to get movement, Team Obama has embraced wholeheartedly broad interagency decision making. A friend who now works as a senior official for a large agency was recently needling me by proudly recounting how much better the current administration is than the last one which I worked for: “Unlike under Bush, we don’t just get three agencies to make a decision and then force everyone else to go along. We get all the agencies together to decide collectively.” “Sounds good, but doesn’t that make things impossible?” I asked. Without missing a beat: “Well, yes. I have been log jammed for over a year in the interagency on a key policy decision. We finally broke it by getting [3 federal agencies] together to finally decide.” Oh yeah, this sounds much better.
If the whole-of-government model is fundamentally impractical here, how can the interagency still be made to work in practice? It seems to me this can work when there are clear lines of authority and someone influential is empowered to break deadlocks when necessary. In most cases this can only come from the White House. In fact, when the President’s National Security Council (NSC) staff calls an interagency meeting and makes known what the President wants to happen, things can get done. Usually, it is only the White House can tell agencies to do something they don’t want to do. The problem of course is that the President can only focus on so many priority issues at once. And the relatively small NSC staff (roughly 150 people versus about 19,000 at the State Department) cannot possibly coordinate and knock heads on every issue.
So what to do? A first step is to abandon the naive idea that it’s best to have everyone in the room as often as possible. In fact, given the colossal nature of the U.S. federal government and accepting interagency turf wars as wholly rational, the opposite seems truer: have the minimum number of people in the room you need to make and implement a sensible decision. If the people or resources of other agencies are needed, then the NSC has to find a way to make it happen.
More importantly, drop the whole-of-government fetish and figure out a sensible structure with clear strategic, budget, and reporting lines of authority. If USAID is going to be absorbed into the State Department, then just do it and stop pretending it’s not happening. Then you can have a “super-State” work with NSC to direct the other agencies to fall into line. By definition, this means U.S. development policy will be to directly serve U.S. diplomatic and security interests. Thus we are back to a 2D world, and so be it.
Alternatively, if the administration truly believes in the 3Ds, it needs an agency that takes a long-term development perspective—and is able to hold its own in hand-to-hand interagency combat. At a minimum, this requires some kind of separate agency with its own budget and authorities. Such an agency should absorb most of the little development components, including the relevant staff and budgets, of the various agencies sprinkled across the executive branch. High-minded speeches and simply promising to invite USAID to occasional NSC meetings is not enough.
At some point, I suspect the folly of whole-of-government will be more obvious. What comes next however is far less so. In the meantime, the gaps between rhetoric and reality are only likely to grow wider.
Possibly Related Posts
- My Reflections on and Hopes for the New U.S. Global Development Policy
- Where Is Obama’s Trade Policy?
10 Responses to “Too Big to Succeed? Why (W)Hole-of-Government Cannot Work for U.S. Development Policy”
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October 5th, 2010 at 2:26 pm
Haven’t thought of it that way. Real cool post. I think one problem you may have had with DoS is not that there were too many people in the room, but that State folks don’t want to make a decision unless everyone has already agreed to it, so nothing ever gets done or it keeps getting passed up the chain to the very top.
That said, every politician who says development shouldn’t be tied or can be independent of our security and economic interests is kidding themselves and very likely posturing. Same thing with the “neutral” humanitarians who think they’re just delivering aid.
The question is what’s better for American interests … a separate USAID, or a USAID subsumed within State. For the most part, it is right now, and won’t be until USAID really is in the lead and doesn’t answer to F or the Secretary.
Best,
RJS
October 5th, 2010 at 2:30 pm
That last bit should have read:
“The question is what’s better for American interests … a separate USAID, or a USAID subsumed within State? For the most part, USAID is subsumed right now, and won’t be in the lead until it doesn’t answer to F or the Secretary.”
October 5th, 2010 at 2:55 pm
Very good post. It is a problem most countries struggle with, and in most countries it is development that gets slaughtered on the altar of coherence.
October 6th, 2010 at 1:18 am
Thank you, Todd, for “belling the cat”. Based on my experience in government (including USAID and Treasury), I decided years ago that the Whole of Government approach makes no sense in this day and age. I have also argued that an approach that puts “development” at the center of our foreign aid programs is paternalistic and backward-looking. The countries that will be critical to peace and stability in the decades ahead want to be partners, not charity cases. Virtually every USG government department and agency has international interests. They should be beefing up their international competence and effectiveness individually instead of being herded by some central “aid czar”. We don’t need to have the world’s premier aid AGENCY. We need to have the world’s smartest approach to global challenges from climate change to poverty and conflict. The critical gap I see is country knowledge. We no longer have engineers and doctors and agronomists and economists in our embassies/USAID missions who really understand their host countries and interact effectively with their counterparts. A smart, forward-looking approach would me much more country-centered than theme/fad centered, I submit.
October 6th, 2010 at 1:08 pm
I ended up leaving a longer comment over at Easterly’s Aid Watch as he was begging for comments, but I thought it only right to leave at least an abridged version here.
The point is well made that the whole-of-government approach is weakening development policy, but of the two solutions you propose, shifting to 2D defense and diplomacy-driven development would only weaken development policy even more. I have a hard time imagining our trade policies with Comoros rank very high on the list of our national security priorities.
As for the 3D solution, I question the idea that breaking the bureaucratic gridlock holding up development could be solved by… creating more bureaucracy. I like Weber as much as the next person, but I think fully staffing USAID and should be a first priority before talking about adding more and more staff.
So much for a shorter version.
October 13th, 2010 at 10:24 am
Modelling after the British development model may not be the case now as the new coalition (Tory) government has placed DFID in a USAID style post–making aid part of national security and not solely about development.
October 13th, 2010 at 10:43 am
You hit the nail right on the head! It describes to a tea my experience at State in the early days of PEPFAR. The whole of government approach is paralyzing; it creates an extremely inefficient environment where everyone is scared to make decisions for fear of how the agencies will react. It is not just dysfunctional but also wastes limited resources that could be better spent on the ground.
October 13th, 2010 at 3:57 pm
My own experience with the w(hole) of government interagency process is that it (1) chews up an inordinate amount of time and energy, and (2) ends up not really resolving anything at all. Each agency usually walks away with a piece of what it was after, the size of the piece generally depending on the amount of skin in the game. It’s decision-making by advocacy, not evidence and reasoned argument. And Congress is as much a culprit as the executive. What committee wants to cede authority and budget to another?
October 14th, 2010 at 7:27 am
My mom knew what to do when three kids in the back seat got into hand-to-hand combat. Each was made to sit in his/her place and not invade the space of the other two.
October 19th, 2010 at 1:49 pm
For complex international engagements, whole of government is necessary, and not just among the 3Ds. While the posting under discussion poses an interesting argument, the rationale for disposing of “whole of government” seems to be that it is simply “too hard.” Indeed it may be true that current bureaucratic structures are broken, but in certain cases the whole of government concept is the only appropriate system. For example, to abandon the vast array of talent spread across the federal government, in the face of bureaucratic hurdles, would hinder the mission of the Civilian Response Corps (CRC).
Specifically when discussing Reconstruction and Stabilization (R&S) and the CRC, the posting contains the misconception that other agencies are at the table to push their agendas. When it comes to R&S and the CRC, many of the domestic agencies do not have a separate agenda. The R&S work of the CRC is often not within the mandate of these domestic agencies, and these agencies would not conduct similar operations without the CRC as the facilitator. In contrast, the domestic agencies are willing to deploy their technical experts on reimbursable details, to perform duties outside of their mandate. The real issue here is to have an understanding of the requirements on the ground and how the CRC can address these requirements. In essence, State and USAID have to fix “themselves.” Deploying technical experts from non-foreign affairs agencies into dysfunctional embassies will not work under any circumstances.
A second misconception is that the State Department and NSC understand the breadth of the U.S. Government’s available resources. It is fine to say “if the people or resources of other agencies are needed, then the NSC has to find a way to make it happen,” but in reality the embassies, NSC, and State do not accurately understand the vast resources the domestic agencies have available. The representatives from these agencies sit at the table to ensure the State Department and the rest of the decision makers understand the available resources and legal considerations involved, not to push hidden agendas.
Tapping into a functionally aligned pool of federal government employees with technical skill sets is compelling and of value. This pool of technical experts already exists within the U.S. Government’s domestic departments and agencies, or the “4th D.” Without the 4th D, the USG will only create redundant capabilities in State or USAID or hire contractors. While State and USAID would have greater control over redundant capabilities in this scenario, this system would not have a force with functionally aligned government to government capacity building, or reach-back support to a functionally aligned team of experts.