The Foreign Service Journal, January-February 2017

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2017 29 Steps to Improve Foreign Assistance Here are eight recom- mendations for the next administration on how to improve foreign assistance: 1. Select the leader- ship of USAID carefully. The USAID Administrator and his or her top subor- dinates have extremely difficult jobs. The next administration should insist on hiring only top-flight political appointees to staff senior positions at USAID, men and women with the same résumés they consider for the top positions at State and the Defense Department. In particular, there is a special need at USAID to appoint individuals to senior positions who understand how to work with Congress. Equally important, the political leadership must have both an understanding and a willingness to represent the development-foreign policy linkages. Things do not go well in the agency when its leaders view themselves only as technicians. 2. Keep rebuild- ing USAID’s capacities. Although the staffing increases sought at the end of the Bush administration and throughout the Obama administration have increased USAID’s capacities, the agency still needs more employees in the field and in Washington designing effective programs, contracting, and handling grants, inspections, evaluations and other inherently governmental functions. Due to person- nel shortages, too many of these duties have been ceded to contractors, resulting in some embarrassing failures. In addi- tion to hiring more staff, training needs to be increased, and the limits on using program monies for operating expenses should be abolished by Congress. Foreign Service officers at both State and USAID still only receive a fraction of the profes- sional training that their military counterparts receive. And a necessary functional skill that all USAID officers must have is technical oversight, which requires training, experience and mentoring. Increased training needs to be geared to produce 21st-century foreign aid officers who, for example, better understand how to meld governmental and private-sector resources for optimal impact. 3. Begin consolidating functions. With few excep- tions, the next administra- tion should migrate all assistance programs back to USAID for implementation. This will take some time to accomplish, but the benefits of having all health, democracy, rule of law, economic growth, environmental and other programs in one place will result in economies of scale for back-office functions such as procurement and contracting—which are often lack- Our best global friends and partners are countries that have received U.S. assistance since 1945. USAID provided materials for temporary shelters for many of the more than one million Haitians left homeless following the 2010 earthquake. COURTESYOFTHOMASC.ADAMS