The Foreign Service Journal, January 2010

18 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / J A N U A R Y 2 0 1 0 and two ongoing studies of USAID’s mission and agenda. The timing of those studies, both launched last year, reinforced sus- picions that the delay in the ap- pointment of an administrator was a deliberate power play by State to win greater control of USAID. The State Department, at Clinton’s di- rection, launched a quadrennial review to set the depart- ment’s diplomatic and development goals moving forward. And in August, Pres. Obama signed a Presidential Study Directive authorizing a governmentwide review of U.S. global development policy. As Atwood points out, USAID’s administrator was supposed to co-chair the State Department review. “I think that no matter how it comes out, there may be questions raised because USAIDwasn’t represented at the political level” during the months be- fore Shah’s confirmation, he said. Still, the fact that Obama is taking a close look at the development mission is a good thing, says Gordon Adams, a professor of foreign policy at American University in Washington and a senior national security official in the Clinton administration. “I understand the frustration at not having an administrator. That said, the body English is right, the desire to make development a more substan- tial part of U.S. development seems like more than just lip service, and it’s clear the issue is being addressed seriously.” The Gordian Knot But despite the increases in funding and staff pledged by Obama, morale at USAID remains at a low ebb. Its staff is just over half the size it was 35 years ago, due to a steady “brain drain” that has left the agency scrambling for tech- nical experts and people to oversee them. To make do, agency officials have been forced to raid the development budget to hire contractors to manage the contractors in the field. As former USAID Administrators Atwood, Natsios and M. Peter McPherson pointed out in an article in For- eign Affairs (November/December 2008), the agency at the end of George W. Bush’s presidency employed just six engineers and 16 agricultural experts. In late 2008, the American Academy of Diplomacy and the Henry L. Stimson Center recommended an increase of 1,250 new USAID officers by 2013. Without the in- crease, the AAD/Stimson Center report said, USAID would not be able to function effectively, much less keep up with the growing demand for de- velopment assistance. Former American Foreign Serv- ice Association President J. Anthony Holmes has gone even further. Given the 75-percent decline in USAID staffing since the 1970s, the agency is “simply not able to do its job” and has “no surge capacity at all,” he wrote in Foreign Affairs (January/February 2009). Holmes believes that to pursue the type of nationbuilding activities now expected of it, USAID requires a 150-per- cent increase in its Foreign Service staffing. When Pres. Obama stressed his belief in the virtues of soft power during his inaugural address, retired State De- partment Foreign Service officer Ron Capps was one of many who applauded. Capps had seen the implications of USAID’s staffing crisis in the field. He had begun his 25- year government career in the Army, and his time working with State in Africa, Kosovo and Iraq only reinforced his respect for the military. Yet Capps — like many of his fel- low FSOs — is skeptical of the growing role the military is playing in development programs overseas, at the expense of civilian agencies. When he retired from the Foreign Service in 2008, Capps joined the humanitarian relief group Refugees In- ternational as its peacekeeping manager. On a trip to in- vestigate the extent of the shift in development dollars toward the Department of Defense, he stopped in Nema, a Saharan desert town more than 1,000 kilometers inland from Mauritania’s coastal capital, Nouakchott. DOD had funded the construction of a medical clinic there, so Capps was surprised to find that it was not being used. It turned out that Mauritania’s government was uninterested in pro- viding the materials and manpower to operate it. The problem, as Capps later detailed in a report for his new employer, was that the U.S. soldiers coordinating the project had turned to their counterparts in the Mauritan- ian military to secure a site on land controlled by the Min- istry of Defense. But they hadn’t brought the Ministry of Health into the loop, which might have been able to tell them that the site, in a military zone, would be very diffi- cult for average civilians to reach. Things might have gone better, Capps believes, if the Pentagon’s new Africa Command, which is overseeing such development efforts, had conferred with the USAID mission in Nouakchott before undertaking the project. C O V E R S T O R Y Despite the increases in funding and staff pledged by Obama, morale at USAID remains at a low ebb.