The Foreign Service Journal, January 2010

J A N U A R Y 2 0 1 0 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 23 erage was $57 million per manager. Nor did the new project funding end the debate over USAID’s role vis-a-vis State. “There is a continuum of views, with some on one end saying it should be a Cabinet- level agency, and the other side saying we should be folded entirely into State,” says AFSA’s Zamora. “The foreign aid community and, I believe, Congress would prefer we were more autonomous.” State vs. USAID That has not been the trend, however. In 2006, in an effort to unify foreign assistance programs at the State De- partment and USAID, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice consolidated policy, planning and budget authority for development programs at State. An April 2009 Gov- ernment Accountability Office report found that while the consolidation had given State a better understanding of USAID’s work, it hadn’t always worked out well for the agency’s staff. USAID officials inWashington and the field told the GAO investigators that State dragged its feet on developing country assistance strategies, leaving some country plans out of date and creating a great deal of pa- perwork for the agency’s already overworked staff. A USAID official in Jordan said that State had “repeat- edly changed its guidance over a short period of time” and that “at times the updated guidance contradicted, instead of built on, previous guidance.” In Ethiopia, USAID staff complained that relying on State to issue a long-term coun- try strategy had undermined longstanding protocols by which USAID and Ethiopian officials had previously un- dertaken projects. And in Ukraine, USAID officials described how their efforts to respond to parliamentary elections had been un- dermined by State’s bureaucracy. After requesting some advance funds to set up programs to support the elections, USAID staff were told that approval would require 10 sig- natures. The six-week delay that followed crippled the mission’s ability to implement its pre-election programs. Natsios, who departed USAID in advance of the 2006 changes, contends that, in some ways, the restructuring C O V E R S T O R Y