The Foreign Service Journal, September 2008

skills and experience of headquarters staff for a broader assessment of ben- eficiary needs that USAID field mis- sions and embassy staff could provide; • Absence of consultation with key stakeholders in the budget and plan- ning process, including congressional authorizing and appropriations com- mittees and other executive branch agencies (most notably Defense); • Dependence on a strategic plan- ning framework focused on linking foreign assistance to U.S. strategic pri- orities, but not to the development priorities of key stakeholders; and • Failure to account for other for- eign assistance funding streams, out- side of those controlled by USAID and the State Department. In its defense, the Office of the Director of Foreign Assistance (the F Bureau) was assigned an ambitious task: achievement of strategic coher- ence in its allocation of resources without expending the political capital necessary to strike up a conversation, much less undertake the grand bar- gain with key stakeholders required for comprehensive reform. Faced with the thankless task of achieving reform on the cheap, instilling coher- ence without engaging in full consul- tations with the legislative branch, civil society groups, or other agencies (particularly the Department of De- fense) engaged in foreign assistance, the F Bureau concentrated on what was achievable within its pre-existing legislative authorities. It did not expect the resulting firestorm of criti- cism from private voluntary organiza- tions, Congress and, most surprisingly, career staff at the State Depart- ment and USAID. The administration’s folly lay in overreaching its limited mission with claims and promises of sweeping reform. The most specific manifesta- tion of this lies in the attempt to squeeze the totality of its foreign assis- tance programs into a strategic frame- work straitjacket, in which all pro- grams were to be mapped into one of five strategic objectives. The tool for tracking this process would be a series of templates initially utilized for the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. This planning vehicle may have made sense in the supply-chain world of tracking inputs and outputs in the delivery of anti-retroviral drugs. But the attempt to apply it to a mash-up of programs that run the gamut from health and education to countertraf- ficking and counterinsurgency opera- tions requires a real leap of faith. Setting Priorities At issue is not simply a competition for resources or concerns that devel- opment assistance might be shifted to S E P T E M B E R 2 0 0 8 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 53