94 NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 2026 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL A short digression: Natsios thanks his daughter-in-law, Nicole, for pushing him to defend USAID in early 2025. I want to thank her too, on behalf of the Foreign Service officers whom I represent at AFSA, for spurring him to say publicly what we knew but could not say ourselves at a time when we felt very isolated. Development, Natsios insists, is an essential tool of statecraft, not charity, and it has been transformational, abroad and at home. But it has also been in constant conflict with other U.S. government agencies, hampered by a counter-bureaucracy—the oversight offices that respond to institutions based in Washington, D.C.—and by a Congress and White House that prefer “rapid, visible, and quantifiable” results. That preference explains why USAID moved away from long-term investments (e.g., research, scholarships) and toward the noble but more short-term work of health and humanitarian assistance. What little funding remained for long-term investments was increasingly directed by Congress through earmarks, which claimed nearly all of USAID’s funding before it ever reached the field. In Senegal, I managed a $120 million budget in 2024. I had $1 million in discretionary funds. That was unusual because the normal amount was zero. In Natsios’ telling, this is the underlying crisis in modern development: The client shifted from the communities and governments where USAID worked to Washington itself. To illustrate, he recounts asking a former USAID officer how much of their time went to responding to the counter-bureaucracy. Tallied up, the answer was all of it. His sharpest chapter takes on the clash between development and diplomacy, and it speaks most directly to the practitioners now folded into the State Department. Natsios lays out the pitfalls of that merger in detail, buttressed by the experience of the British and Australian aid agencies that were absorbed into their own foreign ministries, much to the detriment of their effectiveness. The diagnosis is aimed at the policymakers in Congress who never got a say as much as the staff living with it. The successes he identifies are real, and they are slow. Natsios points to the Green Revolution, where Norman Borlaug’s work fed hundreds of millions and paid dividends to American farmers as well as foreign ones. Disease-resistant sorghum, developed by an Ethiopian scientist who received a USAID scholarship, fed herds abroad and American cattle alike. The Asian tigers took decades of patient investment before they became the trading partners and allies they are today. None of these would have survived a quarterly review. His prescription follows from the diagnosis. Natsios wants a cabinet-level department, because a department can defend its prerogatives against other agencies and branches. A subordinate agency absorbs whatever they choose to hand it. He recommends devolving real BOOKS A Self-Inflicted Act of American Vandalism Guns Are Not Enough: Foreign Aid in the National Interest Andrew S. Natsios, Bloomsbury Academic, 2026, $36.00/hardcover, e-book available, 480 pages. Reviewed by Austan Mogharabi “Within five years we will either recreate USAID … or we will cease to be a great power.” Andrew Natsios included that line in his testimony to the House Foreign Affairs Committee on February 13, 2025. His new book, Guns Are Not Enough, makes the case. The book covers every major school of development theory. Natsios—former USAID Administrator and now a professor at the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M—divides the book into three parts: a history of USAID’s rise and fall, an account of how foreign aid collides with the rest of the government, and a proposal for a new, cabinet-level department dedicated to foreign aid. It is a serious academic book, but Natsios uses stories and anecdotes to keep the theory grounded and moving, making the material genuinely accessible. Along the way, he coins a term (adding to Washington’s love affair with acronyms): Obsessive Measurement Disorder (OMD), the tendency of the “counterbureaucracy” and of policymakers to prize what can be counted over what actually matters. The technical expertise that was the heart and soul of USAID has not disappeared— it was dismissed.
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