The Foreign Service Journal, November 2021

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | NOVEMBER 2021 27 Here is an anniversary review of the agency's founding and evolution, as well as its shortcomings and accomplishments. BY JOHN NORR I S John Norris is the author of The Enduring Struggle: The History of the U.S. Agency for International Development and America’s Uneasy Transformation of the World (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021). He served at both USAID and the State Department during the 1990s, working as a speechwriter and field disaster expert at USAID and as director of communication for Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott while at the State Department. A s the U.S. Agency for International Development, USAID, marks its 60th anniversary this month, the moment is ripe to reflect on both its accomplishments and short- comings. Working in well more than 100 countries during this period, both sides of the ledger are striking. USAID and its many partners in development have helped achieve what by any reasonable accounting must be considered unprecedented advances in the COVER STORY AnEnduringPurpose,aComplexLegacy human condition since the agency’s founding. Smallpox—in an unusual collaboration between USAID, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the World Health Organization and the Soviet Union—was eradicated after an innovative vaccination campaign. This was the first time a disease had ever been eradi- cated on a global basis; that fact was made still more impressive given that smallpox killed more than 300 million people world- wide in the 20th century alone. USAID spearheaded child survival campaigns with its partners, saving millions of lives with a simple intervention of oral rehydration therapy that costs only pennies per packet to produce. The Green Revolution, championed by the Johnson administration and advanced through research funded by the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, staved off what many feared would be an era of global famine while boosting incomes for poor farmers. Countries such as Taiwan and South Korea, once dismissed as economic backwaters, were transformed into economic powerhouses (and, ultimately, donors themselves), in no small part because of large U.S. investments through USAID, particularly in building the technocratic expertise within their planning and finance ministries.