The Foreign Service Journal, November 2021

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | NOVEMBER 2021 31 economic dimensions were presented to Congress separately. To secure support on the Hill, Treasury Secretary C. Douglas Dillon informed Congress that 80 percent of economic aid would be spent on American goods and ser- vices. Eighty-three members of the House protested the proposal that the agency would get multiyear appropriations. WilliamGaud, who ran one of USAID’s regional bureaus at the time, saw it as a grievous setback. “An aid program should be a long-term proposition if it is to achieve its ends,” he argued, but instead, “we spend the whole bloody year fighting before the Congress.” President Kennedy was deeply irritated with the loss of long- term authority. As David Bell explained: “He saw that attitude as limiting the office of the president and the powers of the presi- dent in dealing with a turbulent, complicated, dynamic world.” The Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 was signed by President Kennedy on Labor Day, and Congress required the merger of the preexisting assistance agencies into the new agency within 60 days. Among the debates during the creation of USAID that have continued to play out over the years, none has been more frequent or fraught than that over the agency’s relationship with the State Department. For most of the agency’s existence, State and USAID have sorted out mutual accommodations. From the beginning, however, the State Department disliked the agency’s independence. It continues to fight peri- odic rearguard efforts to have USAID folded into State. “The aid program is too intimately involved in our foreign relations to allow for the fiction that it is a technical operation which State can delegate to an operating agency,” wrote a State Department official in 1962. Periodically, those efforts to assume greater control over USAID have erupted into messy open conflict, including a merger battle in the 1990s during the Clinton administration and creation of the “F” Bureau in the subsequent Bush administration. Fueling this persistent debate are sharply diver- gent views of aid. When he formed USAID, President Kennedy saw its central mission as expanding the number of free-market democra- cies over the long run, which, in turn, he believed, would make the U.S. more secure and prosperous. The alternative view has been to use aid to gain short-term leverage and influence in countries willing to oppose communism (or terrorism), with commitments to democracy and free markets a second-order consideration. In short, is foreign aid an instrument of U.S. foreign policy, or is development in and of itself an important aim of U.S. policy? The tension between these two approaches has never been fully reconciled, but the track record of aid when used for instrumen- tal purposes is not a promising one. A Changing World, A Changing Agency USAID’s evolution can be followed over the course of the administrations from Kennedy through Obama. The Kennedy and Johnson administrations saw USAID heavily focused on Henrietta Fore, the first woman USAID Administrator, is shown here inspecting a humanitarian aid delivery at an Army base outside Tbilisi on August 22, 2008. REUTERS/GLEBGARANICH Former President George W. Bush visits the Kasisi Children’s Home in Lusaka, Zambia, on July 4, 2012. SHEALAHCRAIGHEAD/THEBUSHCENTER