The Foreign Service Journal, December 2008

Congress should consider allow- ing USAID to reallocate 10 per- cent of any earmark to meet local demands or needs. In addition, it should look at creating earmarked accounts for those sectors not now covered by them, so that Congress would at least be fully accountable for allocation deci- sions. Currently, when Congress increases a specific earmark without increasing the bot- tom line of the budget, other programs that have no leg- islative protection must be cut to fund it. In particular, earmarks should be created for democracy and gover- nance, agriculture, energy, and roads and infrastructure. These two reforms would go a long way toward reducing the inflexibility of the USAID budget and making it more responsive to local requests for program help. Toward More Effective Implementation The new foreign aid program should encompass the following elements: • Restoring the agency’s technical expertise by trip- ling the size of the USAID Foreign Service from 1,100 to 3,300 (the Bush administration has begun funding a doubling of staff to 2,200). • Providing substantial increases in the training bud- get to ensure the new staff follow common standards and doctrines across agency programs and lessons learned are widely shared within USAID. • Returning to institution-building as a central focus of USAID’s program by assigning career officers to min- istries to work with their local counterparts. Afghanistan would be an excellent place to re-engage in institution- building on a large scale. The new administration should also review the cur- rent draconian security regulations, passed by Congress after the 1998 East African embassy bombings, which limit the number of State and USAID officers who may be posted to an individual embassy or mission at any given time. The walled mission and embassy com- pounds now being built around the world are a major impediment for aid officers (and diplomats for that mat- ter) seeking to interact with civil society and government ministries, monitor projects in the field where they are being implemented and increase the visibility of the U.S. aid program within the society. Some rebalancing must be done (though this will only be possible if Congress makes a policy change) between the need for security for the U.S. government presence abroad and the need for access to get the work abroad done. Programming decisions now centralized in Washington should be decentralized back to field mis- sions, where they were located during the Cold War. Procurement decisions should also be decentralized to the field missions so that more aid dollars are spent in the host countries through local contractors and grantees, to build local capacity and local ownership. (In some cases they could be matched with Western organi- zations until that capacity was well established.) Scholarships: A Transformational Program Another casualty of the period following the Cold War was the USAID scholarship program, which at its height sent 20,000 foreign students a year to U.S. schools. (Now, fewer than 1,000 scholarships are pro- vided.) By all accounts, it was among the most trans- formational programs in the aid toolkit, particularly in building local institutions over the long term. But because of OMB opposition to the program (it did not show results for some time), the rising cost of tuition in the United States and leakage (some of the graduates did not return to their home countries), the number of parti- cipants was drastically reduced. However, these objec- tions can all be overcome. The best scholarship programs in the old USAID educated all of the professional staff in a government ministry over time, matching them with a particular uni- versity in the United States so that faculty could travel to the countries their schools were working with during the summer breaks. To reduce tuition costs, many U.S. uni- versities have now established campuses in developing countries, with students taking half their courses in the States and half at satellite campuses. And to ensure graduates return home, a job would have to be guaran- teed to them upon graduation back in their home min- istry or institution (the major reason participants do not return to their home countries). F O C U S D E C 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 37 Structural chaos has become so serious that it is compromising the effectiveness of our foreign aid program.