It is time to reform the U.S. Foreign Assistance bureaucracy

Source: "What’s the Story on Militarization?" Ron Capps, Monday Developments via FrontLines, November 2009.

Obviously the objectives of development agencies, diplomats and the military are different. Experts in social and economic development have knowledge and skills that are generally not found either in the State Department nor in the armed services.

Over the decades since the Viet Nam war, the number of development experts in the United States government has been allowed to decline. Moreover, there has been a focusing of foreign assistance on limited objectives relating to the reduction of the worst aspects of poverty rather than nation building. As a result, few of those remaining in the U.S. foreign assistance program have a broad understanding of social and economic development.

In the past decade the U.S. Agency for International Development has been weakened and responsibilities for development assistance have been transferred to the State Department and the Department of Defense as well as to the Millennium Development Corporation.

I quote from the article by Ron Capps:

While there are over 2,300,000 uniformed service members, there are fewer than 6,800 Foreign Service Officers at the Department of State and about 1,400 Foreign Service Officers at USAID. The General Accounting Office claims nearly 30 percent of language-designated positions at American embassies are filled by inadequately trained officials, and a recent article in Foreign Affairs noted that American embassies in Africa are short 30 percent of their assigned staffs......

Personnel numbers alone still don’t tell the whole story. A recent study by the Association for American Diplomacy and the Henry L. Stimson Center repeatedly cited a lack of program management skills at State and USAID. Congress has granted the Department of Defense authorities and funding for security and development assistance that should reside with State and USAID; and it did so principally because the civilian agencies cannot carry their load. A congressional report cites a waning of diplomatic effectiveness in representing U.S. interests as foreign officials “follow the money,” increasingly emphasizing defense relations over diplomacy. The RAND Corporation calls these discrepancies “a dysfunctional skewing of resourcesto- tasks.”....

The real story here is that America has just passed the outermost point of one of our regular foreign policy pendulum swings and we are headed back to a more centered approach. Right now, we in the development, humanitarian assistance, and advocacy communities have an opportunity to influence the political story line. Now is the time to press for greater funding for civilian personnel, more training to increase civilian capacity, and a return of authorities and funding and oversight of development and security assistance to the Department of State and USAID.