REQUIRED IMAGE
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s ambitious reorganization of the U.S. foreign assistance efforts last year is deeply, perhaps irredeemably flawed, but did produce some positive results, says a new paper from the Carnegie Endowment.
Source: Carnegie Endowment
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s ambitious reorganization of the U.S. foreign assistance efforts last year is deeply, perhaps irredeemably flawed, but did produce some positive results, says a new paper from the Carnegie Endowment.
Reforms aimed at making foreign assistance an instrument of the administration’s “transformational diplomacy,” and ensuring greater transparency and oversight instead created an overly centralized and complex system that was rushed into practice.
In Assessing Secretary of State Rice’s Reform of U.S. Foreign Assistance, former senior USAID official Gerald Hyman analyzes the objectives, implementation, and impact of the Secretary’s effort to create a cohesive foreign assistance program fully integrated with U.S. national security policy.
Key Conclusions:
• The new system confuses strategic decisions, which should be made in Washington, with tactical ones better suited to context-knowledgeable field officers. Reforms also require that any change made to a foreign assistance project receive approval from the newly created Director of Foreign Assistance (DFA) position, creating huge potential for gridlock.
• In the quest for greater strategic control, the reorganization actually diminishes Washington’s ability to evaluate the objectives and successes of foreign assistance projects. Detailed narratives which provided rationale for programs under the old system have been replaced by a complex, numbered grid system that lacks critical information, making a serious assessment of projects in Washington difficult.
• The reorganization was led by “core country teams,” the members of which, in many instances, had only a passing knowledge of the country they were to plan for. The implementation process also failed to involve many key stakeholders, including ambassadors, USAID missions, and congressional leaders.
• The reorganization was instituted due in large part to the Secretary’s inability to answer congressional inquiries regarding U.S. spending on democracy promotion. The new system places an exaggerated emphasis on the ultimately futile attempt to instantly report on U.S. foreign assistance expenditures and detail the outcomes of an $11 billion program.
“The old system was a fractured, nonstrategic, hodgepodge of bureaucratic satraps in need of a fundamental fix. Greater coherence was certainly necessary. But the Rice reform is deeply, perhaps irredeemably flawed. There were available corrections far short of, and far better than, this foreign assistance reform,” writes Hyman.
Click on icon above for the full text of this Carnegie Paper.
A limited number of print copies of this Carnegie Paper are available.
Request a copy
About the Author
Gerald (Jerry) Hyman serves as both a Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) senior adviser and as president of CSIS’s Hills Program on Governance. He also serves on the Advisory Council to the Center for International Media Assistance of the National Endowment for Democracy. Hyman served with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) from 1990 to 2006, and was director of the Office of Democracy and Governance from 2002 to 2007.
Gerald F. Hyman
Carnegie does not take institutional positions on public policy issues; the views represented herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of Carnegie, its staff, or its trustees.
China’s banking crisis in the 2000s was resolved by transferring the costs to households through financial repression—a decision that recapitalized the banks while exacerbating the structural imbalances that continue to shape the Chinese economy today.
Michael Pettis
Chinese biotech companies have been on the receiving end of U.S. economic coercion. Yet their responses have differed significantly because firm and state interests are not uniformly aligned. For Washington, treating all Chinese tech firms the same, irrespective of their actual interests, risks pushing them farther into Beijing’s corner.
Xue Gong
China’s latest energy plan explicitly calls for integrating data centers into the electricity system, particularly connecting them to green energy. It appears Beijing wants to use compute as a source of domestic demand to absorb renewables excess capacity.
Damien Ma
But their "principal to principal" model will only be as effective as the political strength of each leader back home.
Damien Ma
U.S. unpredictability has allowed China to capitalize on its positioning as the “responsible great power”. Paradoxically, the more China wins the perception game, the more likely expectations will rise for Beijing to deliver not just words but to demonstrate with its deeds.
Chong Ja Ian
