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 Detailed narratives which provided rationale for programs under the old system have been replaced by a complex, numbered grid system that lacks critical information, making a serious assessment of projects in Washington difficult.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. 

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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.