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On the Hill: Hearing on foreign assistance reform
April 23, 2008
By Matthew Plocher
The House Foreign Affairs Committee held a hearing Wednesday on foreign assistance reform and the future of foreign aid in the next Administration. Witnesses were Lael Brainard, Vice President and Director of the Global Economy and Development Program at the Brookings Institution; Steven Radelet, Senior Fellow at the Center for Global Development; Raymond Offenheiser, President of Oxfam America; and Jim Kolbe, former Member of Congress and Senior Trans-Atlantic Fellow with the German Marshall Fund of the United States.
Committee Chairman Rep. Howard Berman (D-CA) provided opening remarks. He said it is “painfully obvious” to those in Congress and the Administration, as well as to foreign officials and nongovernmental organizations that the U.S. foreign assistance program is in grave need of a systematic overhaul. He cited assistance efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq to demonstrate his point. Berman noted that the Committee would be holding a series of hearings on various aspects of foreign assistance reform that would culminate next year in the rewriting of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961. Antiquated and overburdened with legislation, the act is another impediment to aid efforts, Berman argued, adding that it limits the flexibility and freedom of agencies on the ground to tackle difficult challenges. Berman also argued that assistance stemming from the Defense Department must be separated from aid coming from other agencies as the U.S. cannot rely on the military to be its diplomatic face.
Brainard testified that improving foreign assistance efforts is critical. She said that “as remote threats can rapidly metastasize into immediate emergencies, the fight against global poverty has become a fight of necessity – because national security demands it no less than personal morality.” She listed a variety of shortcomings with assistance efforts: too many offices and agencies cover the same topics or are at cross purposes; too much of a reliance on the Defense Department; diplomacy has consistently taken precedence over development when the two should go hand-in-hand; and USAID – the cornerstone of the foreign assistance system – suffers from an acute lack of specialized personnel. In addition to solving these problems, greater program control should be given to local populations and governments, she said, and there must be more “foreign policy cohesion,” so aid programs are not offset by things like stiff trading policies.
Like Brainard, Radelet noted a lack of clarity on policies and objectives, saying there should be an overarching policy for U.S.-led assistance efforts. As it stands, heavy bureaucratic requirements keep funds from getting close to their intended recipients, Radelet said, and earmarks hamper the effective use of the funds that do reach recipients. He said that agencies with their own processes, rules and procedures put a significant strain on countries. “Weakened professional capacity” only exacerbates these issues, he added, as technical positions have to be increasingly outsourced, in turn creating more bureaucracy and inefficiency. Finally, Radelet said, the systems used to monitor and evaluate are weak and focus on whether funds were spent where they were supposed to be, rather than whether programs achieved important strategic or development objectives
According to Offenheiser, Oxfam’s policy is like that of any organization or business: listen to your customers. He said that U.S. foreign aid customers aren’t happy. The plethora of agencies trying to work with small governments or local communities burdens their already meager capacities, Offenheiser said. He added that The Foreign Aid Act has such restrictive and confusing legal rhetoric that few foreign officials want to work with it, and that Washington must also lessen its control on how funding is spent. Offenheiser repeatedly said that instilling a sense of ownership is essential when doing development work, adding that heavily earmarked grants with pre-established instructions exhibit the hubris of the U.S. government. For an efficient development structure, he said, the U.S. has to relinquish more control to local actors who can “set accurate goals for real needs.”
Kolbe was most concerned with decreasing foreign assistance bureaucracy. Echoing other witnesses, he lamented the money and time wasted by multiple agencies working on similar agendas. Kolbe stressed the need to remove the countless earmarks on grants. He also encouraged the Committee to work to better coordinate developmental and trade policies. He cited as an example circumstances in Cambodia and Burkina Faso, two countries that receive aid but whose imports have more tariffs than both England and France combined. This brought him to his final point: besides its disorganization and waste, the U.S. foreign assistance system’s great failing is shortsightedness. Short term goals, he said, whether they are trade or militarily oriented, must be kept from overriding long term development goals. Unlike the other witnesses, though, Kolbe sought to caution the Committee before they recommended forming a new, more overarching agency. This would just add more bureaucracy, he warned.
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