80 Days and Counting Posted by Michael Cohen

Over at the Cable, Laura Rozen reports that the era of good feelings in the State Department is not being felt by everyone:

The exception to generally rising morale at State is USAID, where there has been increased grumbling over the fact that there’s no word on who the next administrator may be. Some people have expressed a sense the agency is somewhat orphaned and adrift so far in the new administration, despite its rhetorical commitment to development issues. Some development hands said they'd heard a new administrator may not be in place until June.

Um, I would politely suggest that the fact we are now 80 days into a Democratic Administration and we still don't have a new administrator for USAID has everything to do with the frustration that some folks are feeling.

AID is as degraded a US agency as perhaps any in the US government. In 2008, USAID had just over 2,200 employees, compared to 12,000 at the height of the Vietnam War. The agency’s diminished staff has made it almost completely dependent on NGOs and for-profit contractors to carry out its work—so much so that Sen. Patrick Leahy complained last year that “USAID has become a check writing agency for a handful of big Washington contractors and NGOs.…”

I was at a recent conference where I heard that AID has about a dozen economists and less than 10 engineers on staff. For an organization whose mandate it is to provide technical and economic assistance to developing countries, these are shockingly low numbers.

Quite simply, if you are going to have an national development agency - and you are going to take it seriously - then you need to make its ability to do its job a priority. In our recent report on improving democracy promotion and fixing the foreign assistance bureaucracy, we call for AID to be made a cabinet-level agency - and with the lack of attention that the Obama Administration is paying to this issue that is something that will have to be emanate from Congress and a potential re-write of the foreign assistance act. But not surprisingly, my confidence is not high.

But in the meantime, if the Obama Administration is really interested in making its rhetoric about development and democracy promotion being a priority in US foreign policy - they need to put somebody in charge of AID. And they need to do it immediately.

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Point taken, but there is somebody in charge of AID. The Acting Administrator of USAID is Alonzo Fulgham, who certainly has an impressive CV.
http://www.usaid.gov/about_usaid/bios/bio_afulgham.html

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