The View from the Hill

We finished our fourth week of orientation and many of us are itching to get on with the show. We've given foreign policy presentations (ours was on "Food Security"), had more panels discussions by the various Bureaus within USAID, and we have survived the mandatory diversity and cultural training workshops.

One of the most interesting days we had this week was when various congressional staffers came in to give us their personal views and party perspectives of USAID "from the Hill." Staffers from both the Majority party (Dems) and the Minority party (Republicans) were represented in panels throughout the day. The good news is that it appears that the political climate in both parties is very supportive of broadening the role of USAID as a tool of foreign policy. All of the staffers were very positive in their remarks to us about the agency. This hasn't always been the case in the past.

Beginning in the 1980s, Jesse Helms compared giving money to USAID like that of "throwing money down a rat hole." In that climate, subsequently, certain restrictions were placed on USAID's "operating fund" which hindered the agency's ability to hire and maintain staff levels. In the 1990s, there was a purge in direct-hire staff and USAID began hiring contractors out of the more robust "Program fund" to essentially do the work that a more substantial direct hire force would normally be assigned to implement. In many cases, there would have been only one direct hire FSO in any given Mission. In many cases, contractors designed and implemented the programs while the few direct hire staffers were just relegated to signing the paperwork.

This poor climate for a robust foreign assistance agency all changed after September 11th. The Defense Department came out with an influential National Security Report which named "Development" as one of the three pillars of Foreign policy along with "Defense" and "Diplomacy." In addition, supposedly, the influential "Religious-Right" wing of the Republican party had began to treat Foreign Assistance as favorable to their ideology, thus placing them on a similar wavelength as those strong supporters of the Department of Defense and many more liberal Democrats. People in the top positions began to realize that USAID had become just some kind of inefficient "contacting agency" and wasn't actually implementing "Development" anymore. The Department of Defense became an even stronger advocate for the agency when it realized that it neither had the staff or the "know-how" to proceed alone in rebuilding Iraq. First, the Bush, and later the Obama administration, agreed that USAID needed to build up its technical expertise while increasing Foreign Service Officer levels to increase organizational efficiency and improve project implementation. Next thing you know, the agency is authorized to double their direct hire FSO levels. So, I guess it was kind of like a "perfect storm" which brought us all to the agency.

Later in the day, we heard about the role of the Senate Appropriations Committee, from a very powerful staffer under Sen. Patrick Leahy and then the role of less understood Authorizing committee from long-time staffers under Sen. Lugar and Sen. Berman. The role of congressional "earmarks" turned out to be the hot-topic of the day. The congress - as its role of "legislator" - maintains an exclusive ability to appropriate funds to programs by using "earmarks" to control the direction of spending. The funding for USAID, which is an agency under the Executive Branch of government, is no different. In our case, congress uses "hard earmarks" and "soft earmarks" to limit what programs we can implement and to what extent we can implement them worldwide. A "hard earmark" is mandatory, while a "soft earmark" is a recommendation which eventually may turn to a "hard earmark" if continually not followed. In the congressional directive, a "hard earmark" is any line that includes the word "Shall," while a "soft earmark" is any line that includes the word "May." To give you an example, a hard earmark would read, USAID shall spend 250 million dollars on micro-enterprise programs with half the programs directly assisting the poor and women, while a "soft earmark" would read, USAID may spend 35 million dollars on agriculture programs in Africa. To make things more complicated, sometimes the word "should" appears. It was explained that "should" is somewhere between a hard "Shall" and a soft "May"...ha, ha.


Further, congress isn't the only branch which "earmarks" spending. The Executive Branch, namely the President, is currently "earmarking" about 60% of our spending into a program called PEPFAR, a health initiative which funds programs which stop the spend of AIDS in Africa. In this framework, USAID has to try to hit all the "earmarks" - sometimes with the same dollar. For example, in order to hit all the above earmarks, you could fund micro-lending organizations in rural Africa which distributes both loans and condoms to farmers...ha, ha. We were also told that in most cases the total sum of both congressional and presidential earmarks exceed the total sum of the budget that we eventually receive from congress. That is when its pays to be creative, I suppose.