In a shake-up of the foreign aid bureaucracy, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice plans to set up an office under her direct supervision to oversee agencies and bureaus that dispense 19 billion US dollar (117 milliarder DKR) each year, State Department officials said Wednesday.
Randall L. Tobias, a former pharmaceutical executive and Republican campaign donor who heads the administrations anti-AIDS assistance program for poor countries, is expected to be named Thursday as the new administrator of the Agency for International Development and director of the new coordination office.
AID (Amerikas Danida) has been an independent agency since it was founded in 1961, but Ms. Rice has made little secret of her frustration over what she has said is a lack of accountability. In addition, foreign aid has been parceled out to numerous other offices that do not coordinate with AID, officials say.
Among the sharpest critics has been Andrew S. Natsios, who stepped down last week as administrator to become a professor of diplomacy at Georgetown University. Mr. Natsios has described the agency as “constipated,” hamstrung by myriad Congressional directives on how to spend money.
Mr. Natsios also complained that as administrator, he had control only over his agencys 14 billion dollar budget, not the 5 billion parceled out to programs to fight AIDS, anti-drug projects, promotion of democracy and military training.
Some reports last year said Ms. Rice wanted to scrap AID altogether and fold it into the State Department to exercise greater control over its programs. But State Department officials denied that she ever considered such a step, which would have required legislation.
Instead, the officials said, Ms. Rice settled on the idea of a “dual hatted” person filling two jobs, AID and the programs in other bureaus.
– This is going to result in a more influential AID administrator, said a State Department official, adding: – What you want is to have someone to make sure the different pieces work together more effectively.
In a speech on Wednesday at Georgetown University, Ms. Rice said that as part of her goal of “transformational diplomacy” – seeking ways of stabilizing democracies in troubled regions – the department would move hundreds of staff members from Europe and Washington to China, India, Nigeria, Lebanon and other developing countries.
Instead of working out of embassies, she said, diplomats may work out of regional centers or in remote areas.
Ms. Rice also said she would expand the office that is supposed to deal with reconstruction of countries after wars and other upheavals. State Department officials said this action was aimed at avoiding the mistakes of providing too little aid too late in Iraq after the ouster of Saddam Hussein in 2003.
State Department officials say that foreign assistance has doubled since 2000 under President Bush, but that large sums of money have been spun off to other agencies in the State Department.
In addition, during the 1990s, President Clinton effectively transferred many foreign aid programs to other Cabinet agencies, including the departments of agriculture, labor, education, and health and human services.
The aim was to circumvent efforts in Congress to cut foreign aid run by the usual agencies.
State Department officials said Ms. Rice had no plans to try to wrest programs away from other Cabinet agencies, but they did not rule out such a step once she feels she has gotten more control of the programs already under her supervision.
The officials said the new director of foreign assistance would oversee budgeting for all functions, helping to develop five-year plans for each country and one-year plans to monitor the carrying out of foreign aid.
However, some AID officials complain that there is already too much bureaucratic second-guessing and demand for quick results in areas like building of infrastructure and health systems in poor countries, where results can take years, if not decades.
Kilde: The Push Journal
