In a recent article in the Foreign Service Journal (“Don't Reinvent the Foreign Assistance Wheel;” FSJ, March 2008), Gordon Adams, professor of international relations at American University and former OMB associate director, lays out the case for continuing with the “F Process” (shorthand for the transformational diplomacy initiative of the current administration), maintaining that, “The F process is half a loaf, and only half-baked at that,” but was still an important first step toward meshing U.S. foreign assistance spending with our strategic goals. He argues that in order to preserve civilian control of foreign assistance, the government needs to revise and reinforce this initiative. In his view, a separate, cabinet-level Department for Development would isolate development from its political support and confound the current problems of coordination and consistency.
As Adams notes, the F process does have some positive features: It has made planning and budgeting more transparent, and forced a greater degree of strategic program integration in foreign assistance. However, his assessment is flawed by some fundamental misconceptions:
1. that the “F” process means that our assistance programs are tailored to the needs of the recipient countries.
2. that the work of development is not fundamentally different from that of diplomacy. Both are a piece of, and should be subservient to, national security interests as determined primarily by the State Department, and should be operationally integrated; and
3. that the disparate pieces of the foreign aid program are actually being coordinated through F’s efforts.
More fundamentally, Adams perpetuates (and apparently supports) F’s drive to blur, if not eliminate, the legislative distinctions between security and developmental funds. The result, when State is in the driver’s seat, is that ALL foreign assistance is increasingly driven by State’s political agenda.
Adams notes that one of the goals was to tailor programs to a country’s stage of development. There was nothing particularly new in this. What was new was trying to squeeze everything into a strategic framework straitjacket. However, as F rapidly learned, it’s next to impossible to do such tailoring given the existing budget restrictions.
Further, “country-level” programming, as conceived by the F process, is strictly top-down -- Washington decides what programs would be appropriate for a country in each box of the matrix, and then directs the range of USAID and State-controlled resources (which don’t encompass some of the most significant streams of foreign aid) to those programs. It is NOT derived from a bottom-up assessment of issues and opportunities determined in consultation with governments and civil societies in those countries.
Adams cites as evidence of the effectiveness of the F process the shift of $2 billion from less needy regions (such as the Western Hemisphere and Eastern Europe) to “needier regions” such as Africa and S. Asia. However, E. Europe programs were on a phase out track before F was instituted. Assistance to S. Asia has gone up only with the inclusion, for security purposes, of Pakistan and Afghanistan. Assistance to the truly needy countries of Bangladesh, Nepal and India (which still has more poor people than all of Sub Saharan Africa, despite its recent growth), has declined. Resources to Africa have gone up, but only in restricted categories -- MCC and PEPFAR. The former does not address the needs of the poorest countries, and the latter addresses only one in a myriad of developmental needs. Apart from these two initiatives, assistance to Sub-Saharan Africa has actually diminished.
A further misconception relates to the proposals for a cabinet level department of development – namely, that the new department would basically consist simply of an elevated USAID. Establishment of a new department could not be undertaken in the absence of authorizing legislation, which would ensure Congressional buy-in (which does not exist for the current F process). Rather than “further disperse the civilian tools of our overseas engagement,” a separate Department would take the further step of bringing currently separate programs (MCC, PEPFAR) into the same institutional tent, where they belong – preferably along with food aid (USDA), refugee programs (State), and multi-lateral development institutions (Treasury). By drawing in the foreign assistance initiatives and programs currently outside the mandate of F it would amplify, rather than reduce, the civilian voice vis-à-vis the DOD.
Adams’ criticism of a separate department as “taking us back to those unhappy days when State and USAID were at each other’s throats on a regular basis” is an inaccurate and unfair characterization of the prior situation, and completely ignores the ongoing unhappiness on both sides. Contrary to Adams view, disputes about development policy should be elevated to the level of senior policy makers, to assure that the case for poverty alleviation is heard and that trade and investment and development policies are, if not mutually supportive, at least not working at cross purposes. Continuing along the current track will mean that the developmental voice will be increasingly lost.
Against his assertion that development assistance does not have the heft and popularity at home needed to command additional funding, one can cite the results of polling conducted by the German Marshall Fund, InterAction, the Alliance to End Hunger and other groups which find a vast majority of the American public supportive of foreign assistance – if they can be assured that the assistance will go to address developmental rather than political ends.
Finally, a separate Dept. for Development would resolve, at last, the ambiguity about who in the U.S. government speaks for international development, and facilitate coordination with all partners in development -- other donors, international institutions and the developing countries who would benefit from our assistance. The main contribution of the F process is in highlighting how far we still have to go to ensure that development is truly a full partner in the national security triad of defense, diplomacy and development.
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