good afternoon the committee will come to order i appreciate the patience of everybody involved here given the timing of our votes i know we are quite delayed here by almost two hours so i appreciate your patience and the two gentlemen who are going to address us today  states expended nearly five dollars billion for flood relief earthquake relief infrastructure projects political assistance and other reconstruction efforts since usaid does not have internal capability much of this work is carried out by international organizations for profit contractors and non profit non governmental organizations often referred to as ngos to administer and oversee these expenditures usaid employs nearly ten thousand full time employees and contractors despite the large number of personnel u weaknesses and potential improvements in documenting monitoring evaluating and reporting on program performance for example oig audits have often identified inaccurate or unsupported results in fact more than a third of the performance a udits and reviews we issued in fiscal year two thousand and ten noted that data reported by usaid operating units or their partners were misstated unsupported or not validated this is a staggering observation this analysis is consistent with some of the things that i have seen quite frankly in both afghanistan pakistan and haiti a recent ig memorandum drafted to administrator shah reported that usaid implementing partners overstated numbers of beneficiaries in iraq let me high light a few of them two hundred and sixty two thousand four hundred and eighty two individuals reportedly benefitted from medical supplies that were purchased to treat only one hundred victims of a specific attack twenty two individuals attended a five day mental health course yet one point five million were reported as beneficiaries one hundred and twenty three thousand were reported as benefitting from water and well activities that did not produce potable water two hundred and eighty thousand were reported as benefitting from fourteen thousand two hundred and forty six dollars spent to rehabilitate a morgue in many ways this is blatant fraud in each country i requested basic information regarding ongoing and completed projects from the local usaid offices among other things my request included number of projects projected and actual costs and whether usaid had verified the completion of the projects officials in each country could not produce this most basic information usaid has since provided some of the information i requested however i am concerned that it took eight weeks and a formal congressional inquiry to assemble the data this is data that i believe should be readily available to the american people trash cover the streets and electrical grids are substandard more than a year after the earthquake only five percent of the millions of cubic feet of rubble has been removed as of november two thousand and ten only twenty two percent of shelters had been built having been there and seen it for myself i wonder if these numbers are generous the most heart wrenching reality though is that many residents are still displaced living among the filth and destruction we are talking about hundreds of thousands of people for those of you in this room looking at this picture that is a classic sign that says this rubble has been removed by usaid they placed the sign in the rubble that is what they are dealing with in haiti  the bottom line is if the agency cannot accurately pinpoint its progress at any given moment then it is failing to adequately oversee its expenditures given usaid's own challenges i am increasingly concerned about the direct assist program advocated by this administration direct assist provides money directly to foreign governments such as afghanistan which ranks according to some th out of one hundred and eighty for the most corrupt countries in the world with recent examples of corruption such as the kabul bank as well as complete lack of oversight infrastructure i would like to know why the administration believes it to be a good idea to accelerate the direct payments to governments we simply cannot trust that a foreign government will provide effective oversight of u s money necessary oversight tools are limited and accountability cannot be assured if the direct assist program is indeed part of the administration's foreign policy toward places like afghanistan then i urge it to stop immediately part of the oversight discussion should also include an analysis of whether the united states is benefiting from these investments it appears that in countries such as pakistan locals fail to realize that we are even providing assistance usaid's from the american people message is not widely broadcast or apparently not very well received i look forward to hearing from administrator shah on how we can improve in this area if recipients are not aware that the american people are providing the assistance then it is questionable whether the united states is getting proper credit for all of its effort with the dramatic increase of u s foreign assistance the federal government must ensure that it is conducting effective oversight each  look forward to hearing from our panel of witnesses about the successes and challenges they face this subcommittee is ready to work with the departments in whatever way possible to prevent the waste fraud and abuse of taxpayer dollars i would like to now recognize the distinguished ranking member from responsibilities for development for humanitarian assistance and they have done that in some of the most hostile and challenging environments on earth including afghanistan pakistan iraq haiti and others the success of usaid's mission in each of these countries is significantly important lieutenant general john allen the president's nominee to be the next commander of the u s forces in afghanistan recently spoke regarding the importance of usaid his remarks are noteworthy he stated that in power but they genuinely fear american soft power frequently wielded in the form of usaid projects while the hard power of the military can create trade space time and a viable security environment the soft power of usaid and the development community can deliver strategic effects and outcomes for decades affecting generations while foreign assistance may have no national constituency here at home it is helpful to hear the strong words of support from secretary gates general stronger sovereign governments that can support their own people in all those countries i just cited while i support fully funding usaid i have also expressed vocal concerns over the past decade as the agency has struggled to implement robust accountability mechanisms and find appropriate delivery vehicles for aid in particular i have been concerned that usaid has become overly reliant on international contractors as implementing partners has lost too much internal capacity and has impleme programs without the necessary monitoring and evaluation mechanisms in place the result has been not only disconcerting levels of waste fraud and abuse in many projects in afghanistan pakistan and iraq but a lack of vision and focus within the agency usaid's mission is so important we simply cannot afford to make these mistakes over and over again so i am very encouraged by administrator shah's usaid forward program agenda critically the agenda directly seeks to address the p concerns that i have raised for many years and that have been featured in hearings before this subcommittee over and over again namely usaid is planning and procurement implementation reform that should lessen their reliance on large international contractors usaid is planning to build more internal management and policy capability and usaid is planning to significantly strengthen its monitoring and evaluation capacity i look forward to hearing from administrator shah today about his progress in implementing this reform agenda and what congress can do to support  it the usaid inspector general also plays a critical role in providing additional oversight and accountability of usaid i have long advocated that the inspector general put more personnel in the field and contingency operations to monitor projects directly i have also advocated that the inspector general do more to help usaid build monitoring and evaluation mechanisms into the programs at the beginning of the projects instead of at the end toward that end i was glad to see that usaid's comprehensive pre award survey of pakistani institutions to determine their capacity to receive aid and work is implementing partners i encourage usaid to do more to address the weaknesses that have been identified in these surveys prior to direct funding assistance thank you again chairman chaffetz for convening this important hearing i look forward statements for the record we are now going to recognize the panel we are pleased to be joined by doctor shah who is the administrator of the u s agency for international development and mister donald gambatesa who is the inspector general for the u s agency for international development we appreciate the dedication that both of you have to this country to the good practices of this country i know your heart is in the right place and we appreciate you being here today for a candid discussion about how we can make the process let the record reflect that the witnesses answered in the affirmative we will now recognize mister shah for five minutes for his opening statement i would remind you that additional comments will be inserted into the record i will now recognize you for five minutes for your verbal opening statement shah thank you chairman chaffetz ranking member tierney and members of the subcommittee i appreciate the chance to be with you today and appreciate the chance to have a conversation about our efforts to create a more efficient accountable and transparent government responsible for advancing opportunity and empowering people throughout the developing world it is a core pillar of our country's national security and foreign policy strategy we strengthen global food security improve global health lay the groundwork for economic growth in fact some of our fastest growing trade partners are long time usaid recipients we expand democratic rights of disenfranchised citizens around the world especially in places like we are seeing throughout the arab world today and we provide crucial humanitarian assistance in response to natural disasters and complex crises with our teams ready to deploy as they are currently deployed in and around libya and some of the most dangerous parts of the world in over one hundred countries usaid staff carry out our mission by engaging local partners implementing projects against clear multi year strategies and evaluating our work so we can learn and improve our results two months after joining the agency i instituted one of the most sweeping sets of reforms usaid has ever undergone a package of reforms we call usaid forward it is an early outcome of secretary clinton's comprehensive quadrennial diplomacy and development review this ambitious set of reforms is changing the way we do business with new partnerships and emphasis on transparency and accountability and a relentless focus on achieving results for our development dollars through these efforts we have rebuilt the agency's budget and planning policy capabilities at no additional cost at the same time we have established new oversight structures and vetting systems to ensure our assistance is more transparent and accountable than ever my goal is to help the american people see in a transparent way how we spend our resources and what we get as a result we have started to make this possible by building the website foreignassistance gov a clear on line dashboard that allows users to easily track foreign affairs spending our policy bureau has created a series of new country development cooperation strategies so we can work with our foreign partners and with our implementing partners to set clear defined goals sector by sector in programs around the world we will make those public as we are beginning to do with our programs in an area we call feed the future our global hunger and food security program with congressional support we are improving our business procurement and contracting practices bringing modern practices to improve and update reporting systems and focusing on working with more local partners and through smaller more manageable contract mechanisms we have created a board on acquisition and assistance review that has already reviewed large programs and broken them into smaller pieces to improve management and competition and how projects are awarded finally we have established a world class monitoring and evaluation system one that gets us away from the traditional practice of counting process results and having them reported by implementing partners who carry out the programs as referenced previously and one that uses independent third party evaluations to help us understand what we are getting for monies we invest for example in seven of the fifteen presidential malaria initiative countries in which we have made investments to save children's lives from malaria we recently found through independent evaluation that we have had a thirty six percent reduction in all cause child mortality which means we are saving kids under the age of five from all causes because of our malaria program and saving them by the hundreds of thousands of kids  over time these shifts and these improvements in our efforts will help us do a better job of managing our programs in sub saharan africa latin america and asia and will particularly help us working in specifically hard areas such as war time situations in iraq and afghanistan it is precisely in those settings where we have focused a number of our newer and more aggressive reforms to improve accountability and oversight to expand the number of times our teammates and colleagues are out visiting programs and seeing how projects perform and where we have rolled out initiatives like the accountable assistance for afghanistan that is helping to improve oversight not just of contract partners but of their subcontractors and  results that we are seeking in the afghanistan project whether we are working in afghanistan or zambia we do so for one very clear reason development is a core part of our foreign policy and national security around the world we help by partnering with our troops in creating exit strategies and keeping them safe we work to prevent famine and food riots that are destabilizing around the world and in saving millions of children's lives every year we create the basis for stability and economic growth where people believe it is often difficult to do that is why secretary gates has said doing development is a lot cheaper than sending soldiers because it is so critical to our national security we look forward to this conversation  subcommittee thank you for the opportunity to appear before you to testify on behalf of the office of the inspector general for the u s agency for international development this afternoon i will share information about our efforts to promote accountability in foreign assistance programs as you know usaid has primary responsibility for managing and supervising the implementation of its programs and activities our role as inspector general is to assist the agency in combating waste fraud and abuse and by promoting economy efficiency and effectiveness we take our role in as you call it following the money very seriously and draw on our highly skilled foreign service and civil service direct hire employees as well as foreign service nationals to perform this function across our eleven offices in washington and around the globe since foreign assistance priorities frequently shift we continually reevaluate our oversight posture and when appropriate make adjustments to better position ourselves to address emerging risks and challenges for instance in critical priority countries and disaster areas we now have staff living and working in afghanistan haiti iraq and pakistan previously these countries had been served by regional offices our oversight covers the full portfolio of agency programs and extends to more than one hundred countries our core oversight activities include both financial and performance audits and reviews to complement these efforts with investigations into allegations of criminal civil and administrative violations in fiscal year two thousand and ten we issued over four hundred and ten financial audit reports these audits covered eight dollars ninety cents billion in funds and questioned more than thirty six dollars million in costs additionally in two thousand and ten usaid reported that it sustained two hundred and thirteen dollars million in previously identified questioned costs our performance related reports address program compliance implementation and results when we identify areas that require corrective action we make recommendations for program improvement last fiscal year we issued sixty six performance audits and reviews with a total of four hundred and twenty three recommendations additionally we also have a significant investigative portfolio our criminal investigators have full law enforcement authority and investigate allegations of waste fraud and abuse of u s foreign assistance funds and employee savings and recoveries mainly from criminal penalties civil judgments and bills of collection our criminal investigators also deliver fraud awareness briefings to agency personnel contractors grantees and host country representatives last year over th four hundred individuals attended our briefings worldwide agency managers have a positive track record in responding to our recommendations and have developed appropriate plans to address every recommendation that we made last year we are encouraged that today the agency and its leadership are taking steps to further improve its accountability posture usaid has recently worked to improve its performance management by building more results orientation into planning processes and strengthening its monitoring evaluation programs to promote sustainability of hard won development gains usaid is also doing more to increase its use of host country systems and partners as you are aware many accountability challenges the agency faces are intensified in critical priority countries and disaster areas monitoring the progress of these programs in such places as afghanistan haiti iraq and pakistan is often hampered by security concerns infrastructure related travel restrictions frequent staff rotations widespread corruption weak government institutions and diminished rule of law my office is taking a number of steps in response to the accountability challenges in these environments we have expanded our on the ground presence to provide greater audit investigative oversight have increased outreach on fraud awareness and do more to promote hotline reporting when a program requires enhanced financial scrutiny such as cash transactions and disbursements we conduct concurrent financial audits so that we can identify questionable expenditures and control weaknesses as soon as possible on the investigative front we leverage external resources by coordinating with other u s law enforcement authorities in task force settings and working with local officials to investigate and prosecute crimes we also monitor implementing partners internal compliance investigations and do more to hold them accountable for reporting fraud proper stewardship of american tax dollars requires a solid accountability framework are committed to working with agency counterparts to ensure that such a framework is in place we appreciate your interest in our work and look forward to learning more about your interest and priorities thank you minutes the ig is reporting that more than one third of the performance audits and reviews we issued in fiscal year two thousand and ten noted that data reported by usaid operating units or their parents were misstate unsupported or not so let me put it this way the agency and the entire u s system of providing foreign assistance and collecting thoughts on impact has been heavily skewed over the last decade to a set of process indicators and reporting against those process indicators the number of people who benefit what does that mean people benefit the number of visits that were made to a particular farmer what has that accomplished has that improved yields has that improved in health the number of insecticide treated bed nets that are distributed in communities we have very elaborate very costly systems for collecting a huge amount of processed data and i believe implementing partners naturally present optimistic data on what comes in that way in reaction to that i with the secretary's strong support really restructured how we do evaluation in a pretty thorough way we now approach this by doing what we call impact evaluations that means when you design a program from the beginning you understand what your counterfactual is you collect baseline data and you define what the result you are seeking to sixty percent of the productive agricultural region and the flood plain around the indus river it was a tremendous tremendous challenge pakistan could easily have missed its winter wheat harvest usaid working with an organization called the food and agricultural part of this concern do you have anything specific to refute what the inspector general is coming up with can you point to something and say he was wrong in this instance do you have any specific example where that one third number is overstated in if we have enough evidence or probable cause to go forward then we will take it to the department of justice for prosecution if we can't get prosecution from the department of justice for whatever reason we will try local accountability today we have more people outside of kabul in the field visiting projects than we did when i started in all of afghanistan two we have expanded our accountability efforts through a program we call accountable assistance for afghanistan that includes improved project monitoring and oversight it includes an effort to put in place one hundred percent local cost auditing it includes an effort to expand partner vetting and it includes efforts to  zone and the gardes coast road is a good example of a place where i believe nineteen of the workers on the road have died in the process of helping to construct it there have been three hundred and sixty four security incidents the contractor and the subcontractors in those instances and what steps are you taking to improve the accountability in the performance of that and the avoidance of fraud mister shah that is a great question with respect to private security contractors we have actually taken a number of steps in conjunction with the government in afghanistan to provide more regulation and transparency of private security contractors behavior and where resources go in many cases we have broken down awards into smaller component so we have more reporting visibility on both primary contracts and subcontracts including private security contracts we have put a pretty aggressive vetting system in place together with the intelligence and defense communities in afghanistan in order to make sure we are collecting all information possible on potential actors that are risks and then taking action as we did in the situation where we have information that is actionable  expanded our accountability efforts so that we do one hundred percent local cost auditing so we can track as much of that money as possible all of these efforts have uncovered real cases and resulted in very specific actions that we have taken  hire personnel conduct or do that usaid staffs among them are program design partner selection some degree of monitoring often you can extend your capacity to monitor with third parties and with foreign service nationals staff but of foreign service officers at usaid we have brought in about six hundred and fifty new foreign service officers between the last year of the bush administration and the first two years of the obama administration i think on a bipartisan basis together with the military usaid and all the things that you do i can tell you i have never been more frustrated in my life as when i was in afghanistan and were asking a single question a simple question to the usaid workers how many projects have you started with the money we spent and how many projects have you completed we spent about forty five minutes asking that question and we could not get an answer the numbers were being thrown out it was seventy it was fifty they didn't know how many projects they had started we told them that we wanted that information we wanted to know how many projects had been started how many projects had been completed and we did receive quite an extensive response but we still didn't get the final information we were asking for how do you actually know the project has been completed we know when the start date was we know when the end date was and we know how much money was spent one of things that i was most frustrated about was when we asked what were your results the answer was the result was we spent x amount of money that is all they  explain that to me mister shah mister shah thank you for that point i take very seriously your point about results i think at the end of the day we have to be able to articulate what we are getting for the resources we have spent in afghanistan since two thousand and two for  example there was a situation where there were nine hundred thousand boys in school no girls today there are seven million kids in school thirty five percent are girls in large part because of programs we have put in place we can go into the next layer of detail to identify how many teachers we have trained and what the outcomes are related to that in health we have seen a twenty two percent drop in infant mortality as a result of expanding a basic package of health services which used to reach nine percent of the population now it reaches sixty four percent of the population and it has been a  longstanding usaid program with the ministry of public health that has delivered that result in energy which is a difficult sector we have gone from six percent of afghans with access to electricity to more than fourteen percent today including providing around the clock power kabul and including providing enough technical assistance to the local electricity authority so that we have been able to double revenue collections on an annualized basis so they have a sustainability plan for those efforts to me it is very information now we asked for those specific results they told us how much money they are spending they told us when they started the project they told us when they ended the project but we did not get to this point they knew you were going to be testifying here we still don't have that information mister shah i just shared some of that information we can do that sector by sector i think what you are looking at is some version of this spreadsheet which is how we basically track projects and programs statistics i want to see it i want to actually see the schools i want to know where they are because quite frankly i don't believe you because based on the statistics that i am hearing from the ig a third of what you have reported in the past is fraudulent can picture is rubble that is still there mister shah i have been to haiti probably ten times including prior to being in this job prior to the earthquake and then many times after the earthquake there were ten spreadsheet that we got there which didn't feel very complete to me there were six contractors that received over sixteen dollars million three of those six contractors based on the spreadsheet that was handed to me when i was in haiti said that the work has been complete how can we justify five percent of the rubble being cleaned up having spent tens of millions of dollars and three of our contractors saying yes i am done i did what i was supposed to do mister shah actually the new numbers are ten percent and in that context the actual amount of rubble that has been removed is more than was removed two years after the aceh tsunami situation when you look at it compared to situations like the world trade center or aceh in indonesia it is shah first of all all this money is not for rubble removal in fact we have worked very hard to try and get other donors and other partners to participate in rubble removal because frankly it is a less sexy thing than some of the other potential investments i would say overall it important to recognize that haiti is the poorest country in this hemisphere before the earthquake the rates of access to clean drinking water or safe modern sanitation were very low the number of children stunted in haiti was over shah in terms of what has been done we actually are very proud of the fact that usaid was able to coordinate a major interagency whole of government response to what was the largest natural disaster we have ever experienced more than two hundred and thirty thousand people lost their lives in that context we mounted the largest and most effective humanitarian response ever we fed more than four million people during those first few months when there were real challenges in access to food and security we with the international partners to help provide emergency shelter to one point five million people we supported together with others more than one million people getting access to specific vaccines today more people have access to clean drinking water  haiti than they did before the earthquake because of some database decisions we made to make sure that as water was distributed chlorine tablets and basic education was provided to help people protect themselves of the rubble we think between ten and twenty percent has been removed in sectors like agriculture and health we have pursued a very strategic focus in agriculture for example which is sixty percent of the total employment in haiti we focused on four very specific areas of production we have worked with private partners like monsanto and others to help get improved hybrid seed varieties to those farmers and we have seen in many different instances a doubling of actual crop yields measured and  verified that leads us to believe that the haiti agricultural sector can become a more vibrant sector going into the future we also helped establish an industrial park in the north that will create five thousand jobs next year on the way to creating twenty zero jobs by attracting a korean company and others for manufacturing we have worked with partners like coca cola to help create a juice industry in that case with mango juice in particular so that the core productive assets of the country are contributing to the economy and employment you can't judge the effort in haiti in one or two years it will be a longer term effort haiti has been a very poor country for a long time we have been very focused on taking the time to do deliberate planning and coordination in order to make sure this time around the results are much much better mister tierney is usaid the lead in this overall project mister shah usaid works in coordination with the department of state and other agencies  country person entity is in charge of the bottom line on whatever might be the overall strategy of where we are going to try to let this country take itself mister shah we have a special coordinator at the state department tom adams and cheryl mills  work with these donors can plan where the future of this country is going in terms of employment sustainability and things of that nature mister shah it has some specific technical expertise and it draws on resources inside the government at usaid and other partners to do exactly those tasks i will note that during the earthquake twenty eight of twenty nine ministries collapsed fifteen percent of the senior level work force mister tierney i am trying to get a figure on that after this obviously every the haitian government strategy is about decentralized economic development in specific targeted regions to restart the agricultural economy and to promote industrialization and jobs and to do it in a way that helps people have economic opportunities outside of port au prince so it takes more demographic pressure off of port au prince that type of strategy is one we support fully and our programs are aligned against that strategy and  programs limited to those areas where we might be the lead donor or partner creating space for other partners to lead in other sectors other international donors and partners as i mentioned before overall we are about ten percent of the total commitments to haiti  with those assessments and what specifically are you doing to fix this problem mister shah when i started i certainly felt that we needed to get out and see our projects in a more effective manner there are two or three strategies we have deployed in pakistan to accomplish that task the first is we worked on security to make sure we have security as we go but taking risks in getting out there in fact even in farah and neighboring areas we have had more than one hundred and sixty staff visits to the sites and projects over the last six months second we have built some mechanisms that use third party monitoring and evaluation personnel mostly local but often very highly qualified engineers that can look at road projects and conduct a specific assessment or educational specialists that can go into a school and make a careful assessment of what is taking place we are increasingly getting more data and information from those types of partners out there doing that third as i mentioned  is to make sure in project design we are collecting baseline data against certain types of counter factual situations so we can say in a statistically validated and verified way that kids are learning more because of the following programs in farah and in some of the contested areas we use a mechanism called the office of transition initiatives that has been able to get out and support quite a lot of activity from building roads to improving shah we do visits we rely on reporting from implementing partners we rely on the third party evaluation mechanisms to make those assessments as well  places south obviously the agency has the same issue we also use as you mentioned in your remarks third parties other audit firms that we will hire local audit firms to go out and help us with our review read that and don and i had a conversation about it i actually read it out loud to my senior staff and said this is exactly why we are launching usaid forward because we are not going to rely on these sort of processed indicators that were reported by the very partners that do the implementation when i say that in pakistan we have reached six hundred and twenty thousand farmers through the flood relief efforts or that we have built two hundred and eighty schools through our stabilization program in farah and those areas that is information that is coming to us now from work because it is a core part of an integrated national security strategy we need to do it to help keep our country safe and to help in some dangerous parts of the world provide opportunities to people to have an alternative to a path that is threatening to us i just want to say that because i think that is an important shift in how we think about monitoring evaluation and results reporting that is highly relevant to our reform agenda  several findings and recommendations to solve the findings it seemed some of the problem had to do with variations in cost quality standards were different also there was a people there living amongst waste feces i saw rats running around the school we are so short of the goals how do we answer that to the american people who have poured their hearts and about a billion this conversation so far has all been about transitional shelters they are structures with plywood supports that start with tarp and over time you can put corrugated tin and other materials to make it a longer term shelter but they start as transitional these are literally a tarp on four pieces of plywood mister shah right they are transitional shelters the tarp actually meets a certain set of what we call sphere standards that can withstand wind and rain and other things  more permanent shelters which i understand having read the material are intended to only last three years how many of those have been completed mister shah the transitional shelters can last three years as they are built up with t over time that can last for one two to three years the primary strategy of repairing the yellow and green homes so they can be permanent structures for families or building homes they could be permanent last year based on the data that there were many more homes that could be fixed that people could go back to than we initially thought was to say we would do fewer temporary shelters and more yellow house repairs and green house returns because that was more  blocks on rubble removal has been the inability to get enough staging sites from the government of haiti so we continue to work with the government i think we are optimistic that they will manage to find sites that would allow  on that i have been following usaid for eleven years from when i was on the foreign affairs committee if you don't have the cooperation of the host country why is it you don't come back to the and say we are being impeded from meeting our goals because you are talking about abysmally failing if this were new orleans you would be fired fema got fired for doing a better job than you are doing in haiti didn't they as far as accomplishment i am not talking about your effort mister shah i would just note that in haiti we are somewhere between ten and twenty five percent of the effort and i don't away most of the rubble i want to know when you do not have the cooperation of the host country to a sufficient level even if we are ten percent the other ninety percent have the same concern why is it you don't come back to the congress and obviously to the state department you work with and say we are unable to meet our mission we are wasting money we are having people six hundred and eighty thousand by your own number still suffering more than a year out without homes mister shah first i would just say on the money of the billion dollars that has been spent about seven hundred dollars million was spent in the first three or four months as part of the response certainly giving each person a certain amount of cash in that context would not have met the needs we were able to meet food distribution to four million people thousands of surgeries that saved hundreds of lives mister issa we are talking about a billion dollars is our ten percent right that money hasn't been spent yet some of it has been obligated but that billion dollars has not been spent mister issa let me switch gears for a moment to the ig this is the closest we could be to a disaster outside our u s virtually haiti is about as close as anywhere you are going to get except maybe canada or tijuana if we can't do better in haiti what does that say about our ability to have a poor country that needs ten or twenty million people taken care of whether it is us by ourselves or the world are we organized for success on this scale based on what you have seen in haiti goal that america should be able to meet in a matter of if not weeks a couple of months when you look at the sub components and the fact that the human beings you are trying to help are the work force to put them up it doesn't take special machinery it doesn't take bulldozers it doesn't take heavy lift all it takes is the delivery of the materials and once the port was operational could have been delivered enough for everyone isn't that true mister gambatesa i would think so in a perfect world  is not a perfect world we get that but once the port was opened and our president committed to provide real relief what went wrong that we are here talking about various numbers but ultimately we have supplied did you lack the willingness of the government to cooperate was there great waste was there an absence of people willing to put up their own shelters i certainly think the last one we can assume there were plenty of people willing to put up their own shelters  honest media did a very good job of telling the world that it wasn't so good but that was a televised event where the cameras were on today's hearing is really about the inability to accomplish with the monies given what the goal was in a timely fashion after the camera lights went off if you would limit your answer to that i would appreciate it mister shah right now we are pursuing a comprehensive reconstruction strategy with the government of haiti we are primarily taking the lead in a few  mission you have gone from soft housing to working on hard housing but you are not dealing with one point five million in totality because before you ever got everyone into soft housing you have made shifts through the process so you are always working on a next program that is different than the one you didn't accomplish would that be even a little bit fair mister shah no i don't think so not with respect to housing it was never our goal as americans to directly build temporary shelters for the one point five million displaced haitians a big part of the strategy was to enable as many returns as possible to rural communities to other cities and to de intensify port au prince we supported that effort and had four  five hundred zero people leaving port au prince into host country arrangements we provided a lot of support for that and logistics for that which was very important but that was a government decision that we supported mister issa because my time has expired and they have been very indulgent let me ask for a yes or no are you satisfied with the work you have done as a model for the effort of usaid in the western hemisphere mister shah sir i am never satisfied with anything i always think in this business and this industry of saving lives and helping people who are what about today mister shah i don't know that i would ever use an a for anything but i would say that was a tremendous initial response i think we would generally have had more success with more rapid rubble removal and housing type issues if we had a confluence of factors including more specific support from our partners and the government of haiti to identify land for staging sites and to support some of the issues that were faced at the port and with respect to customs in general we respect shah that is also why we helped set up the interim haiti recovery commission which is co chaired by the haitian prime minister and president clinton it includes as board members a number of major donors and multilateral  very consistent with your writings and public speeches about this subject we are relying very much on our ability to invest in expanding our procurement work force to hire seventy specific civil servants who have the expertise to help us shift from cost reimbursement to fixed price contracting and to use more milestone based performance award mechanisms which we have built and are now propagating out but it takes unique expertise to put that in place and to make that work  and have them work well but also to monitor the money do the accounting and make us feel more comfortable on the one hand we have hollowed it on the other hand we are complaining that we are not getting the accountability and transparency that we want it seems to me if we continue down the path of hollowing it out and not providing the resources go into some of the most difficult situations on the face of the planet we appreciate their efforts and i want them to recognize the value congress places upon their work i know it is hard for them to be away from their families and whatnot  the people around the world serving in usaid a lot of good people with the right heart dedicating their time and talents away from their families difficult security situations difficult living arrangements i don't want to failing to provide data to this body in a timely fashion members of congress spend a great deal of time flying at great taxpayer expense to visit these situations around the world uniformly we have the most difficult time getting the most basic information i just want to have your ongoing commitment that we are going to be able to access that real time data what has been accomplished what are we spending and then be able to see what is actually being spent i think the american taxpayer should know where their billions of dollars are being spent mister shah you certainly have my commitment i would invite you personally and other members of the committee to come potentially with me on some of these trips  that you are continually interested in this i would also like the opportunity to demonstrate some of our programs like feed the future which is working in twenty countries targeting moving eighteen million people including seven million kids out of the state of poverty and hunger  which really does bring together so many of the best practices of what we have learned about development in terms of private sector engagement accountability and conditionality and putting in place the kind of measurement systems that let us know in a very verified  that said i need to say one more time because there have been good relief efforts probably the immediacy of what happened in haiti but having seen it myself having read this report having gone through it  my own personal assessment sixteen months after that devastating earthquake in haiti i think the totality of the u s response has been pathetic and disappointing despite a lot of money moving in that direction and undoubtedly a number of lives that have been saved but we still have hundreds of thousands of people living in conditions no american could probably even fathom how bad it is when you have metrics that say a third of the performance audits for the department were either misstated unsupported or not validated that raises a lot of red flags when we are arguing about whether or not the rubble removal is five or ten percent that is  a stunning number that is shocking sixteen months after the effort when we are missing our goal by sixty five percent in terms of building the shelters when we say we have only achieved less than twenty five percent of the goal it