committee will come to order and i would very much like to welcome our expert panel of witnesses to the committee today to this cause the daunting task that the new administration and the next administration and the congress faces the reforming international izing of the us foreign assistance system it is painfully obvious to congress the administration foreign aid experts and n g o s alike that our foreign assistance program is fragmented and  broken and critical need of overhaul i strongly believe that america's foreign assistance program is not in need of some minor changes but rather it needs to be reinvented and retooled in order to respond to the significant challenges our country in the world faces in the twenty first century this year our committee will review our foreign assistance program to look at what actions are needed to achieve coherency ineffectiveness in the u s foreign assistance framework we will hold a series of hearings various aspects of foreign assistance revolve arm such as rebuilding u s civilian diplomatic and development agencies the role of the military in delivering  shaping foreign assistance and improving america's image around the world these efforts will help inform the committee on the direction that congress and the next administration should take in reforming the u s foreign assistance many experts are calling for a partnership between the congress and the next administration to come together and work on improving our foreign assistance programs i'm committed to this partnership and will do everything i can to ensure that it yields results next year our committee intends to reform and rewrite the foreign assistance act of one thousand nine hundred sixty one that's assuming i have any input into what we do next year  authorities for our civilian agencies agencies to tackle global experiment poverty corruption and other threats to our long term national security goals as congress of the next administration come together on rewriting this legislation we must give greater attention to core development programs particularly basic education child survival maternal health cultural exchanges and agricultural development programs recently there has been a stark examples of poorly performing programs which have resulted in waste fraud and abuse such as the us reconstruction programs in iraq and afghanistan our foreign assistance programs also been crippled by a lack of resources coordination and a lack of critical capacity in the thirty's necessary to support such programs as a result there has been an ad hoc effort to reform our foreign assistance programs through new programs such as the millennium challenge account new mandates and more congressional him in a straight of directives i welcome the effort to better coordinate our foreign assistance programs and to make those programs more accountable by providing merit based assistance to good performing countries who the money and challenge account however i'm concerned that these efforts merely provide a stop gap to the problems which are quire broad reaching and long term solutions with over ten cabinet departments and over fifteen sub cabinet positions and independent agencies involved in implementing foreign assistance our system has become plagued with poor oversight and accountability and i lack of meaningful coordination and coherency and i'm also by the department of defense's rapid encroachments into foreign assistance astonishingly the proportion of d o d foreign assistance has increased from seven percent of bilateral official development assistance in two thousand and one to an estimated twenty percent in two thousand and six d o d activities have expanded to include the provision of humanitarian assistance and training in disaster response counter counternarcotics activities and capacity building of foreign militaries these activities should be carried out by the department of state and usa id the military is overburdened and overstretched and they must focus on the security threats facing our nation while the civilian agency should coordinate their activities with the military to ensure coherency of effort we should no longer rely on the military to be the diplomatic and development face of america around the world idol again like to welcome our witnesses today who will address the just to finish the last part of the statement we look i'm looking forward to the witnesses to get their assessment of the current system and the organizational and legislative obstacles facing the current system and their recommendations for organizational legislative reform specifically should congress and the next president merge usa id completely into the department of state should we upgrade us to a cabinet level department for development or maintain the status quo what should a foreign assistance reauthorization bill look like and i'd also like our witnesses to answer the question how do we balance our national security objectives with our development goals in our foreign assistance or are they mutually reinforcing what role should the u s military play in providing foreign assistance and how do you propose to improve the capacity of u s civilian agencies to respond to the challenges of the twenty first century i colby who served as one of the most respected members of congress on issues involving foreign aid programs were so pleased that you rearranged your schedule in order to be with us chairman colby as the chairman has pointed out despite efforts over the years to to reform our our foreign assistance program over the years and these changes have been attempted by truly great members of congress foreign assistance act in any meaningful way since the one nine hundred seventy three and i commend the chairman of our of our committee mr berman for committing to the task of both authoriz assistance and overhauling our foreign assistance that you which is now close to fifty years old and to reform and update the one nine hundred sixty one foreign assistance act would entail addressing a range of really  difficult issues we would need to look at the categories of assistance their objectives and their associated programs that congress would have to focus on addressing questions concerning aid for development and whether the concepts underlying these which go back to president kennedy's are relevant today and whether they are still effective we would need to consider the the many many restrictions the directives the earmarks that have been placed on our assistance programs something that would raise concerns among many members and not just inside congress but outside as well as policy prescriptions is vital to specific efforts and programs that we most care about we would have to look at ways in which our foreign aid agencies and offices implement and oversee their particular programs what we have today is something like a bowl of spaghetti with the lines of authority and often uncoordinated pursuits of objectives that are difficult to follow we would need to look at the organization and the structure of foreign aid agencies and offices and consider in a detailed manner questions having to do with personnel with procurement with contracting with the valuation and i credit secretary of state rice for trying to address much of this on her own through the creation  of the office of the director for foreign assistance at the state department two years ago however that that effort might not achieve the coordination and evaluation of our assistance that we would all like to see and there have been no congressional engagement in the creation of that new office propose the creation of a new cabinet level department of foreign development but the question is whether a new centralized agency would simply follow and in the path of id was originally set up as a centralized agency and in sixty one but as demands changed some of its programs were taken over or simple spin off agent season entities and projects so cabinet level that is a foreign development agency probably would not be enough to prevent the eventual spin off of  programs as a response to the need for specialized expertise in in areas such as infectious diseases transcend national threats trafficking in persons cyber crime and similar  areas therefore i would like to ask our distinguished panelists what do you view as an alternative structure to respond to current and emerging challenges dynamics needs and priorities a recent commission established by the congress to look at such questions the health commission was unable to agree on this issue but the health commission did prepare a draft bill that provides a basis for discussion today id if appropriate the terminations of functions of certain agencies may be necessary the transfer of new foreign assistance program of the functions to the each covered agency and the consolidation and streamlining of the department of state so i welcome the panelist remarks on these proposals and finally i would like i know that chairman colby has spent so much of his time in congress  dealing with entitlement programs and that may very well confront us with some difficult choices in the in the coming years we may not have much in the way of available funds for foreign aid in the future but if other programs place pressures on our overall budget and one overarching goal must be to ensure that our foreign aid is neither wasted nor lost through corruption and all of us know how difficult it is to defend born aid programs when instances of waste or fraud arise and they become there for us all to see so any effort to reauthorize or reform our foreign aid program must have a new surance that the program is indeed affective and that's what the taxpayers want to want to know and any such efforts would have to be constantly evaluated and this oversight is such a truly looking at foreign aid to tie it to results and that funding would go to those topics and those issues and those programs that work the best for america's taxpayers thank you both thank you very several decades has been put to mini album of all uses but as the oxfam report notes the problem has been coordinating the overall foreign assistance effort and in particular combining shorter national security concerns with the longer term goals of smart and sustainable development i hope this hearing will begin the process of discussing ways to form the u foreign assistance how to reform the legislative and argumentation o structure and the implementation of foreign aid when i was an ambassador or states of micronesia i was confronted with an outbreak of cholera the us a mission performed professionally and absolutely and i will always be impressed by the number of usa idea officials i met who conducted themselves with the highest degree professionalism and knew the culture and knew the environment in which they had to work that being said i am also aware of the bureaucratic structure at the state and the fact that political and economic port from both the congress and the executive branch so that we can have a foreign and mission that really serves our goals of this country and serves our foreign policy well so i hope to hear from our witnesses this morning mr chairman ways in which we can improve our foreign assistance thank you very much time in the 's really difficult politically maybe for the united states now or the peace corps in northern ecuador and i'm convinced that our country needs to lead with a soft assistance in the world our military will always be there but it's much better to have our folks there earlier doing some of the good things our country's known for instead of having to do the military side of it and with that mr chairman i appreciate your effort to do this our committees are a done some things this year with the international  introduction of really an exceptional panel and to discuss the challenges and solutions of reforming our foreign assistance program dr lael brainard is the vice president and director of global economy and development program and holds the bernard l schwartz chair in the international economics at the brookings institution dr brainard served as deputy national economic advisor and chair of the deputy secretaries committee on international economics during the clinton administration previously served as associate professor of applied economics at the mit sloan school she receive your master's and doctoral degrees in economics from harvard university and has authored many studies on foreign assistance global poverty and international economics stephen rattle that is a senior fellow at the center for global development and i think has been talking about this subject for a very long time he's very familiar to the committee he works on issues relating to foreign a developing country debt economic growth and trade between rich and poor countries he was deputy an assistant secretary of the u s treasury for africa the middle east and asia from january two thousand through june two thousand and two and in that capacity he was responsible for developing policies and u s financial relationships with countries in these regions including debt rescheduling programs with the i m f world bank and other financial institutions prior to that mr adelman was on the faculty of harvard university where he's a fellow at the harvard institute for international development director of the institute's macro economic programs and a lecture on economics and public policy he served as an advisor to the indonesian government the ministry of finance and trade in the gambia in gambia and  as an economic advisor to the president and minister of finance of liberia raymond often hisor is the president of oxfam america a nonprofit international development and relief agency and the u s affiliate he served for five years as a ford foundation representative in bangladesh and prior to that in the andean and southern cone regions of south america he's also director of programs for the inner american foundation in both brazil and colombia and work for save the children federation mexico mr often iser holds a masters degree in development sociology from cornell university and earned his bachelor's degree from the university of notre dame and we're all quite pleased to have our former colleague the distinguished congressman jim colby to the committee congressman colby currently serves as senior transatlantic fellow for the german marshall fund of the united states he advises on trade matters as well as issues of effectiveness of u s assistance to foreign cunt trees in u s e u relationships and migration and its relation ship to development is co chair of the transatlantic taskforce on development and serves as an adjunct professor in the college of business at the university of arizona for twenty two years jim colby served in the house of representatives for eleven consecutive terms from  thousand and seven while in congress congressman colby served for twenty years on the appropriations committee of the house and was chairman of the treasury post office and related agencies subcommittee for four years and where we worked with him of course on this committee was for the last six years in congress he served as chair of the foreign operations export financing and related agency subcommittee responsible for state department usa id and other foreign assistance programs i think it's fair to say all of that at no time during the six years you served as chairman of that subcommittee the house foreign affairs committee ever give you the benefits or problems of an authorization bill to work with congressman we intend to change that congressman cole be graduated from northwestern university with a b a degree overdue you know world where remote threat can metastasize into a mediate emergencies the fight against global poverty is truly a fight of necessity not simply because of personal morality but also importantly because of national security america's engagement in this fight harkens back to the best traditions of the marshall plan the founding of the bretton woods institutions and john f kennedy's alliance for progress but today it appeals to a new generation of americans who are actively engaged as never before in advocacy campaigns global service commitments in philanthropy on behalf of the world's poor our consciences our hearts and our faith demand that we tackle deprivation because it's the right thing to do but helping the poor around the world does a lot more than making americans feel good it makes americans it makes the world feel good about america and builds support for our vital interests in other areas at this moment when hard power assets are stretched thin and when we face new threats new twenty first century threats we need a national security strategy that recognizes that development should be elevated alongside defense and diplomacy and deploys foreign assistance strategically as a key instrument of american soft power and a key determinant of that faith that poor people see of america around the world we're gradually at the current time o aspirations and our aid dollars are exceeding our impact on the ground and the reason was already alluded to in the remarks made by the chairman the ranking member in the committee although we've seen very rapid expansion of foreign assistance in the last seven years the administration has responded to each new challenge by creating a new ad hoc institutional arrangement instead of modernizing an infrastructure that was created for the cold war meanwhile the department of defense i think more by default than by design has taking on a growing role and now accounts for about one fifth of our official development assistance in what ranking member  fifty objectives different agencies are pursuing overlapping objectives with poor communication and coordination with the inevitable result that oversight and accountability have suffered instead of clarifying missions and rationalizing offices state while well conceived super imposed yet another layer of bureaucracy into this max the year ahead i think offers a unique opportunity for this committee to update and upgrade america's foreign assistance capability i think instead of the fifty odd often outdated objectives that the executive branch is currently pursuing its foreign assistance act should narrow the focus to roughly five strategic priorities addressing poverty and need supporting the emergenc capable foreign partners who share our values and countering security humanitarian and transnational threats instead of the current spread of fifty offices managing aid we should have one agency with the authority and the operational capability and the accountability to carry out these missions effectively complemented by interagency coordination located at the white house in terms of what that reform should look like let me mention briefly for guidelines firstly i think it's vital to elevate both development and diplomacy not just in principle alongside defense as in the two thousand and two national security strategy but also in practice elevating development will be absolutely critical to attract and retain  talented professionals in the field although it's outside the scope of my testimony here recent commissions have also highlighted the need to in the diplomacy pillar i strongly agree with that recommendation and think these two recommendations are mutually reinforcing establishing a strong and separate voice for development will enable the state department to strengthen its core mission of diplomacy which is in many instances quite different from development and sometimes require working with different entities overseas  in different means and also often brings to a conflict short term political objectives versus those long term investments in development and democratization that need to continue importantly i think defense is significantly expanded its direct provision of foreign assistance and we can failing states and i believe that this is due to perceived gap filling because of the perceived weaknesses in civilian capabilities with an already overstretched military going forward it's critical to upgrade our civilian capability in order to create separate and complementary roles by design not by default it is in order to do so the second thing is it is critical to invest in our operational civilian capabilities we currently have a readiness deficit on the civilian side usa id staff has fallen by a third at a time when spending has risen dramatically and by some estimates nearly a third of remaining usa id foreign service officers are eligible for retirement at a time when the premium on technical expertise is higher than ever usa id has only five engineers on staff and over half of its professionals work in generalist areas third it's critical to achieve coherence across policies increasingly in today's world trade investment policies policies are force multipliers for our foreign assistance and we can no longer afford to choose those strategies and separate cohn's nowhere is this more apparent than on agriculture currently our development agenda and our domestic farm and biofuel policies are working at cross purposes at a moment where we are seeing food riots threatening important developing country governments around the world and of course it's critical to achieve that coherence by having high level coordination at the white house as we do on national security finally i think it's critical to rationalize agencies in order to clarify missions and improve accountability i personally having a chair to a task force on this topic have arrived at the conclusion that a cabinet level department of global development would be the best way to eliminate redundant bureaucratic layers and address today's mentation while ensuring against the subordination of long term investments and democratization development to short term political objectives and i think the u department for international development has shown this is both achievable and can measurably boost effectiveness so let me just summarize by saying i think this committee is the right place to lay the groundwork for the next president to capitalize on what i see is a growing consensus in favor of modernizing our aid infrastructure larry knowles formerly of the congressional research service who i believe is here today did a study of past episodes of successful transformation and  one clear conclusion is that those successful transformations occur in the first months of the new administration so the countdown has begun successful we're form is going to require the personal commitment both of the president and congressional champions that is also very clear from that analysis the recommendations that i'm making here today don't importantly require big budgetary resources in fact they magnify the impact make it effective and accountable for our twenty first century challenges thank you thank you dr doctor thank you very much chairman berman ranking member last and then and other members of the committee let me try to briefly summarize my remarks in my view today's complex global challenges requires a new vision of american global leadership that really promotes our values enhances our security helps create economic and political opportunities for people around the world and helps restore america's faltering image abroad to do so we can't rely exclusively or even primarily on defense and security to meet these goals we need to make greater use of all the tools of statecraft to do so including diplomacy defense trade investment intelligence and a strong and effective foreign assistance program we have at hand today i believe the best opportunity we've had for many many years to modernize and strengthen our foreign assistance programs the combination of the challenges that we face abroad concern about us standing the broad agreement on the importance of foreign assistance and the upcoming change in the administration creates the opportunity for deep change i hope we can seize that opportunity if we are content with multiple bureaucracies overlapping functions outdated legislation inefficient spending and only mixed success then we should continue with the status quo or just make marginal changes but if we wish to make foreign assistance a vibrant tool to strengthen u s leadership abroad to fight poverty and to build a better and safer world and it's time to take on the the challenge of modernization reform and change i fully concur with dr brainard's diagnosis of some of the problems in the key components of a reform strategy but let me focus on three key areas first the need for global development strategy second the need for new foreign assistance and third how our system should fit together with the efforts of other of other countries in multilateral agencies one of the key weaknesses in our approach is the lack of clarity on our goals our policies and our objectives our efforts to promote global proper prosperity and reduce poverty should be treated as a principle not a subordinate element of our global engagement alongside defense and diplomacy but the first step to develop a strategy along these lines is to elevate global development as critical to both our national interest and to the broader interests of the world that should lay out our principle objectives and goals and the basic framework for foreign assistance both bilateral and multilateral that will use to achieve those goals one of the key issues is articulating and balancing two of the key goals of foreign assistance and hansing our national security and promoting american values by fighting poverty around the world in the long run both of these are important and they're mutually reinforcing when the u s pursues them strategically it positions itself as a pragmatic and principled world leader but since september eleventh foreign assistance has been dominated by national security interests in fighting terrorism that's wholly appropriate but it risks obscuring the equally important imperative of fighting global poverty which in and of itself is a means to address the causes of conflict terrorism and unhappiness around the world supporting development will help build a world more capable open democratic and up an economically viable state can act together as our allies and our partners a national development strategy should describe the major programs that will be used to meet these objectives going beyond foreign assistance to also include how we will use trade our foreign international finance policies diplomacy defense immigration investment and other policies which would also summarize the key budgetary requirements and critically it must include how we will monitor and evaluate our programs we need to be clear on what we are trying to achieve and and how we are balancing these objectives and how we are progressing meeting these goals right now are monitoring and evaluation program processes are very weak and we don't know actually what we do well and what we don't do well and we can't very well without seriously strengthening our ability to measure our progress towards achieving those goals one of the key i'd like to turn my attention now to the second key issue which is rewriting the foreign assistance act it's way past time to write the foreign it's over fifty years old it's grounded in cold war threats it's over five hundred pages long it's full of earmarks restrictions and all kinds of other things that are just a burden to affectively delivering our foreign  assistance it provides very little flexibility to those operating on the ground the issue is not about no earmarks are eliminated earmarks or restrictions or waivers or anything else the issue is that there is just way too much on it and the legislation is really crushing itself under its own weight and with the combination of all of the earmarks together even if individually they make a lot of sense the combination of them provides just too little flexibility for those operating on the ground to meet our primary our primary interest rewriting the foreign assistance act would provide the basis for a grand bargain between the congressional executive branches with a shared shared vision on the balance of responsibilities on authorities and the key objectives in mechanisms for foreign assistance although several pieces of critical reform can be achieved without legislation such as creating a new strategy strengthening monitoring evaluation and improving procurement i believe that without  without a rewriting of the foreign assistance act we cannot fully implement the reforms and changes that are needed as part of this we need to we need to agree on the jack design goals as i have mentioned we need to reduce the ex foreign assistance act would provide the opportunity to redress part of the new act would be addressing the organizational issue and we've already talked about that a little bit today there's a little bit of a danger that we focus too much on the organizational reform because there's a lot of other things that need to be done but having said that i think organizational change is necessary to reduce the bureaucracy and eliminate the inefficiencies i think that a cabinet agency is critically important precisely so it does not get fragmented in the future i think one of the reasons that usa id has faced this this fragmentation it is is because it has not had the independence and the strength and it has been burdened with this burgeoning foreign assistance act that has led to other agencies trying to do what usa id was trying to do a stronger independent agency coupled with a new stronger foreign assistance act would provide the basis so that our foreign aid does not get fragmented going going forward i believe that it would be a mistake to fold foreign assistance programs more fully into the state department i think in the long run that would undermine the effectiveness of our programs because because our development goals would be subordinated to diplomacy and all too often long term development objectives would be undermined by the short term focus on on pressing diplomatic and political issues the core objectives of the state department are quite different than those for development and just recognize it is important to separate some of our other tools of foreign policy such as trade policy such as international financial policies such as our intelligence policy and defense policy from our diplomacy at the state department so too it is important to separate and give the independence to our our development policies and our foreign assistance while coordinating closely state department let me briefly turn to the third the third issue which is working with our development partners a big part of modernizing our foreign assistance is to rethink much more strategically how our assistance works together with others a major lesson over the last few years is that our foreign policy leverage is much stronger when we work in concert with our friends and our partners through multilateral approaches and the same is true with foreign assistance unfortunately today only about ten percent of our assistance goes through multilateral channels the rest ninety percent we do on our own this ten percent figure is down from twenty percent just a few years ago and compares with other donors that provide thirty three percent of their assistance through multilateral channels the united kingdom has now replaced the united states as the major contributor to the world bank's concessional finance arm for the first time in history to keep problems come along with that one is that our money goes much further when we leverage it with our partners and our allies and the second is that as we provide less funding to the multilateral agencies we lose our influence in the direction and the policies of those agencies many of them do need reform but we're not going to be able to affect that reform if our share of the funding is being reduced taking on these challenges for foreign assistance reform won't be easy it's been tried many times before but i believe that the moment is here and is right that we can do that i think it's time to take advantage of this opportunity to modernize and strengthen our assistance so that we can more effectively combat poverty widen the circle of development prosperity fight terrorism enhance u s security and further other strategic interests abroad this hearing and as chairman i'd like to begin just by applauding your efforts in particular to put this issue on the calm rational agenda and say that we very much at oxfam share your sentiments that america must rebuild our capacity to engage in the fight against global poverty  for those who may not know oxfam we're a global organization working to reduce poverty in over one hundred twenty countries around the world we take no u s government funding our u s support comes from the american citizens and organizations that care about global poverty the perspective i'd like to bring to today's hearing is from the field from the poor and from the customers of our aid programs where oxfam witnesses on a daily basis the best and worst of u s foreign assistance and overwhelmingly i must report the customers of us foreign aid is currently designed feel that it is failing failing in particular to help people realize lasting change in their communities and in their lives this morning's headlines i think part of the story skyrocketing food prices are setting off riots in countries around the world where people are already living on what this vividly illustrates is a poverty anywhere in the world can threaten global as well as our own national security to deal with the unique challenges of a twenty first century globalizing world we desperately need a twenty first century strategic vision that addresses all three pillars of our national security strategy defense diplomacy and development when we see the military using foreign aid as a force multiplier or diplomats using it to persuade a foreign government to cooperate with us politically our experience in the field is that you are unlikely to have any impact on the deeper issues of poverty that plague a society and may cripple its government when we see the department of defense spending one fifth of our development funding while our civilian agencies suffer from a depleted capacity and resources in the field we believe that our short term tactical concerns are trumping our long term strategic interests my colleagues have already made the case for major fundamental reform a new foreign assistance act a new cabinet level department for global development a new strategy for reducing poverty and porting economic growth in developing countries at oxfam we endorse all three of these proposals i'd like to take a few moments now to explain why from our point of view from the basis of a customer's perspective these reforms are important drawn from the kinds of experience that we and other agencies represented in this room have working directly with the poor because the united states has no development strategy and no clear institutional leadership of our overall development policy many countries where oxfam works confront a plethora of us agencies working at cross purposes in non strategic way take afghanistan with at least eight different u s government agencies working there u s military political and development efforts are coordinated on the ground only when u s officials make a special effort to talk to each other when they don't and they often don't they work at cross purposes burden local officials with too many meetings waste u s taxpayer money and fail to keep our promises to the afghan people our lack of a strategy is compound it by an out of date legal framework that confuses rather than guides the  illustrative of this problem is the fact that the body of law governing us foreign aid today contains the phrase and i quote notwithstanding any other provision of law two hundred fifty two times this complexity of the law might be worth it if the law address global challenges today's global challenges in some detail but in fact it doesn't for example congress appropriated one point eight billion dollars for child survival and health in two thousand and eight alone this program has never been authorized by this committee the foreign assistance act makes no more than a few passing references to it and the law provides absolutely no strategic guidance as to how congress expects the funds to be spent or what results they should achieve given this type of strategic absurdity in the current law how can a us an idea employ on the ground do their job indeed can you here in congress have any confidence that they are doing their job it is our experience again in the field that if you really want to tackle global poverty you need to change the practice on the ground specifically u s foreign aid must do more to put poor countries and poor people in control of their own future give them agency engender a sense of ownership the end goal of any sensible foreign policy should be to put itself out of business we need to help governments and citizens find ways to finance their own development eventually we want to see a world that doesn't need us foreign aid because it doesn't have poverty but if we as the united states ever get out of the foreign aid business then we need to deliver aid in a way that strengthens rather than undermines the relationships between citizens and governments in poor countries afghanistan's national solidarity program illustrates this concept in two thousand and three this program gave rural villages ownership over their own economic development in one village near the pakistani border where the taliban insurgents have been active for some time villagers chose to build their own hydro power plant that will bring electricity to about three hundred families near the site villagers record government and a public square for the entire village quoting one villager this is our money all the time we're checking whether it is being spent correctly because villages are actually creating these projects of course they want to protect them what's more the taliban feels less comfortable attacking village led projects than it does clearly branded foreign aid projects smart development means that we have to stop telling poor people what they need and let them tell us what they need we need to adopt the approach taught in our best business schools here in the united states listen to your customer understand his or her on his terms to partnership means ceding a measure of control something that is hard often for washington to do but when we fail to take time to listen to poor people we waste our tax dollars and we waste our time another example during the asian tsunami in two thousand and four what us government responded rapidly and effectively with humanitarian relief but when it came time to rebuild villages in thailand were delivered unsolicited votes from the us government and other aid agencies villagers who were day laborers not fisherman before the tsunami felt obliged to become fisherman in order to put the  boat one villager told researchers we've got too many boats and aren't enough people or fishing spots to go to fill it in the village i think there are more boats than fish in another case development  dollars literally went up in smoke and afghan in geo described a project to deliver roofing timbers to people in afghanistan central highlands the agency overseeing the project based in geneva took twenty percent of the thirty million for administrative costs and then sub contracted to a washington based ngo that took another twenty percent which in turn subcontracted to an afghan n g o s took another twenty percent then they paid an iranian trucking company to conversed when poor people are put in charge of their own development we can see real success oxfam america for example has a micro finance program called saving for change which differs from traditional micro finance the participants save land and pay each other interest without taking on debt from a bank credit provider or a money lender they can use these loans to start small businesses or buy much needed supplies their families the people who benefit would have usually been left behind by traditional banks and credit they are the poorest of the poor the program self replicate on a large scale and to low cost serving those who need a safe place to save or access to a small loan by supporting village groups that act as their own community banks the program is improve the livelihoods of poor people and increase their access to financial services since the savings for change program was launched in two thousand and five more than one hundred thousand people in mali senegal burkina faso and cambodia joined the program grows rapidly  used in this way it works is more than just a gap filler instead it becomes a catalyst that mobilizes local resources there's a difference between charity and investment smart development again means that we invest in poor people and poor countries as partners and view our efforts in the context of other forces at work in their societies there is no quick fix for global poverty i don't think any of us on this panel believe that this is a long term effort and involves significant investment in institution building and a building equitable growth demands patience unfortunately right now our political process undermines patient effort by creating unrealistic expectations demanding instantaneous results and issuing confusing constantly changing directives by relying on the annual annual budget cycle to fund our foreign aid we are centrally moving the goal posts every twelve months for the billions of poor people who are asking for our help and for the aid officials who are trying to organize a five year strategic plan within their missions government after government has told oxfam and in the two thousand and four study that we did that u s foreign aid creates more headaches for them than aid from any other donor tell us that us foreign aid is the most burdensome of any to administrate when president kennedy laid out his vision for us usa idea in his one hundred sixty one inaugural address he painted a vision of american leadership based on our values he called us to public service and committed us to fight for the world's poor and i quote not because the communists may be doing it not because we seek their votes but because it is right one hundred sixty one this is another once in a generation opportunity we seek the leadership of the members of this committee to fix begun this process with this hearing we hope there will be many more such hearings this year to highlight the issues and educate the members and the  public those of us in the room from oxfam and from the interaction community we are working to convince the presidential candidates that foreign aid reform must be a high priority early in the next administration and we firmly believe that if you exercise leadership to address this challenge the american people will support you the energy is out there is out there and as a firm believe that america must in reengage the world in a positive way around its values and i can promise you that many organizations represented in this room and many others not here ranking member rustling other members of the committee for this opportunity to testify before you this morning as chairman pointed out not long ago i sat on the other side of the dias as a member so it's an honor for me to be here today to discuss the future of u s foreign i think it's fair to say that the next administration in the next congress can play a role in shaping reshaping our foreign assistance program if they choose to do so by working together branches have to be involved in the key decisions to structure reform streamline the way u s government prioritizes funds and delivers foreign aid pointed out i spent twenty two years in the house of representatives the last six of those as chairman of the subcommittee that funded most of the us foreign assistance programs i certainly found during my tenure the priorities shifted dramatically particularly in the aftermath of september eleventh as a result of the radical change in the global environment the administration added development as a third pillar of national security policy but the foreign operations three zero two reallocation is traditionally been one of the smaller appropriations committee allotments although the percentage of foreign aid funding changed little the overall foreign aged budget dramatically increased during the time that i was chairman the new initiatives that were launched by the administration speak for themselves the president's emergency plan for aids relief far as garnered widespread support from the administration from congress and the ngo community the millennium challenge corporation continues to offer an innovative approach to aid that reinforces local ownership good governance and economic freedom for recipient nations as an initiative i support as chairman to work closely with this committee to draft legislation that created this new approach to foreign assistance as a former appropriate addressing authorizer i think we know how rare that collaboration is we are proud of that effort and i continue to support the tenants the tenets and the delivery record of the m c c and i are just committed to do so as well as i left congress i've begun to examine for assistance more broadly as a senior transatlantic fellow at the german marshall fund of the united states working together i think the united states canada and europe can help to rationalize the system not just because most of us accept the moral imperative to alleviate poverty but because fostering economic growth in the developing world can lead to shared prosperity and improve security for all of us with this thought in mind the german marshall fund launched a major look at foreign assistance creating a platform for transatlantic learning debate and policy reformulation around foreign assistance and development the mission of our task force is to provide strategic recommendations to strengthen trans atlantic cooperation in the relevant and harness of the public opinion in a way that can create conditions for reform the task force will act as a platform for the exchange of innovative ideas in an environment conducive to intensive policy analysis and we look forward to sharing those results with you when the task force completes its work this fall in time for the next administration let me turn now to the questions that were posed by this committee in its call for this hearing you have four of them first us one of the problems of playing foreign assistance international development system has become increasingly complex the number the average number bilateral bilateral donors parade recipient and the words for it let's take a country like tanzania has increased from about twelve in the one nine hundred sixty to thirty three different bilateral donors giving aid to that country that's the average country development is no longer a predominately a government a government domain the rise of mega foundations like gates corporate foundations social responsibility programs of private corporations and hybrid actors a broad new opportunities but also new challenges in development u s trade policies often fail to achieve and sometimes undermine our development goals is critical to us demonstrate leadership and help to bring the w around the multi lateral trade talks to a successful conclusion legislation was introduced to extend duty free status to non oral products of many muslim nations this legislation has languished over the years it is a shameful fact that the united states collects more tariff duties from bangladesh and cambodia than it does from britain and france second the question you asked was what recommendations you have to improve the u s foreign assistance program including organizational and legislative recommendations developed should be considered a much greater element of national security the foreign assistance act is been described here at the tables cumbersome it's complicated it's outdated it ought to be simplified above all as a priority this includes creating a new comprehensive for assistance act to replace the one hundred sixty one act and over twenty pieces of additional legislation that now accompany operationally the mission and structure of usaid usa id ought to be done to find more clearly now i differ with the others on the panel here in saying i don't think this is necessarily an argument for full cabinet level position for development so i'm open to that argument a new cabinet secretary without thinking through all the other changes that have to accompany it only adds another read on the layer of bureaucracy what we do neither should be clearly more flexibility within the funding allocated to development assistance fewer congressional earmarks eliminating the inefficient use of tied aid to purchase american goods the third question you asked what is the appropriate balance between national security and long term development of finding a balance is certainly not easy but it's very important national security is always going to be a paramount administration for any administration this or any of those succeeds the war on terror will continue in another ministration even if it goes by a different name  longer term development objectives should not be sacrificed for short term security goals the time to do so undermines our security over the long term if these countries do not develop stable economies and the last question you asked is what is the opinion regarding efforts to reform the inner agency process including calls to rewrite the national security act of one thousand nine hundred seven as i mentioned earlier the president has added global development as a third pillar of national security but our institutions and practices have not been altered to reflect this change the u s government has over twenty different departments i think we just heard down here that over fifty are identified twenty different departments and agencies engaged in development work and redundancies are policies have to be fashioned to ensure the long term development institutions policies and practices are preserved and strengthened the push for policy coherence has not been achieved in fact has led to greater incoherence and a weakening of support for development among some lawmakers the push for policy coherence leads to a one size fits all solution where long term development priorities are sidelined the agencies that support development defense and diplomacy cannot it seems to me be bundled under a single roof in conclusion i want to focus the committee's attention to what i think may be the most critical challenge to any successful overall of our foreign assistance program and that is how do we rebuild public support for it before september eleventh i would wager that you face it every public meeting the same hostile questions that i had about four and a the events of september eleventh modified that somewhat shifted the focus a bit but our constituents continue to be concerned about domestic security issues that impact their lives more directly your challenge as a committee our challenge as a nation is to draw the connections between foreign aid and national security as well as domestic help and economic issues i worry that isn't a we are turning inward when we should be doing exactly the opposite congress and the new administration will need the public support to continue current commitments let alone reform political leaders we must help the public understand that our economy is intertwined with the global economy and that our food and energy prices are impacted by the demand for food and energy all over the world there is no turning inward in a globalized world and foreign aid is one tool we use remote a healthier more secure and economically stable world jim and i thank you for this opportunity to look forward to the questions that you organization of this for a second put aside serious inner agency issues i'll just give you my experience i've been chairman of this committee for months and  reference a program the u s helped lead the way on that has done an amazing amount an effort to modernize and the compelling nature for addressing this issue yesterday i met with a group of people most important and serious issue we have to address the issue of universal global education we've heard references in this testimony to the value of child survival programs some people have come and talked about in the end for the for the larger purposes of ending poverty we have to create more science capacity and in these individual countries is a great deal of attention paid to nutrition and of course we see it now every day in the headlines the whole issue of agricultural production and in some ways i think as you pointed out there some of our domestic policies in terms of agriculture and our desire to encourage agricultural better agricultural development and third world countries mr often sort of says let let's let the poor people i mean you know i don't want to oversimplify here but you know what your point was listen to the people of these countries in your effort to deal with global poverty and global development in terms of justice i wonder off the top of my head i can barely decide which is the most important there's a group of people who don't have access to education able to understand the value that education could bring for them so maybe this sounds elitist and it is washington that's hard to let go but what is the metric for all of the what is the method by which you think we should sort through all of this and yes you can say well congress shouldn't be making calculated decisions about which ones to favor somebody else should but somebody in the executive branch is doing it otherwise or or somebody in the bureaucracy that we create to do this what is the framework for making a sensible decision about how to balance all these on the surface absolutely compelling case for giving whatever we have to those particular issues how do we balance all that out in the context of government of the agency that you are contracting with but i think the important thing is what is the millennium challenge corporation done and what kinds of projects have the countries chosen to ask for in the compact that they've entered into and look at those not quite starkly different basis i think to hear from all of you as well the question that you raise goes right to the heart of the difficulty of the challenge but the reason that i think at the end of the day we need to take on this challenge we have scarce resources there are more challenges out there than we can possibly address i think as we have looked at this issue of public support in particular we are always struck that public support is much  stronger when it can be a challenge visibly and something that is easy to mobilize against because you can put a face on that global education i think over time people have gravitated towards that general growth is a lot harder to get a lot of people excited about really the burden and the difficulty of making those kinds of tradeoffs between what there is a lot of support for and what at the end of the day we should be prioritizing strategically i actually think that that is the purpose of an national development strategy i think one radical idea that we should do what we're good at and perhaps let others in the international community or the private sector or o s do things that the government may not be so good at i think we've actually been pretty good at global health for instance we have an amazing science infrastructure to bring to that task there are other things maybe we're not so good at so at the end of the day it is critical to make trade offs right now we're not making those tradeoffs i think that is in a nutshell the difficulty that the funding process is responsive to mobilization in a way that doesn't bring all the different pieces together at an overarching whole of government level and that is the fundamental change that needs to happen constituencies doing all doing good work and all addressing critically important problems but we're not necessarily doing that work in a coherent and well ordered way so for example you might program in some on government citizen participation and so on and so forth at oxfam we actually have come to feel like the core of whatever strategic vision that we might offer should have sort of three be a three legged stool in which what we're really looking to do develop effective focus on the institutional capacity of the states i think that the work that's been done in afghanistan for example toward that end it's a long journey but that's been a lot of what's been going on develop active citizenship and  enable citizens to actually hold their government accountable for the kind of funding expenditures that governments are making and the kind of programs that government actually have because in effect governments at the end of the day have to deliver the public goods to citizens foreign aid programs are never going to have enough money to do that and sure that we get the kind and at the end of the day we need citizens interacting with each other in a responsible way to ensure that we get the kind of stable environments that are going to ensure the security that we're looking for around the world and that has to be the third around that you do you begin to think about what are the particular institutional structures and modern institutional structures in modern institutional thinking that we want to bring to the these questions and in the sectoral components i think then we start looking at what is the country to have to cut you off that's why dr atala will have to get back to you or you have to find a way and insinuate you're such and somebody else question ranking member thank you so much mr chairman it really is impress e i guess i don't know what the word is this chart yes it make spaghetti look simple this is unbelievable the foreign assistance legislation  organizations is frightening that the chairman is is willing to undertake this reform is going to be a daunting challenge for us but i but i welcome it i wanted to ask chairman colby as a  former appropriator former chairman of the subcommittee on on foreign operations what were your your greatest concerns with committees like when we came about with programs about the foreign aid funding policy measures that were supported by the committee of authorization because as we as we undertake this great adventure to reform to move our reform bill we have to work with the appropriators and and if we want to begin the process of passing this this legislation to reform or replace the foreign assistance act of sixty one where do you think would be our  logical first steps and if we were to get it through the house and working with the appropriators what how can we build support for this program is in the senate so much of the work that we do here unfortunately doesn't seem to to get over to the other side and including our great pepfar bill which was greatly supported and and also the concerns of of groups and supporters of specific foreign assistance programs that have serious concerns on behalf of the aid directives that we put out the policies that support these programs how do you  in a practical way playing out as we begin the process now but really build up for greater action next year well that's a big question with a lot of lot of possibilities for the answer but let me let me start by saying quite frankly i don't think you're going to have a lot of success unless you start with the administration on board on this by that i mean you can lead on this the congress can lead but the the ministration better be there as cheerleaders am playing in the band along the way because otherwise it's just not going to succeed this is a this is going to be heavy lifting and it's going to require a real team effort between the administration the next administration whoever that might be republican or democrat a real heavy lifting on both sides to make this kind of thing happen my recommendation would be to start with taking the foreign assistance act  if you're looking at the foreign assistance act and looking at ways in which you can be simplified and you can eliminate half more than half of those lines consolidate some of those things simplify the structure of the way in which is rather than trying to create a whole new agency that's why it's not that i differ with the idea of the importance of development with my colleagues it's just that i think having been at this game long enough i think there is i know the practical problems of trying to do what  restructure the whole thing with an entire new agency and a new cabinet level agency i think that's going to be tough to do so i would start with trying to simplify the thing the things that we were many of us have talked about here today and then i would in terms of how you're going to that's support over in the senate to get this done again the administration's going to be critical to that you're going to need the media support i mean we've had strong media support on a lot of other issues issues and we're going to have to work with the the members of the senate over there it is tough as we know the millennium challenge corporation is the best example that we had where we passed it here as an authorizer we passed it on the floor of the house we got over the senate and senator lugar just couldn't get it over in the senate it just couldn't move over there and so they came back to us and said how about doing this on the appropriation bill and we said well only if we're going to work in cooperation with the authorizing committees on this and we did and i think the results show a bill that was well drafted carefully thought out and i think frankly improved in the time he took after passed the house and before it came on to the appropriation bill we made a lot of modifications to it that i think can improve it so that process doesn't prove it but sometimes that is the only way that you can do this thank you articulated the needs but that needs to be balanced by what we can do well and that brings us to our monitoring and evaluation programs which are which are very very weak i think to get at that issue of how we balance what issues we  really need to fundamentally address how we monitor and evaluate our programs so that we can understand what it is we do well and what it is we don't do well and we're not in a position to do that we actually evaluate a lot of programs individually but we don't bring them together and look at them systematically across programs to figure out what it is we do best that's part of the answer the other part of the answer is then to work with our partners more carefully because what it is that we don't well we want to make sure that somebody else  doing well we don't need all of the thirty three bilateral agencies in there trying to dig wells or trying to do maternal and child health or whatever it is we want to provide that support to do that and for others to do something different so i think it's a combination of monitoring and evaluation and working cooperatively with our partners sort of a comparative advantage and apply it to development capabilities and the gentleman from washington mr smith recognized for five minutes thank you mr chairman thanks for this hearing and for the tremendous panel that we have on this issue i do think that the organization at least the starting point is the key to improving this situation we've talked a lot about the different strategies out there and i'm sure if we picked all four of us go off you right the strategy would be a little bit different for all four of you but i think there is a growing consensus and an understanding just because so much effort by our government by n g o s on health care and education on a bunch of different pieces i think there's a lot of knowledge out there on what works and what doesn't work in terms of development assistance the problem is that that chart that you have not just four but several hundred if not more people devising the strategy and working at cross purposes so what i really want to delve into is exactly how that organization would come together and i guess the idea of creating the cabinet level position for a secretary of development if you will you know my concern is that the size of that list to get there i think will probably have to work within existing organizations and it's not just a matter of foreign aid as  colby's point i mean trade economic development are critical issues if you look at a development strategy foreign aid is a piece of it and there are other elements so i'm really interested in sort of drilling down when you look at the various agencies from usa id department of defen as we've noted is very involved in this on the armed services committee as well and do a lot of work with the special operations command spending a lot of time doing development question is how do you pull all those pieces together just as a model would be a little bit on the counterterrorism side and what we did in terms of specifically targeting terrorists prior to nine eleven you had a you had a chart for that job didn't look too much different from this chart and by my reading having worked in there actually done a com all these different pieces now or coordinating better and they do have some people who are in charge so as we put together this organizational chart i think looking at how they did that might be a pretty decent model but getting down to the specifics what does it look like who separate department and so i said ok you're in charge of the strategy how do they gather in all the other people on that chart and make sure that they're coordinating well and spending the money wisely what is sort of your individual visions on that the part of the president and members of congress this committee would have to be part of that it is doable if you look at the diff it example and we've spent a lot of time looking at that example because i think it is the one outside of the s that provides the the most relevant learning i think you're right that within the us there's also a host of examples that are that are useful what was critical there again was just that agreement both  within the incoming administration that this was a high priority and that support from parliament in the case here the questions i think would arise do you have legislation authorizing legislation which would enable you to build around a single entity whether it's building around us the idea whether it's merging m c c and us the idea whether you're starting afresh and bringing those functions in but that would be of course the great benefit of actually having legislation the executive branch can do something short of that presumably elevate the head of a idea to a cabinet level on a kind of executive basis for that length of time but i don't think ultimately at the end of the day that you will get the institutional coherence that we are all seeking by doing a stopgap measure now you also asked about some other functions that will never should never reside in a development agency even if it were to exist trade is going to stay outside the department of defense is always going to have functions particularly non permissive environments or some a permissive environment that it's uniquely capable of doing the state department will always have a foreign assistance function that is focused on  political objectives and so they're the the answer of having an organisation that is competent and operationally capable is a part of the answer you need inner agency coordination at the highest level coming from the white house and we've never had that on the set of issues with the force and focus that we need over time but i would point out i think the national counterterrorism center that was set up is pretty decent model where you bring doubly concerned with earmarks with regard to foreign operations spending because we have disclosure requirements now that apply to so called hard earmarks that don't apply to so called soft where we find a lot of these can you comment a bit on that and give some examples perhaps of where this is becoming a problem or a problem or maybe increasing the problem well let me let me say first of something like that mostly soft earmarks for the most part so you're right the rules aren't going to govern as much there so i do think that what you have to do is try to reduce those kinds of things as much as possible harder marks for sure from being written in the bill now i want to speak also on the other side of this as an appropriator saying that i don't think that the process is one so i do think there is a requirement for specificity in the law as to how we're going to do that in finding that balance is not easy and that's what i know that you have been working on a great deal here but one of the things you can do is eliminate a lot of these soft earmarks that are written in the language of the report of the report language actually directives for the agencies to follow and as you pointed out don't have the same requirements for reporting that are going to be in the in that are going to be in the bill so i'm not giving a lot of real direction here because i think it's a real challenge to maintain the constitutional responsibility you have as a legislator to decide how the funds but also not to go around your mar reforming our foreign assistance programs at the same time instead of saying all right we don't like the way it's being done over here it's not serving our function so we're going to create a completely new program i felt that some of what we we need a cabinet level agency or can we if we're not going to have that what can we do still to reform this process doctor and that i think we there's no silver bullet here i don't think we can really address these problems with just a new strategy and agree on goals i don't think we can address this with just just the legislation although i think the legislation would go a long way i don't think we can do this just with organizational reform and i do worry that sometimes this  framed as as just the organizational reform but organization is important and the fact that we have so many agencies doing more or less the same thing is just inefficiency and waste and by bringing the agencies together we would actually reduce government  lot of this waste and make things more efficient so i think bringing them together is a key thing that needs to be strong and independent prefer a cabinet level agency not absolutely necessarily examples like oh pick an ax and then others that have independence and strength that are not necessarily that but leaving them leaving the situation as it is will only lead to further weakening one of the reasons the ranking member mentioned that more and more over the years these programs  do it themselves and that needs to be redressed so i think we need we do need to bring them together with a strong and independent as agency as possible cabinet level would be performable but it's not an issue that we've either got the status quo or or a cabinet level agency one solution that i think would make things worse and i think at least many of us here would agree with actually taking the solution is to bring everything in the state department i think that actually would seriously undermine things in the long run so we need some independence coordination with the white house won't do it because coordination is a short term fix that relies on individual personalities and it might work for wanted ministration but it won't it doesn't institutionalize things but i do think it is important to bring things member mr colby talked about the ministration by and i think we have to agree and getting them early and in the transition period and doing the things that you're doing now to get the folks who are involved around around the candidates focused and thinking about this little bit i think is essential i do have to say i think senator biden based on my conversation with him and senator lugar are both very interested in taking this on so i think there is a basis here for  want to echo the comments of many of my colleagues and welcoming all of you to this important hearing and i know that all of you been working on these issues for a long time and i appreciate you sharing the knowledge of the problem with us and i hope that we can hear from officials of the department of state department of defense and get their perspective on these issues as well let me ask a question there are several schools of thought with respect to rationale is that foreign assistance should be carried out to reflect the humanitarian nature of the american people and then there's a final school of thought that foreign assistance should be used to promote u  s experts in your opinion what should be the purpose of u s foreign assistance i actually think that foreign assistan promotes all three promote u s national security national interest and national values and i think it is rare that those things are actually in conflict and increasingly they are very consistent with each other if you think about humanitarian emergencies increasingly those have crossed borders spillovers those we can those come back around to haunt us on the national security front alternately are long term development objectives of creating democratic states that meet the needs of their own people offers the best hope for americans to have strong partners in the world and not to need to intervene and i also wanted to just briefly come back to this question of the cabinet level and take thirty seconds on that and just say i think there are three reasons why this is critically important to elevate at this juncture one because without cabinet level status you will have no representation at the white house that has been a huge problem i used to coordinate the white house  did not have a seat at the table and that undermined our development effectiveness secondly we will not rebuild civilian capacity and till we have a strong cabinet level voice explaining why it's important third internationally by elevating respond i think i would agree with the other channels here that are all interlinked they're not they're not mutually exclusive by any means you have a failed state for example take a good example the first order of business might mean to provide humanitarian force that concept i think i've taken a different position from the other members and saying that i didn't think it was necessary to have a cabinet level position i think it's going to be a very heavy lift i don't see this in being a high enough priority in the next congress or the next  the level of stature and certainly the importance here as we talk about projection of soft power and doing the right thing for the right reasons i'm not so sure a cabinet position necessarily guarantees that straddle and i heard you and on highs or talk about the need to reorganize and combine under one umbrella i think those are my words not quite your words and certainly it's clear to me that when you look at this kind of a graphic that  something needs to be done but that was the purpose i think in part why the congress attempted to convince the administration on why we needed to reorganize homeland security and i think that  e the verdict on that one certainly a lot of folks don't think fame is doing a better job now because they're under homeland security i think we need to be cautious about the potential pitfalls when we talk about how we reorganize in one area because my time and i want to get to a couple of the questions how would you prioritize reorganizing a couple quick  we need to bring them together to reduce the overlap the difference with home a key difference with homeland security is that many of those agencies were actually doing very different things with an overall objective of security but really quite different theme is really different from immigration and naturalization service is for example all of these agencies are actually providing forces they're actually providing very similar things so i think bringing them together under one umbrella would actually make all right you're making the case again before you then prioritize mister can you  prioritization i'm going back to the emphasis on the issue of planning and i think at the end of the day the key thing is we have to plan before you prioritize i think form has to follow function that's the key message i mustn't call radel i think we need the first priority needs to also it depends upon who the next secretary of state is terms of what attention they spend on looking at how to make sure the trains run on time for lack of a better time lack of a better term i think that there's a big question when you can fly all around the world without talking about a republican or democrat administration the real question is is this going to be a priority of the next administration and i think there's a huge question mark about that  frustrated by the lack of coordination i mean i'll give you a anecdotal example i've got a family group in my area that's involved with an organization that has put over two million dollars to build a one hundred  that as i said my remarks i mean we have i think eight different agencies in afghanistan at the present time and what is no focus on what americans are willing to do through the private goodness of their hearts when you have private donations like that  i'm not sure in terms of coordinating delivery of private donations that yeah no i mean there's a lot of other stuff that is not taxpayer dollars but just groups that are willing to give their own personal support organizations where there's a large presence of not for agencies and i think the larger question we're all dealing with on the ground many of these countries is how do we get stronger better coordination and better relationships with government that are part of a holistic package and i think he is obviously moving in that direction  creating greater accountability and ownership of the part of government but when you've got agencies each with their own interests each with their own funding base and each with their own sect or responsibility it's very often hard to get them together to collaborate unless there is some higher power that's going to basically have the authority to do that and that's i think why we're all here talking about this today thank you my time's expired other questions also met in written form mr chairman thank you very much in the gentleman from new york mr a number of my colleagues have asked some questions regard to the growth of china and its investment around the world as well as capital investment that they're making in parts of the world  certainly should but because it is a symptom that the u s really out of the game on infrastructure development in that part of the world as we have heard about the plans for instance for africa while on the one  hand the u s military is recognizing the strategic importance of africa the other side of that we should not want the primary face of america and a lot of african communities doing development work to be in uniform and so the i would just note that while we're downsizing many areas of our aid to china china is going to double in africa by two thousand and nine and at the same time we're cutting democracy government funding general health funding in agriculture funding the chinese export import well dispersed twenty billion in aid over the next three years in africa and trade between africans to reach one hundred billion by two thousand and ten ten times the two thousand figure and i would also concur and i think we've got something to learn from the chinese about the process they take a long term view and one of the reasons we're investing in infrastructure is they figure they're going to be around the investments are worth making and they're going to expand off the infrastructure to conduct other activities particularly natural resource extraction where they're also making large investments  but they've also managed to figure out ways to cut costs protect their investments and measure results over the long term and therefore be more confident about these investments in infrastructure something i think we might want to get more attention to all of which is what's been said here is absolutely true in fact the german marshall fund just undertook a study of this a report which just came out on monday done by deborah broad again from a professor at american university who's been studying china in africa for the last twenty years it's very interesting i'll send you a copy of that report it's not a new chinese involvement in africa is not a new it's been around for a long time it's gotten a lot larger getting a lot larger it's a fairly nuanced kind of program and what's been said here i think the key point is that they are filling a vacuum that is being left by europe in the united states is not doing as much in africa as china some of the places they are clearly resource oriented there after extraction of resources but in other cases that's not the case and they have been involved think because only one compact can be developed countries tend to be too big and a bit more complicated than they should be but i don't think the key issues around who we're selecting i think those criteria are providing incentives for countries to achieve countries there are some very poor countries where there might be exceptions but the board has the discretion and has used it once or twice to do that and i think generally appropriately so i don't think the key issue there is with who they select i think it's around the compact development and  have to do in order to qualify for this i think it is doing exactly what we want to do i would only add that i think it's also having this incentivizing effect of getting other countries or non recipients currently kind of thinking about you know how do they step up and what are the changes they have to make to become recipients and just want to just take a couple things you said and ask you to focus on a more if the millennium challenge account program and by the way jim those ambassadors who were in your representatives who come to the help but why not just take all right development assistance one of the three pillars we'll do it all through this kind of mechanism and the corollary i guess is since the answer is that's going to leave a lot of people out would what are the difficulties in in doing that things in areas where we are competent to do it in third tarion countries with weak governance mechanisms in and that actually are sustainable and actually make lives better over the long term as opposed to put aside the humanitarian crisis that you're trying to fix at the moment is there a role for aid to those to those democracy i think that we cannot have one size fits all in our approaches because the countries we're working with are very different and the approach that is most effective and well governed democracies that are really trying to improve their institutions and implement good development policies has to be quite different from the authoritarian regimes that may not have those interests so i think we need to have for those kinds of countries where it makes sense to give them more discretion and to give those governments the responsibility of designing programs and have the faith that they'll do something that is that is affective for their own people but in other countries that approach won't make sense and i think in those places we need less money we should have more money for the country they have the so much through the government and we have a smaller focus of activities and things where we might think that we decide actually have some responsibility that we should be doing health or education whereas in the end we allow those choices for the governments involved so i think we need  a more differentiated approach and we can do that we don't need a thousand approaches but we certainly don't need one approach either and i think some differentiation along the length of time the amount of money how much responsibility we give to the governments involved and who we to building up civil society to hold government accountable there is a sort of inverse relationship between the amount of ownership if you will and oversight but there should be a continuum in the kinds of programs that we do and m c c country shouldn't be completely different from the ones that we do in countries they're not quite there yet in particular we should be able to work on economic growth all over the world and right now i think part of the problem with having the m c c in a very different institutional environment and really not coordinated in integrated for instance with some of the id programs is that you don't get that learning back and forth and you don't get that coherence between for instance the health systems work that we're doing in the economic growth that we're working and so over time i would like to see more of the learning going through to other programs in terms of how to provide accountability how to work with civil society organizations to department of state sought to organize and streamline our u s foreign assistance programs by categorizing countries based on certain indicators and requesting funding in line with their graduation strategies rather than setting country level levels first then deciding what the funding priorities in each country would be that was widely think that it will not be enough to work within the authorities of the state department i do believe congress needs to be a piece of it i think to some large degree that the the biggest flaws have to do with the process with the actual implementation  and they had a lot to do with a kind of top down washington out approach partly i think because that he was under the gun he had a very short period of time and so the vast amount of knowledge and operational capability in the me degree the notion of strategically prioritizing is not one that we should throw out with the bathwater if you will but i think it needs to be done in a deliberate manner it needs to be done with congress it needs to be done with the feel of th brainard said they did not consult with very many people this was done internally with the state department there was very little consultation actually within the executive branch much less with congress or with the public and as a result i think they ran across many problems that they could have dealt with had there been much more of a consultative process i do like the idea in some countries of having more general resources available that can be determined by that country but you've got to deal with the legislative underpinnings  make that work because what they ran up against was that the concept was inconsistent with the legislation so you can't just do that in house partially without dealing with with the membership here to make that make that work so i think one of the big lessons about that is that partial marginal reforms won't get this done that we have to actually think bigger and bring in the coalition that we've been talking about  need to continue to be involved in the middle east as i think eleven commission report was very clear that we need to enter into war trade agreements with struggling third world countries with the middle east itself but let me just go beyond the middle east and go to the other islamic countries in south and south asia southeast asia are we doing enough in terms of our assistance and aid to those countries that are not oil rich that are not  think did we do enough and are we doing enough now if i may congressman i lived for four years in indonesia i was an advisor to the ministry of finance there one of the great moments after the tsunami was when the people of indonesia saw u s troops actually carrying supplies to the victims of the tsunami and for the first time they actually saw that u s soldiers were not evil people that just killed people to the united states can actually do positive things and we need to do more of that now indonesia is rapidly growing it's a very large country i'm not sure they need a lot of our money but what they do need is better trade agreements with us more more open trade and to feel that we are a partner in discussions on broader diplomatic issues dealing with the security issues and a wide range of other things i think we can continue to provide assistance to indonesia on humanitarian issues because they do have a lot of earthquakes and a lot of other issues just because of the geology of where where they are and when we can be the first the first as it is having open dialogue and seeing as an equal partner where we're working with them for their interests can i just add to that i don't think it's a matter so much of how much money we're spending but whether we're spending a little right way one of the  things we need to be looking at a lot more is building the right kinds of institutions in those countries trade capacity building about unemployment rates which are enormously high and we need to do a lot more in the way of trade capacity building for those countries don't have oil don't have those extract industries they can develop and the resources they have and be able to trade those with the rest of the world we need to coordinate better our trade with our development and our military programs so i think all of these are things we need to do but and we need to be looking at it in the long run it's about building jobs about creating jobs because we have a generation of young people unemployed there rife with with problems of that unemployment not feeling as though they are they have any sense of self place very anxious actually to move toward elections but i think to some degree not quite clear exactly how to do that given all of what they have to do in terms of dealing with corruption and arresting a lot of corrupt officials so i think there's  d a moderate islamic population that really deserves a good deal of attention on our part i would note it gets about seventy million dollars of annual foreign assistance from the united states currently but we charge five hundred million dollars in tariff to congressman cole these point issue for you to grapple with here i'm a little clear about what the present situation is and what the ideal is in terms of rebuilding capacity we've heard  talk about loss of employees feeling among people who focus on this and maybe some of you have conflicts of interest in the hand that there is too much reliance too much contracting because of a  increase in disbursement so that i think on average it's about two million dollars per person and even that understates what they're actually doing because it's a smaller percentage of staff that are doing the contracting and i think there is a well you know wouldn't it just require a secretary of state that cared about these issues to fix it i think the answer is no i think the state department civilian staffing promotion authority based on a very different afghanistan noting that there's a skeletal staff there that is turning over very very rapidly and in some sense weakening the program implementation in a country that's of critical strategic importance to the united states and the few folks that are there basically are left money out the door as quickly as they can get out the door and then there's a rap and then they burn out in this rapid turnover so you're not going to get high quality performance in under those kinds of circumstances and in effect the job that many people are having to do which is not the reason they actually came to the first place fact the compliance officers or auditors for large contracting agencies as opposed to really people working with governments around the kinds of programming that we're talking about when i first came to this town in the late  s was the premier employer for development professionals and it had tremendous internal intellectual capability that's been largely and i think that's a lot of what we've got to rebuild we've got to rebuild that intellectual leadership capability and it is a very serious problem that really does need to be addressed everybody along this table has ascribed aspects of it but there are at all the professional levels serious lack of of the people i would labels the one the most serious lack of people procurement contracting that know what they're doing there you have to have those kinds of people what makes this even more alarming is if you look at the statistics one third of all of the u s eighty professionals will be eligible and will be retiring in the next five or six six years testimony and and and call on you again one way or another as we try to move forward on this thank you again hearing is