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44–587 PDF 2009

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A RELIANCE ON SMART POWER—REFORMING THE 

FOREIGN ASSISTANCE BUREAUCRACY 

HEARING 

BEFORE THE

OVERSIGHT OF GOVERNMENT MANAGEMENT, 

THE FEDERAL WORKFORCE, AND THE 

DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA SUBCOMMITTEE 

OF THE

COMMITTEE ON 

HOMELAND SECURITY AND 

GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS 

UNITED STATES SENATE 

ONE HUNDRED TENTH CONGRESS 

SECOND SESSION 

JULY 31, 2008 

Available via http://www.gpoaccess.gov/congress/index.html 

Printed for the use of the Committee on Homeland Security 

and Governmental Affairs 

( 

(II) 

COMMITTEE ON HOMELAND SECURITY AND GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS 

JOSEPH I. LIEBERMAN, Connecticut, Chairman 

CARL LEVIN, Michigan 

DANIEL K. AKAKA, Hawaii 

THOMAS R. CARPER, Delaware 

MARK L. PRYOR, Arkansas 

MARY L. LANDRIEU, Louisiana 

BARACK OBAMA, Illinois 

CLAIRE MCCASKILL, Missouri 

JON TESTER, Montana 

SUSAN M. COLLINS, Maine 

TED STEVENS, Alaska 

GEORGE V. VOINOVICH, Ohio 

NORM COLEMAN, Minnesota 

TOM COBURN, Oklahoma 

PETE V. DOMENICI, New Mexico 

JOHN WARNER, Virginia 

JOHN E. SUNUNU, New Hampshire 

MICHAEL L. ALEXANDER, Staff Director 

BRANDON L. MILHORN, Minority Staff Director and Chief Counsel 

TRINA DRIESSNACK TYRER, Chief Clerk 

OVERSIGHT OF GOVERNMENT MANAGEMENT, THE FEDERAL 

WORKFORCE, AND THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA SUBCOMMITTEE 

DANIEL K. AKAKA, Hawaii, Chairman 

CARL LEVIN, Michigan 

THOMAS R. CARPER, Delaware 

MARK L. PRYOR, Arkansas 

MARY L. LANDRIEU, Louisiana 

GEORGE V. VOINOVICH, Ohio 

TED STEVENS, Alaska 

TOM COBURN, Oklahoma 

JOHN WARNER, Virginia 

RICHARD J. KESSLER, Staff Director 

JOEL C. SPANGENBERG, Professional Staff Member 

JENNIFER A. HEMINGWAY, Minority Staff Director 

JESSICA NAGASAKO, Chief Clerk 

(III) 

C O N T E N T S 

Opening statements: Page 

Senator Akaka .................................................................................................. 1 

Senator Coburn ................................................................................................. 2 

Senator Voinovich ............................................................................................. 3 

WITNESSES 

THURSDAY, JULY 31, 2008 

Richard L. Greene, Deputy Director of U.S. Foreign Assistance, U.S. Department of State ........................................................................................................ 4 

Leo Hindery, Jr., Former Vice Chairman, Commission on Helping to Enhance 

the Livelihood of People Around the Globe (HELP) .......................................... 18 

Gordon Adams, Distinguished Fellow, Henry L. Stimson Center ....................... 20 

Anne C. Richard, Vice President for Government Relations and Advocacy, 

International Rescue Committee ........................................................................ 23 

Samuel A. Worthington, President and CEO, InterAction ................................... 26 

Gerald F. Hyman, Senior Advisor and President of the Hills Program on 

Governance, Center for Strategic and International Studies ........................... 28 

ALPHABETICAL LIST OF WITNESSES

Adams, Gordon: 

Testimony .......................................................................................................... 20 

Prepared statement .......................................................................................... 60 

Greene, Richard L.: 

Testimony .......................................................................................................... 4 

Prepared statement .......................................................................................... 43 

Hindery, Leo Jr.: 

Testimony .......................................................................................................... 18 

Prepared statement .......................................................................................... 54 

Hyman, Gerald F.: 

Testimony .......................................................................................................... 28 

Prepared statement .......................................................................................... 94 

Richard, Anne C.: 

Testimony .......................................................................................................... 23 

Prepared statement .......................................................................................... 75 

Worthington, Samuel A.: 

Testimony .......................................................................................................... 26 

Prepared statement .......................................................................................... 81 

APPENDIX 

Background .............................................................................................................. 103 

Speech by Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates, entitled ‘‘U.S. Global Leadership Campaign,’’ July 15, 2008 ........................................................................ 112 

Charts ....................................................................................................................... 117 

‘‘Improving US National Security: Options for Strengthening US Foreign 

Operations,’’ working paper by Anne C. Richard and Paul Clayman .............. 120 

‘‘Proposed Major Components and Organization of a Cabinet-level Department for Global and Human Development,’’ Policy Paper from InterAction, 

June 2008 .............................................................................................................. 144 

‘‘Revamping U.S. Foreign Assistance,’’ December 10, 2007, submitted by The 

HELP Commission ............................................................................................... 159 

Page

IV 

Questions and Responses for the Record from: 

Mr. Greene ........................................................................................................ 181 

Mr. Hindery ...................................................................................................... 221 

Mr. Adams ......................................................................................................... 227 

Ms. Richard ....................................................................................................... 231 

Mr. Worthington ............................................................................................... 237 

Mr. Hyman ........................................................................................................ 248 

(1) 

A RELIANCE ON SMART POWER—REFORMING 

THE FOREIGN ASSISTANCE BUREAUCRACY 

THURSDAY, JULY 31, 2007 

U.S. SENATE, SUBCOMMITTEE ON OVERSIGHT OF GOVERNMENT

MANAGEMENT, THE FEDERAL WORKFORCE, AND THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA, OF THE COMMITTEE ON HOMELAND SECURITY

AND GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS, Washington, DC. 

The Subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 2:05 p.m., in room 

SD–342, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Hon. Daniel K. Akaka, 

Chairman of the Subcommittee, presiding. 

Present: Senators Akaka, Voinovich, and Coburn. 

OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR AKAKA 

Senator AKAKA. I call this hearing of the Subcommittee on Oversight of Government Management, the Federal Workforce, and the 

District of Columbia to order. I want to welcome our guests and our 

witnesses as well, and thank you for being here today. 

This is the fourth in a series of hearings exploring the effectiveness and efficiency of government management of our national security. The first hearing looked at reforms of the U.S. export control system. Subsequent hearings examined the management and 

staffing of the arms control, counterproliferation, and nonproliferation bureaucracy at the Department of State. Today we focus on 

our foreign assistance programs. 

Foreign assistance includes economic development, security, humanitarian, disaster response, health, and governance programs. 

We have helped other nations through our foreign assistance programs for over 60 years. During the late 1940s and early 1950s, 

countries in Western Europe benefited from the Marshall Plan as 

they rebuilt themselves after World War II. President John F. Kennedy signed the Foreign Assistance Act into law in 1961 in response to the American desire to help others. 

Foreign aid programs continue to be a vital part of our foreign 

policy strategy. The devastation of September 11, 2001 was a demonstration that what happens in failed states can bring terrible 

tragedy to Americans. Al Qaeda was free to plot in one failed 

state—Afghanistan. Our national security depends on how well we 

help failed states recover. 

In the words of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, ‘‘organization 

charts, institutions, statistics, structures, regulations, policies, committees, and all the rest—the bureaucracy, if you will—are the necVerDate Nov 24 2008 10:00 Jun 30, 2009 Jkt 044587 PO 00000 Frm 00005 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 P:\DOCS\44587.TXT SAFFAIRS PsN: PAT
2 

1The speech by Secretary Gates, entitled ‘‘U.S. Global Leadership Campaign,’’ July 15, 2008, 

appears in the Appendix on page 113. 2 Charts referred to appear in the Appendix beginning on page 117. 

essary pre-condition for effective government. But whether or not 

it really works depends upon the people and their relationships.’’ 

Policy is not enough. Organizations and people do matter. Good 

policy depends on capable organizations. 

Without objection, I will introduce the entirety of Secretary 

Gates’ speech into the record.1

My primary goal in this hearing is to identify possible recommendations for improving the foreign assistance bureaucracy. 

The key components I ask our witnesses to address in their remarks are the human capital, management, coordination, and 

structural challenges that reduce the effectiveness and efficiency of 

U.S. foreign assistance. 

We need to ensure that we have an organization with the capacity to support the foreign assistance policies of this Administration 

and the next. 

In 2006, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announced a new 

direction for U.S. foreign assistance in order to align U.S. foreign 

assistance programs with the Administration’s foreign policy goals. 

Secretary Rice announced the creation of a new Deputy Secretary 

level position, the Director of Foreign Assistance, who would also 

serve at the same time as USAID’s Administrator, although this 

has not been established in statute. 

This new foreign assistance bureaucracy confronts a number of 

challenges. An overview of some of the core problems—and there 

are three charts2—can be seen in these charts: The steep decrease 

in USAID Foreign Service Officer staffing from 1967 until today; 

the fragmentation of foreign assistance among many agencies and 

programs; and the amount of development assistance not under the 

direct control of the Director of Foreign Assistance. 

The challenges are clear. We need to design a national strategy 

for foreign assistance with a clear mission and the means to accomplish it; streamline aid programs to ensure effectiveness and efficiency; simplify foreign assistance since there are too many programs, in too many departments, chasing too few dollars; reduce 

the role of the Department of Defense in foreign assistance as their 

involvement may come at a cost of supporting their own core mission; and finally, we need to improve USAID’s human capital because its current staffing and training levels do not support its 

worldwide requirements adequately. 

Clarifying the key foreign assistance organizational and human 

capital issues will help the next Administration better focus its efforts and further strengthen U.S. national security. I look forward 

to hearing from our witnesses on these matters. 

May I now call on Senator Coburn for any statement he may 

have. 

OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR COBURN 

Senator COBURN. I will not make an opening statement. I have 

a history of being very interested in the subject on how we carry 

out our USAID projects as well as the people involved with it, and 

3 

I look forward to hearing our witnesses testify, and I thank you for 

the hearing. 

Senator AKAKA. Thank you. So glad you are here. 

Senator Voinovich. 

OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR VOINOVICH 

Senator VOINOVICH. Thank you, Senator Akaka. We appreciate 

your convening today’s hearing to examine our foreign assistance 

structure. 

As a senior member of the Foreign Relations Committee, I have 

had the opportunity to meet regularly with international leaders to 

advance our public diplomacy. As the United States seeks to advance its interests and promote global stability, the delivery of foreign assistance in a timely and consistent manner is crucial to our 

efforts to support democracy abroad. 

Our current framework limits the return on our investment. 

Many would be surprised to learn that our foreign assistance structure spans 26 agencies and offices. The Department of State and 

the U.S. Agency for International Development control just over 

half of our development assistance and in 2008 will provide more 

than $24 billion to 155 countries. Without an orchestra leader to 

direct our development program and integrate existing agency 

silos, we limit our collective ability to strengthen the third pillar 

of our National Security Strategy. 

Now, critics have described our current aid structure as fractious, cumbersome, and rigid, a relic of the Cold War. While the 

creation of the F Bureau was well intended, most agree further reform is necessary. It seems to me that our development goals could 

be more easily accomplished if all partners involved sat down and 

crafted a comprehensive foreign assistance strategy. 

Compounding an inefficient structure is a lack of an adequate 

number of trained personnel to administer our foreign aid structure. The forthcoming report by the American Academy of Diplomacy, which I am proud to be part of, will show that the USAID 

currently has 2,200 personnel who administer more than $8 billion 

annually in development and other assistance following cumulative 

staff reductions of nearly 40 percent during the last two decades. 

While the average Federal contracting officer oversees an estimated $10 million in contracts, the average USAID contracting officer is responsible for approximately $57 million. 

Our foreign aid is intended to ensure stability and prosperity 

overseas. We also hope that our investment will help us to win the 

hearts and minds of those we are trying to help. In 2007, the program on internal policy attitudes reported that 20 of the 26 countries, including many who receive millions of dollars of U.S. foreign 

assistance, felt the United States was having a negative influence 

on the world. 

Unfortunately, these numbers are the lowest ever recorded. 

While Secretary Rice is to be commended for her transformational 

diplomacy and initiative, it is clear that we have got to do more. 

Secretary Gates also encouraged us earlier this month to strengthen our civilian institutions of diplomacy and development. 

I hope today’s hearing will result in a foreign assistance structure that is well managed, supported by highly skilled individuals 

4 

1The prepared statement of Mr. Greene appears in the Appendix on page 43. 

committed to public service, and funded in a manner that allows 

us to use our foreign policy tools more effectively to meet the challenges of our rapidly changing world. 

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

Senator AKAKA. Thank you very much, Senator Voinovich. 

I welcome our first witness to the Subcommittee today, Richard 

Greene, Deputy Director of U.S. Foreign Assistance, Department of 

State. 

It is the custom of this Subcommittee to swear in all witnesses, 

and I would ask you to please rise and raise your right hand. Do 

you solemnly swear that the testimony you are about to give this 

Subcommittee is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the 

truth, so help you, God? 

Mr. GREENE. I do. 

Senator AKAKA. Thank you very much. Let it be noted in the 

record that the witness responded in the affirmative. 

Before we start, I want you to know that your full statement will 

be made part of the record. I would also like to remind you to keep 

your remarks brief given the number of people testifying this afternoon. 

So, Mr. Greene, will you please proceed with your statement? 

TESTIMONY OF RICHARD L. GREENE,1 DEPUTY DIRECTOR OF 

U.S. FOREIGN ASSISTANCE, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE 

Mr. GREENE. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Senator Voinovich, and 

Senator Coburn. 

First, I would like to point out the irony of talking about reforming the foreign assistance bureaucracy, and both the Chairman and 

the Ranking Member included quotes by Secretary Gates in their 

opening statements, and I have a quote by Secretary Gates in my 

opening statement. I think it is a sign of the times. 

The degree of turmoil and poverty in the world poses both challenges and opportunities for our foreign assistance programs. Our 

goal of improving lives around the world is consistent with our national security goal of making the world a more secure place. By 

addressing the long-term conditions that lead to despair and instability, development takes its place alongside diplomacy and defense 

as key components of our National Security Strategy. Today we 

must ensure that each of our major foreign policy tools works together to achieve results that promote our development, humanitarian, and national security goals all around the world. 

Under Secretary Rice’s leadership, we have invested considerable 

effort to begin to improve the coherence and effectiveness of our 

foreign assistance architecture. Our overall approach has many features. These include adequate funding levels; the creation of a new 

structure to coordinate USG strategic and operational planning, integrated budget formulation and execution; a bigger and better 

trained and supported workforce—we are trying to turn that trend 

around; a focus on country needs in our planning and budgeting; 

better expanded civilian-military coordination and delivery; expanded public-private partnerships; and a new rapid response capacity through the Civilian Response Corps. These are all works in 

5 

progress, and in my opening testimony, I would like to focus on just 

three components. 

First, regarding funding levels, there are numerous recent examples where we, the Administration, you, the Congress, as well as 

our stakeholders have worked closely together to provide the development funding commensurate with the challenges and opportunities that exist around the world. Consequently, the U.S. Government has nearly tripled Official Development Assistance since 

2001. Of course, the signature program of that growth is PEPFAR, 

and yesterday the President signed into law a bill reauthorizing a 

second-year program with very strong support from the members 

of this panel that we are most appreciative of. 

We have also significantly increased our investments in other 

key development areas, such as health, education, economic 

growth, and governance. And I think both Congress and the Administration can take pride in the significant resources and the 

focus on results that we have provided to important programs that 

are transforming lives and making our world more secure. 

Second, we are reforming the foreign assistance planning and allocation process. As you pointed out, Mr. Chairman, 2 years ago, 

Secretary Rice reviewed our current structure and frankly, she did 

not like what she saw. She saw fragmentation, duplication, no clear 

lines of authority, inadequate data transparency, and she had a 

hard time getting any answers to any basic management questions 

about what we are spending, where we are spending it, and what 

are the purposes. 

Consequently, Secretary Rice established the position of Director 

of U.S. Foreign Assistance, and you have talked about what that 

position is all about. 

To carry out its mission, the new organization has developed several new, and I think important, tools. These include a Foreign Assistance Framework as an organizational tool to describe a broad 

range of foreign assistance programs, a set of common definitions, 

standard indicators, and country-level operational plans that describe how resources are being used and how results will be measured. 

The office is also focused on integrating State and USAID foreign 

assistance efforts and developing a country-specific focus, and for 

the first time, the Administration has submitted an official foreign 

assistance budget that fully integrates State and USAID requests 

for individual countries and program areas. 

We are also working to incorporate non-State and USAID foreign 

assistance programs, a subject of your chart on the far right. For 

example, we are piloting a strategic planning process where stakeholders from across the U.S. Government are working in Washington and in the field to develop U.S. Government-wide countryspecific foreign assistance strategies. 

Finally, I want to mention operational support. Successful foreign assistance reform depends on our ability to rebuild USAID’s 

core development capacity. My Secretary of Defense quote is where 

he said, I think about a month ago, ‘‘It has become clear that 

America’s civilian institutions of diplomacy and development have 

been chronically undermanned and underfunded for far too long— 

relative to what we traditionally spend on the military, and more 

6 

importantly, relative to the responsibilities and challenges our Nation has around the world.’’ Simply put, we need more better 

trained and supported people to work in new ways to support the 

achievement of U.S. Government development objectives. Staffing 

has not grown commensurate with the tremendous growth in programs and funding levels and challenges and degree of operational 

complexity. USAID’s workforce and infrastructure must keep pace. 

Consequently, Administrator Henrietta Fore launched a 3-year 

plan to double USAID’s Foreign Service capacity and significantly 

ramp up systems and training resources. Administrator Fore calls 

this program the ‘‘Development Leadership Initiative.’’ 

So where does this leave us? I think this is all clearly a work in 

progress. It is fair to say that the initial implementation of the reform effort had some serious problems, but I think it is also fair 

to say that we have seen significant improvements in many of the 

key areas of concern. 

I think we now have a greater development focus and sense of 

U.S. Government unity about how, why, and what we are trying 

to accomplish in our foreign policy and our foreign assistance goals. 

And while we are still in the formative days of our reform effort, 

we have made significant progress in bringing greater U.S. Government coherence to what we are trying to accomplish in foreign assistance. We have also taken the first steps to reinvigorate 

USAID’s development corps. I think what is also important is to 

talk about what we need to do next. We collectively need to do 

more to realize our goal of significantly improving foreign assistance cohesiveness. We need greater funding flexibility. We need 

programs that are demand-driven and not ones that are dictated 

by the type of funding available. 

We need to do a better job of giving country experts the ability 

to shape and implement development strategies. We need to recruit 

and retain a robust workforce, with strong operational and technical skills. We need to further streamline our internal planning 

and allocation processes. We need to fully implement a whole government approach that achieves better coordination of U.S. Government foreign assistance programs. And to be successful, we need 

the active engagement of Congress, public and private partners, 

and the international community. 

So, in closing, I think the one word that captures where we are 

in our efforts to help achieve what we are talking about here is 

‘‘more.’’ In the assistance world, there are more issues to consider; 

there is more complexity; there is more aggregate resources; there 

is more security concerns; there is more information about what 

works and what is important; there is more understanding of the 

impact of not coordinating defense, development, and diplomacy; 

there is more international focus on improving our collective foreign assistance performance. But most importantly, there is also 

more promise and more potential for achieving long-term sustainable development goals around the world. Progress can only be 

made if we have a sense of shared community goals and efforts. 

And I think there are clear signs that we are heading in that direction, and I salute the members of today’s second panel for their 

leadership role on that front. Modernizing foreign assistance is necVerDate Nov 24 2008 10:00 Jun 30, 2009 Jkt 044587 PO 00000 Frm 00010 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 P:\DOCS\44587.TXT SAFFAIRS PsN: PAT
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1The charts referred to appear in the Appendix beginning on page 117. 

essary, it is urgent, and it is essential to the achievement of essential foreign policy and national security objectives. 

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

Senator AKAKA. Thank you very much for your testimony, Mr. 

Greene. We will have 7 minutes of questions each here on the first 

round. 

Mr. Greene, you note that our foreign assistance was stovepiped 

into numerous accounts overseen by a multitude of offices, each 

with different standards of measurement and different ways of 

judging success or failure, and that this fragmentation made it difficult to plan coherently and could lead to conflicting or redundant 

efforts. I thank you for this honest assessment. You also state that 

in the year 2006, Secretary Rice launched an effort to improve the 

coherence and effectiveness of U.S. foreign assistance, and let me 

call your attention again to these charts that we have here on my 

right. It does not look like much progress has been made when you 

look at the charts.1

Can you tell us what new steps the Administration is planning 

to take to improve coherence and effectiveness? 

Mr. GREENE. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Let me be blunt. We 

have not done anything to simplify, collectively, the Administration 

and the Congress of the United States has not done anything to 

simplify the account structure that exists. And what the Secretary’s 

initiative focused on was what we could do administratively to 

bring greater coherence. 

So what we are trying to do is to bring together State and 

USAID planning efforts. What we are trying to do is develop tools 

that describe in much greater detail what we do, and how we do 

it. What we are trying to do is to develop an attitude that gets 

around the stovepipes, that has State and USAID employees working together to plan, to develop, to formulate, to execute programs. 

And what we have also developed is a core set of improved tools 

in terms of developing foreign assistance policy that will be significant enhancements over what we have had. And you mentioned 

some transition and legacy issues that I think will be a great aid 

to whoever comes in and manages these programs in the next Administration. 

So our focus has been on what we can do without legislation, and 

what we can do without legislation is bringing out stronger State/ 

USAID coherence. 

Senator AKAKA. Mr. Greene, Mr. Worthington of InterAction argues that the F Bureau has been measuring performance of foreign 

assistance programs by outputs rather than impact or outcomes. 

Do you agree with him? 

Mr. GREENE. Mr. Worthington is a fine and astute individual. I 

think it is a very—everything about foreign assistance is complex, 

and arguably, foreign assistance programs present the most complex public policy challenges there are. If you look at the number 

of programs, you look at the number of implementing partners, you 

look at the types of programs, you look at legislation, you look at 

countries, you look at security objectives, and if you laid all that 

out in a matrix, I would argue it would be probably the most comVerDate Nov 24 2008 10:00 Jun 30, 2009 Jkt 044587 PO 00000 Frm 00011 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 P:\DOCS\44587.TXT SAFFAIRS PsN: PAT
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plex matrix there is in any public policy arena. And I think it is 

a combination of factors. 

Of course, we look at outputs. We are output oriented. And, Senator Voinovich I think has worked hard in a lot of his other committees on this issue. One of the biggest challenges is to really usable performance measures that you would really use to manage 

programs by, that you would really use to make funding and allocation and staffing decisions, and we are working on that. It is a 

work in progress, and I would echo Mr. Worthington’s point that 

it is very important to make continued progress on that. 

Senator AKAKA. Mr. Greene, right now there are over 20 U.S. 

agencies and over 50 programs conducting foreign aid. In Afghanistan alone, there are eight different U.S. Government agencies and 

many private contractors. Using Afghanistan as an example, what 

is being done there to develop a coherent strategy? 

Mr. GREENE. What we have in Afghanistan is, on the foreign assistance side, what we call our Country Operating Plan for Afghanistan that takes all of the foreign assistance resources available— 

to be clear here, I do not want to make this out to more than it 

is—for State and USAID, arrays it and allocates it by program area 

down to a pretty detailed level in terms of different types of programs, different types of delivery mechanisms, who the implementing partners are and what the expected results are. So we 

have a much greater degree of coherence in terms of allocating foreign assistance funds than I think we have had before. 

Now, in Afghanistan and in other post-conflict states, of course, 

there are huge overlaying security concerns, and there are huge 

overlaying political concerns that drive that relationship as well. 

Senator AKAKA. Mr. Greene, do you believe it would make sense 

to consolidate most of our foreign aid programs under State? 

Mr. GREENE. I do. Full stop. 

Senator AKAKA. If over 40 percent of all foreign aid is controlled 

by agencies outside of the State Department, how does State ensure that other departments are not undermining its policies? 

Mr. GREENE. It is a major challenge for us now, again, to be 

blunt. And the way we do it is we rely heavily on the leadership 

by our chiefs of mission in the field. We rely heavily on the leadership of our USAID mission directors who are assistance leaders in 

almost every mission where they are at around the world. And 

what we are trying to do is to develop U.S. Government-wide assistance strategies that incorporate the resources of agencies that 

are not under the authority of the Secretary of State. 

Now, we do not have the authority to make other agencies participate, and we are piloting it in 10 countries around the world. 

We will see how it works. We will see if we are able to achieve 

greater coherence without additional authorities. It basically will 

happen with the cooperation of others, recognizing what is at stake 

here, or it will not happen at all, sir. 

Senator AKAKA. Senator Voinovich. 

Senator VOINOVICH. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

Mr. Greene, our dependence on continuing resolutions impacts 

the agencies charged with the delivering of foreign assistance, and 

recipient nations rely on long-term guaranteed funding to sustain 

economic growth. At my request, the Congressional Research ServVerDate Nov 24 2008 10:00 Jun 30, 2009 Jkt 044587 PO 00000 Frm 00012 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 P:\DOCS\44587.TXT SAFFAIRS PsN: PAT
9 

ice prepared a soon-to-be-released report on the impacts of continuing resolutions on agency operations. We complain about what 

various departments and agencies are doing, but the fact of the 

matter is that we contribute to it with the continuing resolution, 

omnibus bills that we pass. But the report highlights a 138-day 

delay in increased funding for the President’s Malaria Initiative for 

fiscal year 2007, and USAID noted, ‘‘Because of a shorter time 

frame before the end of the fiscal year, planning and implementation were difficult and hurried in terms of the distribution of funds 

and in developing contracts for implementing various approaches 

in malaria control.’’ 

Could you just spend a little time telling us how the way we do 

things around here is impacting your ability to deliver what we 

want you to deliver? And, second of all, in your opinion, does it add 

to the cost because of the way we are operating in terms of our appropriations? 

Mr. GREENE. I appreciate the question, Senator. It clearly adds 

to the cost of how we operate, and more importantly, adds to planning uncertainty about funding flows, about how to proceed. 

What is important is sustaining commitment, and you do not get 

results on the programs we are talking about here unless you are 

engaged in a sustained way over a number of years. You do not 

make development progress in a number of months. You make it 

with sustained focus and attention over a number of years. And if 

we go through this process each year where we are under longterm CRs, we get the appropriations late in the year, the implementing partners who we rely on, who do heroic work in the field 

and every place around the world, cannot plan, they cannot judge, 

they cannot hire people, they cannot put projects into place. There 

is a huge operating tax associated with that, and we are certainly 

worse off because of that, sir. 

Senator VOINOVICH. Also, it is my understanding that so often 

many of these projects that you undertake are earmarked. Would 

you like to comment on that? 

Mr. GREENE. Sir, I think we are not at a good place in terms of 

implementing a balanced foreign assistance program in the United 

States, carefully balanced between congressional priorities, Administration priorities, and the needs and views of people on the 

ground that are actually implementing the programs. And in order 

to get that into better balance, my opinion is that we need a lot 

more flexibility in terms of funding categories, in terms of timing, 

in terms of the duration of projects as well. And I think because 

of what you are describing, sir, in many cases we end up with programs that do not adequately balance our key objectives and do not 

really reflect what the experts on the ground think are necessary 

to make development progress. Thank you. 

Senator VOINOVICH. In two area, we are responsible for making 

it more difficult for you to do the job we are asking you to do. 

Mr. Greene, the Commission on Smart Power that was headed 

up by Joe Nye and Dick Armitage describes how many of our traditional elements of soft power, such as public engagement and diplomacy, have been neglected and fallen into disrepair, and the report 

urges the State Department to give greater attention to an inteVerDate Nov 24 2008 10:00 Jun 30, 2009 Jkt 044587 PO 00000 Frm 00013 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 P:\DOCS\44587.TXT SAFFAIRS PsN: PAT
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grated foreign assistance program driven by strategic considerations. 

I would like to know how is the Department meeting this goal. 

And then the other question is, Does the Department’s current 

framework support the goal? And I guess last, but not least, do you 

believe there would be a benefit to appointing additional senior officials to oversee this whole structure that we have or appoint someone that would be kind of the orchestra leader that would tie all 

of this together and make it happen and give them enough power 

so that they could get people to do what they are supposed to do? 

We keep running into situations where, even in the area of enforcement of our intellectual property, you have about a dozen agencies, 

and we have been trying to get them together. And the President 

was able to go along with an orchestra leader, and a guy named 

Christian Israel is putting it all together. 

But it seems that you have to have somebody that has the clout 

to try to make this happen, and I would like your response to that. 

Mr. GREENE. The two whose responsibility it is to make it happen are Secretary Rice and USAID Administrator Henrietta Fore. 

Now, clearly neither of them have authorities over foreign assistance controlled by non-State/USAID agencies. That is a significant 

chunk, and it shows in your chart up there. I think the foreign assistance programs of the United States could be more effectively 

developed, implemented, and monitored, if more of the foreign assistance funding was under that leadership structure. 

Your second question, sir, was on integration. I think the effort 

that we have launched is a good first step. Again, this is a work 

in progress, but I think it is a good first step, sir. 

Senator VOINOVICH. In other words, you put a team together and 

this is the recommendation about how to get it done? Or are you 

just dealing with it because that is about the only way you can deal 

with it? Has this been taken up, for example, to talk to OMB about 

how that could be better? 

Mr. GREENE. We made a conscious decision in terms of developing this reform effort that we could achieve the most progress 

the fastest if we did what we could do administratively as opposed 

to seeking new authorities. And so we did what we could do administratively, which is to basically try to get greater State/USAID coherence. And I think we have made pretty good progress on that. 

But as all of you point out, and as the chart points out, there is 

a whole other world out there of non-State, non-USAID foreign assistance, and that coordination and improved coherence relies on 

interagency cooperation. 

Senator VOINOVICH. Interpersonal skills between the people involved. 

Mr. GREENE. Yes, sir. This is a very strong leadership-dependent 

operation, sir. 

Senator VOINOVICH. Thank you. 

Senator AKAKA. Thank you very much. Senator Coburn. 

Senator COBURN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

I happen to think PEPFAR and Millennium Challenge Corporation grants, the work that is done there is probably by far some of 

the most effective work we do. And my observation from that is 

that because they have outcome requirements, they have metrics, 

11 

they are measured. We know what we are trying to achieve. We 

know how to measure it, and therefore, we can assess it. And I am 

very glad to hear of some of the management changes. 

Does every program in American foreign assistance have an outcome goal? 

Mr. GREENE. There are outcome goals, Senator, for every program. Now, I think it is also fair to say that in many cases they 

are not as effective, not as clear, not as easy to measure as 

PEPFAR and malaria when you are talking about capacity building 

in terms of a government ministry when you are talking about democracy programs, when you are talking about economic growth, 

and when you are talking about governance. The challenge of coming up with effective performance indicators is a bigger challenge, 

sir. 

Senator COBURN. It certainly is, but the management of all those 

programs is made much more simple if, in fact, you spend the time 

on the front end trying to get those performance indicators. And 

one of the things that I want to make sure we do—and I think it 

will help the State Department plus everybody else—is we ought 

to have a metric on what we are doing. And we just really do not 

in the State Department. In a large number of areas, not only do 

we not have clear outcome goals, we do not have metrics to measure whether or not we are achieving those goals. 

So one of the things that I am hopeful for is—it is really different 

in Afghanistan and Iraq. Those are combat areas. And the judgment that we should make on performance should be different in 

those areas than it is in others. But to highlight, the funds have 

been highly effective, whereas in many areas, USAID, because of 

the limitations we place on our USAID folks, they do not have the 

range of possibility that a local commander has in terms of spending money. I mean, we know—and part of that is security, and I 

grant that we have to discount a lot of that. But I think one of the 

important things—and I cannot stress to you enough, and I am 

going to be around here a little while longer—is we have got to 

have programs that are outcome driven not demand driven. And 

they have got to have metrics, and that is going to be one of the 

things. And I would have a little bit of disagreement with Senator 

Voinovich on CRs. A CR, you know what is coming. You just do not 

know what the increase is in what is coming because the CR is set 

at the level of the year before. So we do not know what the increases will be, but there should be no reason that a CR would 

slow us down for anything because the CR is a continuing appropriation based on the levels that we have been running. 

And so while we do handicap you—and I agree, we should be getting our work done on time—the handicap is on increases. It is not 

on the funds that are running because we are translating those 

through on a month-by-month basis at the same level at which 

they were before. 

If we had metrics, let’s say we spent the extra time to really 

work to try to get an outcome, whether it be crop production or 

whatever it is, whether working with Agriculture or U.S. Fish and 

Wildlife or the Corps of Engineers, if we could spend the time up 

front on that, would it not make sense that we would probably be 

more effective if we had common outcome goals with all those other 

12 

agencies where you do not have direct command and control over? 

And is there any way to set that up when we implement foreign 

policy before we invite the Corps of Engineers in, before we invite 

the U.S. Department of Agriculture in and saying here is our goal? 

Now, here is the goal, here is what we want to see, and how do 

we get there and how do we measure it? That is my first question. 

The second thing is could we not help you more effectively if we 

had more oversight hearings on what is happening so that we get 

a better understanding in Congress of the tools that we need to 

give you that you may not have, and also holding you accountable 

to meet those outcome measures? 

Mr. GREENE. I appreciate your comments, Senator, and more importantly, many people that I work with are in total agreement 

with you on metrics. Metrics are a greatly underappreciated facet 

of any program management exercise, I think anywhere in the U.S. 

Government. We have started down the path of assigning metrics 

to various program areas and elements. Some of them work, some 

of them do not. And we take your call very seriously to pay more 

attention and invest more time to that up front. 

I think our efforts at getting to coherency and improving efficiency of our programs would be improved if we did what you are 

talking about in terms of having common metrics and common indicators for every foreign assistance program no matter where they 

were in the government. 

We are taking steps in that direction in terms of just initially 

trying to capture data and trying to describe what they do with our 

10 pilot programs on overall country assistance strategies and 

there will be metrics components or performance components to 

that. And so I am in strong agreement with you, sir. 

Now, regarding oversight hearings, I have mixed emotions on 

more oversight hearings, but certainly more substantive discussions about what we do and how we do it and the challenges we 

face are welcomed. We would love to do that. 

Senator COBURN. Yes. We had all the hearings on a lot of the 

waste associated at USAID in Afghanistan, and some of it could 

not be helped. I understand that. But the fact is that even after 

the hearings, we went back and hired the same contractors who did 

not do a good job the first time. And sometimes that is the only 

contractor we had. But we ought to be about trying to change those 

things rather than to go in the manner that we have gone. 

You have a tough job, especially in the conflict areas, and it is 

hard to be too critical of you in that, especially when there is a security component to it. So I will save my criticisms for that. But 

I am going to be watching for outcomes in all these programs, and 

I am going to be looking for metrics. And I would just say one other 

thing. We cannot ask our State Department to have metrics and 

be accountable when we refuse as a Congress to hold the United 

Nations accountable with $5.4 billion of our money. This Senate 

passed 99–0 that the United Nations funding ought to be based on 

the fact that they are transparent and accountable to us with our 

money, and it was taken out in conference. We are going to get a 

vote on that every year I am here, and there is no way we can hold 

you accountable when we send money to another agency and turn 

a blind eye about how whether they are accountable or not. 

13 

1The chart referred to appears in the Appendix on page 119. 

With that, I would yield back. 

Senator AKAKA. Thank you very much, Senator Coburn. 

Mr. Greene, according to the charts again, as this middle chart 

shows, there has been a marked decrease in USAID Foreign Service officers from 1967 to 2008. In his testimony, Dr. Adams of the 

Henry L. Stimson Center states that USAID has hired more than 

1,200 personal services contractors. He states that USAID has become largely a contract management agency with programs being 

implemented by a growing number of outside contractors.1

Do you agree with this assessment? 

Mr. GREENE. Mr. Chairman, I have a long tradition of never disagreeing with someone who is sitting right behind me. You just 

never know. 

Dr. Adams is an expert in this area. Dr. Adams has been very 

involved with these issues for a number of years, and I agree with 

his assessment. 

Now, I think what is important is to talk a little bit about what 

we are doing. One, we—meaning under Administrator Henrietta 

Fore’s leadership—recognize that this is a serious problem and that 

we need to rebuild USAID’s core capacity. 

Two, Administrator Henrietta Fore has launched the Development Leadership Initiative where her objective is to double the size 

of USAID’s Foreign Service Corps over 3 years, and fiscal year 

2009 is year one. The Congress has been very supportive of that 

objective and provided additional funding in the supplemental in 

the FY 2007 bridge supplemental. And the initial marks of our appropriation bills in the House and the Senate also provided additional funding. So I think we are, with your very strong support, 

taking a good step to try to reverse that trend, and it is a worrying 

trend. 

I also think there is no interest in going back to the 1967 levels 

when the aforementioned Richard Armitage was in Vietnam. But 

we certainly need to significantly increase what we have now. 

Senator AKAKA. Mr. Greene, I was recently informed by an organization called Inside NGOs that USAID’s staff spends up to 75 

percent of their time on pre-award contract work, such as defining 

technical requirements, writing scopes of work, and evaluating proposals. Less than 25 percent is spent monitoring performance and 

administering the awards. Now, this suggests that accountability 

may be more of an afterthought rather than a management priority. 

Do you agree with Inside NGOs’ characterization of the situation? If not, what percentage of time is spent on pre-award work 

versus performance monitoring? 

[The information provided for the record follows:] 

INFORMATION PROVIDED FOR THE RECORD FROM MR. GREENE 

When looking at USAID staff across the board, warranted contracting and agreement officers and contract specialists make up less than 10 percent of USAID’s 

workforce. These professionals are far outnumbered by Cognizant Technical Officers 

(CTOs) and other Project Specialists who are nearly fully devoted to program implementation, monitoring and evaluation. 

14 

If Inside NGO was referring only to USAID contracting and agreement officers 

and contract specialists, no analysis has been done regarding the percentage of time 

spent on pre-award actions and post-award performance monitoring and administration. It is our opinion, however, that the 75 to 25 percent ratio is fairly accurate 

with regard to contracting officers and specialists. Following award, the CTOs—also 

procurement professionals according to Office of Federal Procurement Policy’s definition, but not warranted—act as the contracting and agreement officers’ representative for the purposes of program implementation, performance monitoring and evaluation and spend a greater percentage of their time on administration and oversight. In addition, within the USAID Office of Acquisition and Assistance, there is 

an Evaluation Division and a Contract Audit and Support Division which carry out 

many contract administration duties such as financial reviews, claims, training, advisory reports, the suspension/disbarment of contractors, and contract performance 

reporting. Therefore, USAID is strongly committed to accountability as a priority. 

Ideally, the warranted contracting and agreement officers would play a larger role 

in post-award activities than they are currently able to. This remains a goal of 

USAID. Unfortunately, there is a chronic shortage of contracting and agreement officers across the Federal Government and this is true at USAID as well. For example, USAID currently has fewer staff in the 1102 (Contract Specialist) back-stop 

than it did 10 years ago, yet obligations have tripled. Given more human and financial resources, USAID would be able to focus a greater percentage of contracting and 

agreement officers’ time on post-award activities and provide for even greater accountability on the part of implementing partners, improved tracking of contract 

performance, improved transparency through better reporting data, and greater 

stewardship over resources. We hope to be able to sustain the significant recruitment effort we recently initiated to bring more Civil Service and Foreign Service 

procurement officers into USAID. 

Mr. GREENE. Mr. Chairman, I do not know what the specific 

numbers are. If there are specific numbers, we will get back to you. 

Just my instinct is that in terms of order of magnitude, it is probably not that far off. And, again, more importantly, taking the tone 

of your remarks on every issue so far, it is what are we doing to 

reverse that? And our main tool to reverse that is to ramp up 

USAID hiring in both operational and technical issues. That is the 

only way we are going to be able to reverse what is a troubling 

trend, sir. 

Senator AKAKA. Mr. Greene, Dr. Adams in his testimony argues 

that Foreign Service officers should be encouraged to hold a development or foreign assistance post in their careers. Do you agree 

with this and agree that this would be useful? And if so, is State 

doing anything to encourage this? 

Mr. GREENE. I think it would be very useful, sir, and I think you 

are seeing a sea culture change in terms of the experiences that 

Foreign Service officers have at the State Department. You look at 

the number of people who have served in Iraq, who have served in 

Afghanistan, who have served in Bosnia, and the large number of 

our people who have been in post-conflict situations, and who have 

been part of managing, and directing assistance programs. And so 

the comfort level with assistance programs has increased. The linkage and knowing the relationship between assistance programs and 

achieving our overall goals has increased. And it is a trend that is 

going to keep on keeping on, as we say, and we will do everything 

possible to encourage it, sir. 

Senator AKAKA. Mr. Greene, GAO reported that Human Resources Bureau officials did not attend meetings in which foreign 

assistance budget decisions were made that could potentially impact human capital requirements. Do you agree that this happened 

in the past? And what has changed since this report was issued in 

September 2007? 

15 

Mr. GREENE. Sir, there is a State Department equivalent of 

USAID’s Development Leadership Initiative. At this point it does 

not have an eye-catching title like Development Leadership Initiative, but Secretary Rice and the leader of this effort, Under Secretary Kennedy, are also trying to significantly ramp up State’s 

core technical operational staffing. And a part of this effort is to increase the number of people and increase the competency of State 

Department Foreign Service officers who have oversight, who manage, and who support foreign assistance programs. 

Senator AKAKA. Mr. Greene, over the last few years, there has 

been a process underway to subordinate USAID to the State Department. Meanwhile, some of our allies abroad have been undertaking efforts to create separate agencies to direct their foreign assistance agenda. The United Kingdom’s Department for International Development stands out as one example. 

In your opinion, is the British development department effective? 

Mr. GREENE. I think our colleagues at the Department for International Development (DfID) are effective. I would also note that 

we just had a very long session with our colleagues at DfID who 

wanted to know what we do in the Foreign Assistance Bureau of 

the State Department and how we do it and what we are doing to 

try to gain greater coherence. And so they were looking to learn 

some of the tools from us to apply back to their own situation. 

Senator AKAKA. Well, thank you very much for your responses. 

Senator Voinovich. 

Senator VOINOVICH. This is a difficult one to answer, and in my 

opening statement, I said that the program on international policy 

attitudes reported that 20 of the 26 countries, including many who 

receive millions of dollars of foreign assistance, felt the United 

States was having a negative influence on the world. Real low 

numbers. Any explanation why you think that is the case? Has it 

got to do with the Iraq War or Abu Ghraib? 

Mr. GREENE. I think there are some pretty well-documented, and 

discussed reasons why that could be true, sir. But I also think that 

there have been some recent polling information that shows that 

trend starting to turn around a little bit. And, again, I think what 

is important is what are we doing to try to turn around that trend. 

And, I think we are doing it, sir. 

Senator VOINOVICH. If there was one or two things that you 

would recommend to the next President that he do to kind of 

change this as rapidly as possible, what would you suggest? 

Mr. GREENE. Sir, are you talking about overall attitudes or are 

you talking about—— 

Senator VOINOVICH. Yes, overall attitudes. I mean, this is all a 

part of our public diplomacy. It is part of our national security. It 

should be. 

Mr. GREENE. I think we do extraordinary work around the world. 

We do extraordinary work around the world that brings great daily 

benefit to millions of people around the world. We do it in conjunction with countries, with partners, with organizations. And I do not 

think we do the greatest job possible of talking about how we do 

it, why we do it, and the results we achieve. And I just think we 

need to significantly improve telling the story of what this country 

16 

does and what this country helps accomplish around the world on 

a daily basis, sir. 

Senator VOINOVICH. Well, it is interesting. We are known for our 

great public relations, the fabulous firms that represent corporations and so forth that are in that business. You think that we 

need to figure out how to do this better, to communicate who we 

are and what we want to do and what we have done, and that we 

do care about other people? 

Mr. GREENE. Yes, sir, and to do it in a sustained, engaged way 

using communication styles and techniques that are more in tune 

with the changing communication styles and techniques that are 

out there today. Frankly, I think we are just starting to wake up 

to that potential and that methodological change that is necessary. 

Senator VOINOVICH. Do you have any people in your shop that 

are working on that? 

Mr. GREENE. Those are primarily in the Under Secretary for 

Public Diplomacy’s shop, Mr. Glassman, and he is leading the 

charge on that, sir. What we constantly get—— 

Senator VOINOVICH. How much coordination is there between you 

guys and Glassman’s operation? 

Mr. GREENE. What Glassman is always looking for two things: 

One are success stories, give us information, feed us all these success stories that your people say you are doing so that we can get 

them out to our communicators all over the world. Paint the picture, give us the information. So he is looking for success stories, 

and he is looking for resources to get the core capacity to deliver 

those success stories in an integrated way, looking for much more 

forward presence in terms of public diplomacy strategy as well, sir. 

Senator VOINOVICH. Shifting the questions to Senator Coburn, as 

a mayor and governor, I used to say, if you cannot measure it, do 

not do it. And one of the problems that we have—Senator Akaka 

and I have—we try to get strategic plans on how people are going 

to get off the high-risk list. You are setting up some kind of 

metrics. When you do this, do you ever sit down with the General 

Accounting Office to talk to them about it? Because so often what 

ends up happening is they come in and look over your shoulder, 

and then they come back with reports that program challenges remain. Is there any work that is being done in that area? 

Mr. GREENE. Right now we are privileged to have a General Accounting group looking at many different aspects of our operation, 

and my understanding—I have not been in these conversations myself, but my understanding is that we have had discussions on performance measures and monitoring. I will find out exactly 

what—— 

[The information provided for the record follows:] 

INFORMATION PROVIDED FOR THE RECORD FROM MR. GREENE 

We have discussions with the GAO on a range of foreign assistance related issues, 

including performance metrics. The current GAO study is however not specificallly 

focused on metrics. 

Senator VOINOVICH. It would really be good to do that because 

we have had situations, haven’t we, Senator Akaka, where they 

come before us and claim they are not being measured the same 

17 

way or that we do not agree with the definition and we are still 

trying to get some feedback on several of those areas. 

The last thing I would like to mention to you is that you have 

recently started this effort, and we are going to have a new Administration. I mentioned the American Academy of Diplomacy, you 

have the Commission on Smart Power, and I think there is one 

other group that is going to come back. There is a big coming together of thought on what we ought to do to go forward. And I 

would really appreciate it if, as these reports come out—in fact, I 

am going to have my staff look at them, and I am going to look 

at them, to see what the common threads are. And you have been 

there, and it would be interesting to know before you tip your hat 

what you think about those reports and whether you think that 

they are suggesting the right things. I would be very interested— 

and I am sure Senator Akaka would—in terms of your thoughts 

about that because we are going to have a new day in this area. 

And we had the Aspen Institute breakfast this morning. We had 

an adviser to the Secretary on terrorism, and his opinion was that 

there are a whole lot of things that we ought to be doing differently 

today. And then I think, Senator Akaka, you are on the Armed 

Services Committee. There is only so much money to go around. I 

think the State Department’s budget proposal is $36 billion. 

Mr. GREENE. Yes, sir. That includes assistance and operations. 

Senator VOINOVICH. Yes, $36 billion, and I think the defense 

budget is $683 billion, something like that. And I know this is 

probably not something good to suggest, but it seems to me that 

we should be allocating our dollars differently than we are today, 

that the enemy is different than it was before the Cold War. We 

have a group that is out that does not fly under any flag, and we 

need to be—as Joe Nye says, we need to have smart power and figure it out. And I am hoping that those of you that are close to this 

really get out and start beating the drum for the fact that we need 

to reallocate our resources and put them in the areas where we are 

going to get a much better return on our investment. 

Senator Akaka, one of the things that drives me crazy around 

here is that—they call it the ‘‘military-industrial’’—Eisenhower 

talked about it, and it is also the congressional thing that we need 

to be concerned about. And we just seem to be going down one 

course, which is the past, and not looking to the future. And somehow we have to break that mind-set and start looking out differently than we are today, I think, if we are going to be successful, 

understanding that we have limited resources. And if we keep 

going the way we are, Senator Akaka, with the $10 trillion debt— 

we have some serious problems that need to be addressed, and I 

am hoping that we have a lot of new thinking. It is not to take anything away from what you are trying to do and the next Administration as to how we are going to handle this situation. 

If I do not get a chance, thank you for your service. 

Mr. GREENE. Thank you, sir. Could I just respond to one of your 

points, if you do not mind, Senator Voinovich? 

I think there is an extraordinary level of compatibility and coherence between what we as an Administration are trying to do and 

what the reports that you cited, the HELP Commission also, have 

concluded. And so as much as the stars ever get lined up on this 

18 

1The prepared statement of Mr. Hindery appears in the Appendix on page 54. 

2The Minority Commission Report entitled ‘‘Revamping U.S. Foreign Assistance,’’ appears in 

the Appendix on page 159. 

incredibly complex, important subject, I think they are about as 

lined up as they are ever going to be in terms of what outside 

groups are saying, what Members of Congress are saying, and what 

we, the Administration, are saying. And I think it provides a really 

good foundation to get to a much better place in terms of coherent 

foreign assistance programming, planning, and implementation, 

sir. And we greatly appreciate your comments. 

Senator VOINOVICH. Thank you. 

Senator AKAKA. I want to thank Senator Voinovich. Mr. Greene, 

thank you so much for being here and for your testimony. I want 

to commend you for being as candid as you have been with your 

statements, and we look forward to continuing to work on this and 

to improve the system. So thank you very much. 

Mr. GREENE. Thank you, sir. 

Senator AKAKA. I want to welcome the second panel of witnesses. 

The second panel of witnesses includes Leo Hindery, Jr., Former 

Vice Chairman, Commission on Helping to Enhance the Livelihood 

of People Around the Globe (HELP); Dr. Gordon Adams, Distinguished Fellow, Henry L. Stimson Center; Anne C. Richard, Vice 

President for Government Relations and Advocacy, International 

Rescue Committee; Sam Worthington, President and CEO, InterAction; and Dr. Gerald Hyman, Senior Adviser and President of the 

Hills Program on Governance, Center for Strategic and International Studies. 

It is the custom of this Subcommittee to swear in all witnesses, 

and I would ask all of you to please rise and raise your right hand. 

Do you solemnly swear that the testimony you are about to give 

this Subcommittee is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but 

the truth, so help you, God? 

Mr. HINDERY. I do. 

Mr. ADAMS. I do. 

Ms. RICHARD. I do. 

Mr. WORTHINGTON. I do. 

Mr. HYMAN. I do. 

Senator AKAKA. Thank you very much. Let the record note that 

the witnesses responded in the affirmative. 

Mr. Hindery, please proceed with your statement. 

TESTIMONY OF LEO HINDERY, JR.,1 FORMER VICE CHAIRMAN, 

COMMISSION ON HELPING TO ENHANCE THE LIVELIHOOD 

OF PEOPLE AROUND THE GLOBE (HELP) 

Mr. HINDERY. Mr. Chairman and Mr. Ranking Member, I am Leo 

Hindery, and I was the Vice Chair of the HELP Commission, which 

was created by Congress in the year 2005 to reflect on how best 

to reform the tools of development assistance. And it is an honor 

for me to be here today to testify to your Subcommittee. I along 

with two other HELP Commission Members—Jeffrey Sachs and 

Gayle Smith—prepared a Minority Commission Report entitled 

‘‘Revamping U.S. Foreign Assistance,’’ and I ask that you place 

that entire Minority Report into the record.2

19 

In the few minutes I now have, I want to discuss in brief three 

of the five most significant conclusions which we drew up in our 

Minority Report, and I would ask, Mr. Chairman, that my fuller 

testimony also be placed into the record. 

Senator AKAKA. Without objection. 

Mr. HINDERY. Even though the principle has been part of U.S. 

foreign policy doctrine for 60 years, our first conclusion was that 

the United States must continue to promote development assistance as a core pillar of national security and American moral values since this principle is now no longer universally embraced. The 

2006 National Security Strategy of the United States explained 

well the rationale and the imperative of development assistance 

when it said that, ‘‘Development reinforces diplomacy and defense, 

reducing long-term threats to our national security by helping to 

build stable, prosperous, and peaceful societies.’’ 

Our second conclusion, and an extremely important one in light 

of the testimony a moment ago, was that the United States should 

immediately establish a new separate Cabinet-level ‘‘Department 

for International Sustainable Development.’’ This new department 

would house USAID, PEPFAR, the President’s Malaria Initiative, 

and Millennium Challenge Corporation, plus all new emerging initiatives such as in climate change. The case for a separate Department rests on five principles: The need, as I mentioned, to upgrade 

U.S. development assistance as a pillar of U.S. national security; 

the need to improve U.S. Government management and expertise 

in public health, climate change, agronomy, demography, environmental engineering, and economic development; the need to work 

effectively with similar Cabinet-level departments and ministries 

in partner donor countries; the need to de-politicize development 

assistance so that it can be directed at the long-term investments 

that are critical in the fight against poverty, hunger, disease, and 

deprivation; and the need for coherence, which is apparent today, 

of those U.S. policies which impact sustainable development. 

The shift, Mr. Chairman, as you commented, in the United Kingdom in 1997 from having a sub-Cabinet development agency to 

having a Cabinet-level department called DfID has dramatically increased the standing, reputation, and experience of the United 

Kingdom in the area of international development. Consequently, 

it was our conclusion that DfID is now, in fact, far ahead of USAID 

as a global thought-leader in development policy and thus, relatively more successful. 

Our third conclusion had to do with what works and with what 

does not work with ODA, which is particularly germane to this 

Subcommittee’s strong interest in organizational process. The discussion on aid effectiveness is often clouded by confusions, by prejudices, and by simple misunderstandings. Many studies, Mr. 

Chairman, try to find correlations between overall aid and economic growth, and when they find little positive correlation, they 

declare aid to be a failure. Yet this low correlation does not prove 

that aid is failing, since much of the aid is directed to countries in 

violence, famine, or deep economic crisis. It is not a surprise, therefore, that aid is often correlated with economic failure, not because 

aid has caused the failure but, rather, because aid has responded 

to failure. We need, as you have commented, a much more sophistiVerDate Nov 24 2008 10:00 Jun 30, 2009 Jkt 044587 PO 00000 Frm 00023 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6601 P:\DOCS\44587.TXT SAFFAIRS PsN: PAT
20 

1The prepared statement of Mr. Adams appears in the Appendix on page 60. 

cated approach than standard simple correlations to judge the effectiveness of aid. And then we need to assess the objectives of specific aid programs and whether these objectives are fulfilled. 

Did the food aid stop starvation? Did immunizations save lives 

or eradicate disease? Did infrastructure spending on roads and 

ports help to generate new employment in new industries? Did aid 

for schooling raise enrollments, completion rates, and literacy? Did 

farm aid increase the productivity of farms? 

In short, I believe there are six keys to success in development. 

First, interventions should be based on powerful, low-cost technologies. Second, interventions should be relatively easy to deliver 

and based on expert systems and local ownership. Third, interventions should be applied at the scale needed to solve the underlying 

problems. Fourth, in a comment raised today, interventions should 

be reliably funded. Fifth, interventions should be multilateral and 

draw support from many governments and international agencies. 

Sixth, and extremely important, interventions, as Senator Voinovich has commented, should have specific objectives and strategies 

so that success rates can be assessed. 

Development assistance programs should have clear objectives, 

and they should not directly aim for excessively broad and overarching goals such as ‘‘democracy’’ or ‘‘the end of terror,’’ even 

though broad goals such as these can appropriately be among the 

direct and indirect motivations for the actual interventions. But 

only, as the Senator has commented, with specific objectives can 

there be measurements, auditing, evaluations, and re-assessments 

as needed. 

Thank you, Mr. Chairman and Mr. Ranking Member, for this opportunity, and I look forward to your questions. 

Senator AKAKA. Thank you very much, Mr. Hindery. Dr. Adams, 

will you please proceed? 

TESTIMONY OF GORDON ADAMS,1 DISTINGUISHED FELLOW, 

HENRY L. STIMSON CENTER 

Mr. ADAMS. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I am delighted 

to appear before this hearing this afternoon. I congratulate both of 

you for holding the hearing because, as has already been said today 

several times, this is a very propitious moment for thinking about 

how we strengthen, improve, restructure and make more effective 

the development assistance of the U.S. Government. So it is extremely timely. 

I also wanted to thank you in particular, Senator Voinovich, for 

your service on the Advisory Panel for the study that the American 

Academy of Diplomacy is sponsoring, which we at the Stimson Center are writing. We appreciate your service there as well and look 

forward to giving you a useful and implementable result. 

I will briefly make a few points today, and thank you for putting 

my full statement in the record. 

Precepts first, I focus on our foreign policy toolkit, and our foreign policy toolkit is out of balance. We have relied on the military 

instrument of power and have neglected and understated our capabilities in diplomacy, development, and foreign assistance. And it 

21 

is my judgment that the Congress and the next Administration are 

going to have to address that priority. 

I observe in my testimony that despite a growing State Department operational budget in recent years, we still have a Department that is inadequately staffed and funded to play a full part in 

our foreign and national security policy. 

And despite roughly doubling our foreign assistance over the past 

8 years, our development and foreign assistance institutions still 

suffer from what I call a ‘‘diaspora’’ of organizations and capabilities. They need to better integrated and coordinated. They need 

more strategic direction. They need more funding and staff. And 

they need, in my judgment, a coordinated budget process to be effective. 

So I want to mention four things that I recommend in the testimony. 

First off, with respect to the State Department, we need to invest 

in additional staffing for the State Department and reshape the career expectations of people going into America’s diplomacy. I think 

both of those are important. We will recommend in the report that 

Senator Voinovich is helping us with that there be a roughly 35- 

percent increase in the overseas Foreign Service staffing of the 

State Department over the next 5 years. But increasing the people 

is not in itself enough. We need to have also different people or to 

evolve the people we have. We have some fine diplomats, but the 

State Department today—and this is very much at the core of my 

testimony—is doing a great deal more than report, negotiate, and 

represent, which is the classical function of a State Department officer. 

Through the State Department and through USAID, we have a 

very strong and growing ‘‘gray area’’ of program activity at the 

State Department: HIV programs in PEPFAR, the EUR assistance 

programs in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, counterterrorism programs, and peacekeeping operations. For all of these, 

we are getting a new generation and a new set of experiences for 

our State Department diplomats. 

We need to focus on that reality, in a very concentrated way, to 

recruit, to train through their careers, to assign across cones, to assign across departments, and to reward a much broader career 

path in the State Department than what traditionally has been the 

case. 

We also think that it is very important to expand and reward the 

work of the public diplomacy function at the State Department. 

Senator Voinovich referred to this in his early questions. We think 

that is a very important aspect, and we will be recommending in 

the Stimson Academy Report an increase in staffing and in programming for the public diplomacy functions at the State Department. 

I mention these issues because, in my judgment, they are all connected. We are talking about the civilian capability of the U.S. Government; our foreign assistance and diplomacy and public diplomacy are connected in our effort to be effective. 

Second, to come specifically to the area of foreign assistance, 

when I was the Associate Director at the Office of Management 

and Budget back in the early to mid-1990s, one of the things that 

22 

struck me most strongly was that most of the accounts that are in 

what we call the Function 150, the international affairs budget, 

were integrated at my desk. I was an OMB official. It is not the 

place that these accounts, programs, or strategies ought to be integrated. Because the integration mechanisms at the State Department were not effective, they were integrated at my desk. This reflects the diaspora I mentioned earlier. And the diaspora has gotten worse in this Administration. Congress and the Administration 

have created programs that have the opportunity to be effective. I 

am talking about PEPFAR and about the Millennium Challenge 

Corporation, which make up the bulk of the growth in foreign assistance funding over the last 6 or 7 years. 

The consequence of the diaspora and your chart amply demonstrates it—is the weakening of our core foreign assistance institution: USAID. Here there is not only a need to rebuild the core, 

but to restructure that core so it can carry new responsibilities. It 

needs to reform to being a technical and field agency as opposed 

to a contracting agency, and forward to deal with the kinds of 

issues it now works on with the Department of Defense and the 

private sector. I want to note here that the flow of funding to the 

developing countries right now from the private sector overwhelms 

any bilateral official aid. The effective coordination with other donors requires an adequate staff in the field. 

So we have a very strong recommendation in the study about 

doubling the field presence of USAID and making sure that it is 

technical, programmatic, and on the ground, not just more contracting officers. We see USAID as the central player in our foreign 

assistance and development programs. I would urge appointing 

someone to the position that exists in statute but has not been 

filled, making the current Office of Director of Foreign Assistance 

an actual Deputy Secretary of State. A Deputy Secretary of State 

for Management and Resources position exists in law, in Title 22. 

And we recommend appointing that person and dual-hatting them 

as the Administrator of USAID. This will ensure a voice for foreign 

assistance at the intergovernmental level, and it will assure responsiveness to the Congress because it is a confirmed official responsible for development assistance. 

The third point is strategic planning. We have talked a little bit 

about that, and Mr. Greene talked about that a good deal, too. This 

comes to the core of the problem. There is a close tie between our 

foreign policy goals and our foreign assistance and development 

programs. Rather than separating them, I see over time the need 

for a very close tie if the United States is going to have a powerful 

and effective civilian foreign policy toolkit, and a more integrated 

strategic planning and budgeting capability that meets the needs 

of development as a central goal of U.S. international engagement. 

This to me is not a question of development versus foreign assistance. A very broad definition of development, one used by most of 

the development community today, incorporates programs that we 

call ‘‘foreign assistance’’ and programs that we call ‘‘development 

assistance.’’ And it is not a question of ‘‘short term’’ versus ‘‘long 

term.’’ The short and the long are increasingly interlocked in our 

statecraft. 

23 

1The prepared statement of Ms. Richard appears in the Appendix on page 75. 

2The working paper from the Stanley Foundation and Center for New American Security entitled ‘‘Improving US National Security: Options for Strengthening US Foreign Operations,’’ appears in the Appendix on page 120. 

There will always be some conflicts between short and long term 

perspectives. That is just in the nature of things. But both are important. It is important to recognize that reality—— 

Senator AKAKA. Dr. Adams, would you please summarize? 

Mr. ADAMS. Yes, I will. Thank you. 

The State Department does both long and short term work. 

USAID does both short and long term work. So we see Mr. 

Greene’s office as flawed, flexible, fixable, and an important foundation for building this long-term, transparent capacity for budgeting. 

I will simply add one other point, and that is that in the testimony I talk a bit about this question of militarization, and both 

here and in the Stimson Center Report, we will try to be responsive 

to Secretary Gates’ concern about militarization of foreign assistance to bring back into the State Department and the USAID 

world the authorities over many of those programs now being implemented by the Defense Department under its own authorities. 

Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. 

Senator AKAKA. Thank you very much, Dr. Adams. Ms. Richard, 

please proceed. 

TESTIMONY OF ANNE C. RICHARD,1 VICE PRESIDENT FOR 

GOVERNMENT RELATIONS AND ADVOCACY, INTERNATIONAL RESCUE COMMITTEE 

Ms. RICHARD. Thank you, Senators. Thank you for holding this 

hearing on Reforming the Foreign Assistance Bureaucracy. Your 

interest in this issue is very well timed. There is a consensus 

emerging that change is needed. 

This afternoon, I would like to outline three major weak points 

in the foreign assistance bureaucracy—one, leadership; two, people; 

and three, coordination—and propose steps that could help address 

these weak points and strengthen the U.S. foreign aid program. My 

remarks are informed by my position as the Vice President of the 

International Rescue Committee, an internationally recognized relief and development agency, and also my past experience at the 

State Department. I was Madeleine Albright’s adviser on budgets 

and planning. 

I should also mention that I am the co-author of a forthcoming 

paper from the Stanley Foundation and Center for New American 

Security that describes how the next Administration might improve 

U.S. foreign operations; and my co-author, Paul Clayman, was the 

counsel for Senator Lugar on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. I request that my remarks and the forthcoming paper be 

put into the record.2

Senator AKAKA. Without objection, it will be made part of the 

record. 

Ms. RICHARD. Thank you. 

Moving quickly to my first point, I think many of us here believe 

that stronger development management, policy, and leadership is 

needed from the U.S. Government. There is just a stronger need for 

24 

leadership of development assistance. The Bush Administration 

has increased overall foreign aid but really opted out of using the 

U.S. Agency for International Development for major new initiatives and instead developed ‘‘work-arounds,’’ such as creating the 

Millennium Challenge Corporation as a separate agency and also 

funneling HIV/USAIDS funding, the PEPFAR funds, through an office in the State Department. A logical move would be to fold these 

initiatives into USAID and thus, bring most of the major aid 

projects under one roof and ideally, reporting to one strong leader 

within the Administration. 

The Administrator of USAID is an important job that needs to 

be filled by someone who can speak with authority. This person has 

to go to conference tables at the White House and be included in 

the discussions as decisions are being made and not told what happened later on. In international meetings and summits, the USAID 

Administrator should be empowered to meet with development 

ministers from other governments as a peer. Put simply, the Administrator must be the point person for relief and development in 

the Administration. 

My written statement discusses militarization of foreign aid and 

concerns about reconstruction after conflicts. These are very hot 

topics right now, but they are parts of this overall foreign aid picture. 

All of these various trends seemed to have boiled down lately to 

a disagreement among experts about the best place to lead U.S. development aid efforts. Some would say leadership should be at the 

top of the State Department, as Mr. Greene did, or with a new 

Cabinet-level development department, as both InterAction and 

Mr. Hindery would maintain, or through a coordinator based in or 

around the White House. 

Paul Clayman and I developed what we call the ‘‘hybrid model,’’ 

which we think combines the best of all these ideas: A new directorate for foreign operations at the National Security Council with 

staff who are knowledgeable and able to obtain input from key actors and help resolve disputes as they arise; a State Department 

that can coordinate and influence the overall direction of the full 

range of aid programs—which, as we know, is more than just development aid—to address the President’s foreign policy needs— 

and that could be built off of the current F process—and a strong 

development agency, which I would propose be a revamped and empowered USAID—that includes all or most major development programs. 

I would also propose that we continue the practice of having the 

leaders from different agencies involved in foreign aid meet to discuss the trends and the policies that the Administration has, and 

this could be modeled on the Millennium Challenge Corporation’s 

board. Importantly, this hybrid model could be readily implemented within a short period of time by a new Administration. 

There is a need for more people in both the State Department 

and USAID to carry out the important work of these agencies. It 

will be important for the Department of State and USAID to explain the impact new personnel will have, how they will make a 

difference, and what tasks they will undertake. Not just more people are needed, but more training, too. The international affairs 

25 

agencies need trained and skilled personnel to match modern demands. This includes the ability to speak hard languages, appreciation for the use of technology, and a good understanding of program management. In terms of skills, there is a clear need for personnel who can respond rapidly to crises and can play useful roles 

in post-conflict situations. 

Finally, both the State Department and USAID need contingency 

funds to head off and respond to crises. I know proposals for contingency funds almost never survive the budget process. I have firsthand experience in that. But I would propose modeling a disaster 

contingency fund on the highly successful Emergency Refugee and 

Migration Account that the State Department manages for refugee 

crises. 

My recommendation, therefore, is that this Subcommittee speaks 

out in support of greater investment in the international affairs 

budget and the personnel of these agencies, but that you also seek 

good answers to the questions of what the new hires will be doing 

and how the workforce will be used to tackle global threats and the 

full range of modern demands on Foreign Service officers. 

My third point is that the very complexity that Rich Greene 

talked about requires coordination. Many of those who criticize the 

current way the U.S. Government organizes foreign aid complain 

about the large number of agencies that run aid programs and the 

long list of budget accounts that fund aid. And so I think a fresh 

approach would probably consolidate this large number of government actors into a smaller number of decisionmakers that work 

more closely together. But there will always be multiple actors because of the complexity of U.S. interests overseas. A coherent strategy does not necessarily mean that U.S. national security priorities, goals, and objectives can be easily described or condensed into 

a simple catchphrase. U.S. national interests are broad and varied. 

The United States has relations with, and Americans have interests in—and I am sure nobody knows this better than U.S. Senators who hear from their constituents what their interests are— 

nearly every country on the globe. U.S. Government engagement 

with the rest of the world should be expected to be multi-faceted 

and complex. 

What is true is that the many U.S. foreign aid actors, organizations, and budget accounts make the entire enterprise harder to explain to senior officials, the media, the public, and to justify it to 

you, the Congress. Government leaders should do a better job communicating the importance of this work. There is a need to coordinate across various U.S. Government agencies in order to align 

U.S. foreign aid programs with foreign policy goals, avoid duplication, and ensure a smart approach. The paper Paul Clayman and 

I wrote on the hybrid model also proposes ways to do this. 

Before concluding, I just want to say, Senator Voinovich, your 

question earlier about the continuing resolution and really the reliance, too, on supplementals to fund emergency funding and crises 

in the world is having an impact on organizations like mine, the 

International Rescue Committee. What happens is there is a great 

deal of uncertainty at the start of the fiscal year, when managers, 

good managers, should be sitting down deciding how many people 

to hire, where they should be deployed, and how do you set about 

26 

1The prepared statement of Mr. Worthington appears in the Appendix on page 81. 

2The Policy Paper from InterAction, June 2008, entitled ‘‘Proposed Major Components and Organization of a Cabinet-level Department for Global and Human Development,’’ appears in the 

Appendix on page 144. 3The charts referred to appear in the Appendix beginning on page 117. 

operating for the rest of the year. Without certainty, you cannot 

know that, and, in fact, when you are told that your funding has 

been cut but you might get more later in a supplemental, what 

ends up happening is you have to let people go. You have to give 

up the rent on your property. You have to not order the supplies 

or send people for training. And it is very hard to do that later in 

the fiscal year when half or three-quarters of the fiscal year has 

gone by. 

As bad as that is in terms of a management problem, it is really 

more troubling in life-and-death situations such as the situations 

some of my colleagues working in failed and fragile environments 

see. You cannot go back in time and deliver healthy babies after 

they have been born, you cannot go back and ‘‘back-feed’’ growing 

children, and you cannot stop the spread of deadly diseases as they 

are tearing through villages three-quarters of the way through the 

year. So I would be very happy to talk to you more about that. We 

have done a lot of thinking about that, both in my organization and 

within InterAction, our coalition of relief and development agencies. 

Let me stop there. Thank you for holding this hearing, and I look 

forward to your questions. 

Senator AKAKA. Thank you very much, Ms. Richard. 

Mr. Worthington, please proceed with your statement. 

TESTIMONY OF SAMUEL A. WORTHINGTON,1 PRESIDENT AND 

CEO, INTERACTION 

Mr. WORTHINGTON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. It is a pleasure 

to be here this afternoon. I am President and CEO of InterAction, 

which is the largest coalition of U.S.-based international development and relief organizations.2

Foreign assistance plays a critical role in advancing U.S. national interests overseas, and it represents, as we know, our humanitarian values and puts the best face of America forward to the 

world in many ways. InterAction’s 168 members receive $6 billion 

a year from the American public directly, which is more than twice 

what they receive in partnership with the U.S. Government. We 

believe that the cornerstone of our foreign assistance portfolio is 

development assistance, which at the heart of it should be poverty 

alleviation. InterAction believes that the chief goal of U.S. development assistance should be to reduce poverty and help countries and 

people achieve their full potential, and that these reflect American 

humanitarianism and equal opportunity for all. 

The problem today is that we have too few development dollars 

spread over too many agencies, as we see in these charts,3 fragmented across 26 different departments, and our aid programs are 

often poorly coordinated, at best, and at worst, working at cross 

purposes. 

It is for this reason that InterAction and its members believe 

that the United States should develop a National Development 

27 

Strategy and that this National Development Strategy, among 

other things, should prescribe how foreign assistance programs will 

be coordinated and integrated with other foreign policy tools for 

working with low-income countries, assert that poverty reduction is 

a primary goal of foreign assistance, recognize the role of women 

in reducing poverty, describe how U.S. development programs relate to the Departments of State and Defense, and lay out how our 

assistance programs should coordinate with other bilateral and 

multilateral and other funding, including funding from the U.S. 

nonprofit community. 

This last point about coordination raises another important issue 

for us, which is the government’s capacity to be a good partner in 

development. Right now USAID, which is our lead development 

agency, lacks the capacity to coordinate effectively with other bilateral and multilateral donors or of its own partners, including U.S. 

civil society. The latter problem is caused by the agency’s human 

capital limitations, which we were talking about earlier today, as 

USAID just does not have the staff to effectively manage the grants 

and cooperative agreements that are used and comprise its primary 

funding relationship with the U.S. civil society and NGOs. This 

problem was exacerbated when the agency’s Bureau for Policy and 

Program Coordination, which handled many functions related to 

donor coordination, was moved out of the agency into the Office of 

the Director of Foreign Assistance. 

I have made 11 key recommendations in my written testimony 

that I believe will improve the government’s capacity to respond to 

this coordination, and I would like to share a few of them with you 

right now. 

First, I would urge Congress to work closely with Director of U.S. 

Foreign Assistance, Henrietta Fore, to implement her Development 

Leadership Initiative, which is, in essence, turning back some of 

the challenges that have plagued USAID for the last 15 years. 

Second, I urge Congress and the Administration to work together 

to replace USAID’s operating expense (OE) account with a funding 

mechanism that allows Congress to maintain its oversight, but 

gives the agency the resources and flexibility it needs to be effective. 

Third, we need to prioritize monitoring and evaluation so that 

USAID can know what works and what does not. 

Fourth, to ensure that USAID staff know the difference between 

acquisition contracts and assistance cooperative agreements. The 

NGO community has always approached USAID a co-equal partner 

rather than simply a contracting agency that pays for development 

programs. 

And, finally, we need to elevate development assistance within 

our government to its rightful place alongside defense and diplomacy, a principle that is well established as part of our government’s National Security Strategy. 

It is InterAction’s position that the best way to elevate development assistance is to create a Cabinet-level Department for Global 

and Human Development. A Cabinet-level department would 

streamline the various goals and objectives of U.S. foreign assistance as well as the current proliferation of assistance programs, including PEPFAR and the MCC, and creating a Cabinet-level deVerDate Nov 24 2008 10:00 Jun 30, 2009 Jkt 044587 PO 00000 Frm 00031 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6601 P:\DOCS\44587.TXT SAFFAIRS PsN: PAT
28 

1The prepared statement of Mr. Hyman appears in the Appendix on page 94. 

partment would protect development from militarization by the Department of Defense or subordinated to the tactical goals of the 

State Department. 

Those who suggest that USAID ought to be merged with the 

State Department underestimate the differences in the culture and 

the functions between the two agencies. The alignment of development and diplomacy is important. So is the alignment of defense 

and diplomacy. And yet no reasonable person would ever suggest 

merging the State Department into DOD. Soldiers enlist in our 

military to become warriors not aid workers. Similarly, State Department officials aspire to be diplomats not development specialists. Humanitarian development policy experts choose to work at 

USAID or the Cabinet-level department we propose because they 

believe they can make a difference in the lives of the world’s poor, 

particularly as it relates to our national interests. InterAction has 

a paper that proposes how we might organize such a department, 

which I submit for the record along with my written testimony. 

Hundreds of CEOs and InterAction are not alone in seeking a 

Cabinet-level department. It is an idea that is gaining momentum 

here in Washington, also the position of the Modernizing Foreign 

Assistance Network, a bipartisan group of experts from think 

tanks, universities, and NGOs, of which I am a part. 

It is clear that the 21st Century presents us with foreign policy 

challenges that our current development infrastructure is illequipped to handle. We are also at a point in our history when respect for the United States abroad is at an all-time low. At the 

same time, the next President will take over a country with a large 

constituency that supports international development, as well as a 

military that supports improvement in our non-military tools. It is 

vitally important that he works with Congress to reach a grand 

bargain that prioritizes these issues and gives the Executive 

Branch the flexibility it needs to respond to a rapidly changing 

world and ensures comprehensive legislative oversight. 

The United States must elevate development within our government and give it the space it needs to be effective vis-a-vis defense 

and diplomacy, focus our foreign assistance and development programs on a streamlined set of objectives by creating a National Development Strategy, and improve the capacity of our government to 

partner effectively with U.S. NGOs, with other donors, and with 

aid recipients. 

Thank you, and I look forward to your questions. 

Senator AKAKA. Thank you very much, Mr. Worthington. Mr. 

Hyman, would you please proceed with your statement? 

TESTIMONY OF GERALD F. HYMAN,1 SENIOR ADVISOR AND 

PRESIDENT OF THE HILLS PROGRAM ON GOVERNANCE, 

CENTER FOR STRATEGIC AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES 

Mr. HYMAN. Thank you, Chairman Akaka and Ranking Member 

Voinovich, for holding this hearing and for giving me the opportunity to appear before you. I ask that my full written testimony 

be included in the record. 

29 

Senator AKAKA. Yes. Other materials that are being requested by 

our witnesses, without objection, will be included in the record. 

Mr. HYMAN. Some of the points I wanted to make have already 

been made by others, so I will be briefer than I might otherwise 

have been. I am sure you will not object to that. 

The first and most important, of course, is that the organization 

of U.S. assistance is fractured, tangled, mismanaged, and malaligned. That is a point that everyone at this table—and, in fact, 

Mr. Greene pointed out himself when he said it was fragmented 

across multiple bureaus and offices within State and USAID. And 

your chart points that out even more forcefully. USAID was, and 

remains to some extent, the primary assistance vehicle, although 

it is deeply troubled, weak, and demoralized, and that needs to be 

turned around, in my opinion. So the first of these three points is 

the fractured nature of our assistance programs. 

Within the State Department, we have a number of programs 

that could easily have been managed by USAID and were pulled 

out for reasons of bureaucratic turf wars, personality, and a whole 

variety of other measures that had, I think, little to do with the 

substance of what was going on. That includes PEPFAR, it includes 

the Millennium Challenge Corporation, and it includes the Middle 

East Partnership Initiative. 

I was in the original group that worked on what became the Millennium Challenge Corporation, and initially that was—a separate 

corporation was only one of several options available for how to do 

a program like the MCC program. Pulling it out just was another 

example of picking away at what could have been or should have 

been and was a central development agency. That trend, it seems 

to me, needs to be reversed. 

The second major feature—and that is all within the 150 Account, all underneath the Secretary of State, underneath the Agency for International Development. The second point is the point 

that is on your chart as well, and that is the other government departments that are doing assistance, with the possible exception, 

sir, of the Bureau for Indian Affairs. It is not obvious to me that 

there is any department in the U.S. Government that does not 

have a foreign assistance program of its own, and that creates a 

huge problem of fracturing, fragmenting, and so on, particularly 

when people from different agencies are engaged in similar or parallel programs in the same country at the same time and often giving contrary advice. So it seems to me that fracturing is the first 

issue that needs to be dealt with. 

Secretary Rice has tried to deal with that through the 150 Account and the development of the so-called F process and the Director of Foreign Assistance. In my personal opinion, it is a defective 

attempt. But as Mr. Greene pointed out, they are working on some 

changes, which I hope will improve the situation dramatically. 

My second point: I agree with Mr. Adams—and I am afraid I disagree with some of my other colleagues on this panel—about the 

advisability of separating the assistance—a coordinated assistance 

effort into a different independent department separate from the 

Department of State, for a variety of reasons. First, the new National Security Strategy calls for development diplomacy and defense into the same—into a unified national security policy. I do 

30 

not think that separating development out of that is going to increase the coherence of those three. It seems to me it is going to 

elevate the problems of integration to a higher level, which may require, as Ms. Richard suggested, a NSC arbiter. But it seems to me 

it is not a wise idea, again, to pull things apart and then move 

them to the top for integration into the National Security Council, 

which will wind up having to adjudicate a whole variety of turf and 

theoretical and implementation issues that it seems to me would 

be better handled within the Department. 

Second, there are other kinds of programs than the pure development account programs, and those are in the ESF accounts. We can 

talk about and I think it would be useful to talk about joining those 

two, but the fact is that we do a variety of ‘‘development programs’’ 

in countries for reasons other than pure development. Haiti, 

Sudan, the FATA regions of Pakistan, North Korea—the list goes 

on and on. These are programs that look like development programs done for very different reasons. We are not putting $750 million into the FATA because it is a great development partner. We 

are doing it for other reasons. And those, in my opinion, are perfectly reasonable to do, perfectly legitimate, and the programs may 

look like development programs—education, schools, roads, 

health—but they are done for very different reasons. And that is 

why you have, we have, separate accounts. It might be useful to 

come back and relook at those accounts, but those are programs 

that, again, require diplomacy and development to be linked together, in my personal view. 

If you pull them apart, either two-thirds of the ‘‘development 

budget’’ would not be funded, or it would be funded at levels justifiable only on purely development grounds, or they would be managed by the Department of State while you had a separate development level agency doing the so-called development program. I do 

not see that the first two are advisable, and the third is neither 

advisable nor realistic, it seems to me. So I would keep them within the confines of one agency. 

The third thing is strategy and tactics. I would be happy to talk 

about that in the question period, but the fact is that the F process 

that Mr. Greene talked about merges tax strategy and tactics, 

hyper-centralizes the decisions in Washington, does not adequately, 

in my opinion, look at the advantages of the field programs and 

field expertise. It oversimplifies the character of recipient countries. 

It undermines the value of our in-country expertise and has damaged the attempt to measure impact, as you discussed earlier. 

So I have nine recommendations. I think I am out of time. They 

are in my testimony, and I will just leave it at that. Thank you so 

much for the opportunity, and I look forward to your questions. 

Senator AKAKA. Thank you. Thank you very much, Mr. Hyman. 

I would like to ask my first question of Mr. Hindery. I know you 

have limited time here. Mr. Hindery, in the four tasks you identified for starting up a new department for International Sustainable 

Development, you did not include the need to ensure that human 

capital needs, such as recruitment, retention, or training are addressed, even though you mention these needs as part of your case 

for starting a separate department. 

31 

Do you believe that a new department would already have most 

of its human capital needs met? 

Mr. HINDERY. Mr. Chairman, I think the question is a seminal 

one, and you have raised it in other contexts this afternoon. This 

is about quality of personnel. It is about quantity of personnel. But 

it is also about morale. And in our longer testimony, my colleagues 

and I on the HELP Commission concluded that all three of them 

can only be met well in a separate department. 

I take exception with some of the other panelists. I think it is 

the status that would come from a separate department that would 

address the morale question, and I think that as these three Secretaries sit as partners in this initiative of defense, diplomacy, and 

development, that all of the management concerns that you and 

Senator Voinovich have raised could be more easily addressed. 

I have had the privilege of being a chief executive of large organizations, and that is an unmanageable chart to your right, sir, absent consolidation and coordination and status—and I really would 

emphasize, as somebody who has had the privilege of leading large 

numbers of people, that status is critical. Status is critical to attracting people. It is critical to retaining people. And absent it, I 

think foreign assistance will not be the success that you and Senator Voinovich might like to see. 

Senator AKAKA. Mr. Hindery and Mr. Worthington, in your testimony, you make a case for a new separate Cabinet-level department focused on international development. Do you see any other 

practical alternatives to this such as improving the F Bureau or 

somehow keeping the foreign assistance responsibilities within the 

State Department? 

Mr. HINDERY. Mr. Chairman, over the 3 years that the HELP 

Commission existed—and I was, as I mentioned, its Senate-appointed vice chair—with a lot of exhaustive review, all of the Commissioners concluded that there were only three choices available 

to this Congress on this issue: A super State Department, that is, 

the collapse of this activity into the State Department; a much 

emboldened USAID; or the third alternative, which Mr. Worthington and I and Ms. Richard, I think, are in consensus on, 

which is the stand-alone department. 

We did not find a fourth, Mr. Chairman. I do not think there is 

one. And it was our conclusion that the negatives of a super State 

Department belie the principles of three D’s as you would have just 

killed off one of the D’s. And as for an emboldened USAID, it would 

not confront the three charts which you have presented to us today. 

Just emboldening USAID and managing it better would not fix its 

structure problem. 

I think as a final comment—and I would defer to Mr. Worthington, who is so able on this subject, and to Ms. Richard—there 

is such a good model in the DfID success that for you and the 

Ranking Member, you do not have to speculate that this works. It 

has been proven to work in the DfID model. And I think that would 

give great comfort, should give great comfort to the next Administration and to this Congress. 

Senator AKAKA. Thank you. Mr. Worthington. 

Mr. WORTHINGTON. The F process was a beginning of an attempt 

to engage in coordination, and as such, it should be applauded as 

32 

a first step. The challenge is for a community that engages directly 

with the U.S. Government in the field, that coordination did not go 

far enough and in many ways was too centralized in the way it related to the field. So one level, we applaud the coordination attempt, but it simply did not go far enough. 

The second is a recognition that any attempt to bring all these 

actors together will only work in terms of how it is reflected in an 

embassy overseas. You will always have an Ambassador as the primary representative of the United States overseas, but underneath 

that, right now you do not have a clear actor who is responsible 

for U.S. foreign assistance on the ground as it relates to different 

parts of the various programs you have over there. At times, you 

do not even know who is going to come and visit a country from 

different agencies. 

So our community—and this is a discussion among some 100 different CEOs over a long period of time. It slowly emerged that we 

needed to have this broader degree of bringing together the different parts of U.S. foreign assistance to simply enable us to work 

with. Some members of our community are working with 10, 15 different parts of the U.S. Government. 

Our challenge was that when we saw the F process come into 

being, the overall goals and direction of U.S. foreign assistance 

shifted significantly at the local level and in budgeting to reflect interests of the State Department and diplomatic interests, which are 

purely—very much valid for U.S. foreign assistance, but we saw 

that there was no longer the space for what we would view as development was actually narrowing at the time when resources are 

significantly increasing for development work within the Administration. And that led us to conclude that it was only establishing 

a more empowered USAID ultimately to a Cabinet-level department under a broad strategy would be the best outcome. 

Senator AKAKA. Ms. Richard, would you care to comment on that 

question? 

Ms. RICHARD. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Where I agree with Mr. 

Worthington and Mr. Hindery is on the importance of having a 

USAID that is functioning and that is strong. And I am really surprised that the current Administration, which talked a lot about 

taking a very businesslike approach to foreign aid, bypassed working to fix whatever is wrong with USAID and set up duplicative, 

new, and other organizations. 

I thought that if one wanted to be businesslike and be a good 

caretaker of the taxpayers’ money, one would have looked at 

USAID, examined how it was operating, and come up with proposals to strengthen it. And so I would propose that the next Administration do that. 

Where I differ from them is that I do not think there is anything 

magic about elevating an organization to a Cabinet level. To me, 

that is no silver bullet. I think that what is really needed is that 

the organization operate very well and have the support of the 

President and of the Secretary of State, and that will enhance the 

status, and that will enhance the morale of the personnel in the 

organization. 

Senator AKAKA. Thank you very much for that. I am going to ask 

Senator Voinovich for his questions. 

33 

Senator VOINOVICH. One of the things that I was really happy 

about when Senator Akaka put this hearing together was that we 

are kind of at a junction or watershed period where we have a 

chance to really do something different. And I think one of the 

things that needs to be underscored is the landscape of the world 

has changed, and that is, we have a whole different variety of challenges that we must face. But the one thing I would like to ask, 

Mr. Adams, in the report coming out from the American Diplomacy, have all these people at the table had any input at all in the 

report? 

Mr. ADAMS. Yes, in a variety of ways, they have. Anne Richard 

is a member of the Advisory Group helping us with that study. 

That group has taken into consideration all three of the pieces of 

work: The Modernizing the Foreign Assistance Network in InterAction; the work Jerry Hyman did for the Carnegie Endowment; 

and the HELP Commission report as well. All of those pieces of 

work are taken into consideration in the work that we are doing. 

Senator VOINOVICH. It seems to me that we have a gigantic public-private partnership, and I think it is really important that you 

take into consideration the contribution that many of these organizations are making. I think you said, Mr. Worthington, they spend 

more money than we do combined. And so that is something that 

is very special, and we ought to be encouraging that, and there 

ought to be as much coordination going on as possible. 

I think the problems that are going to be confronting the next 

President are enormous in so many areas. I would urge all of you 

to really get together and get up early in the morning and go to 

bed late at night trying to come back with some kind of consensus, 

a recommendation to Congress and to the next President, about 

how this thing should happen. As I say, the stars are in line. Two 

years ago, I talked with General Jones about this, as well as the 

head of Africa—and they all—everybody seems to understand we 

have got to do something different. But I think that if we get into 

the next year and we have got people going different directions, it 

will make it difficult for us to be successful. 

I am going to spend a lot of time trying to figure out this concept 

of a new department because I have experienced—and so has Senator Akaka—this whole new Department of Homeland Security. 

And it is a nightmare and probably should never have been put together the way it was. And I say shame on the Administration for 

not coming up here and wrestling with us to say, look, we have got 

the job to do and this is the way we think we need to do it, instead 

of letting us kind of impose it; and now that it is not working and 

things are not going the way they are supposed to, we just say, 

Well, that is your baby, you take care of it. 

I think that is really important to think about how does that get 

done. You have a lot of different groups out there, and how much 

more difficult or less difficult would it be than the Department of 

Homeland Security? We did the Defense Department. There was 

kind of a thread that ran through all of it, and it was a lot easier 

to do. You have different cultures, all kinds of things that need to 

be looked at. 

So I would really like you to give some more thought to how to 

handle that situation, and the other thing, of course, is the issue 

34 

of the earmarks that are there. Again, that does not give you the 

flexibility that you need to look at the programs and how do they 

jibe together and how you can maximize the dollars that are available. 

Mr. ADAMS. Senator, since you asked my view on the department, let me be clear, I do not, in fact, favor creating a separate 

Department of Development. My views really join Anne Richard’s 

and Jerry Hyman’s. The reason I have that view is precisely because, as I said in my opening statement, the reality of our foreign 

affairs agencies and programs is that there is a substantial degree 

of integration, overlap, and even cooperation particularly between 

the State Department and USAID with respect to both program 

definition, program implementation, and the objectives served by 

the programs. This is what I called the ‘‘gray area.’’ It is really the 

connection between our foreign policy objectives, our national security objectives, and the important role that development has in 

those objectives. 

USAID does a number of things, not just development programs. 

It works closely with the Defense Department today in Afghanistan. In Iraq, as you know, it has transition initiatives programs, 

conflict management, military affairs programs and disaster assistance, all of which focus on the near term. And in the State Department, you have a European Assistance Program that is budgeted 

and planned by the EUR Bureau in the State Department and implemented in part at USAID. They have to work with each other 

hand in glove all the time. 

In other words, we have a rapidly changing culture—here I do 

disagree with Leo Hindery—in the State Department with respect 

to its attention to program definition and implementation and to 

long term objectives in the field. And we have a foreign assistance 

organization which can do both long term and short term at the 

same time. 

In my judgment, this is best served—and here I join Anne Richard and Jerry Hyman—by strengthening the capacity of USAID in 

relationship to the State Department. My recommendation is that 

a Deputy Secretary of State position for resources and management 

that exists in law be, in fact, the steering official for the foreign assistance programs of the United States, these programs give both 

accountability to Capitol Hill and a presence at the decision tables 

in the White House. 

That vision may not have quite all the details right, but it conforms to the reality of U.S. involvement overseas today. Trying to 

separate out one very specific thing narrowly defined as poverty reduction and development is not an accurate description of what we 

call ‘‘development’’ programs in the government and would artificially separate out these other policy-relevant programs. Then 

where is their home? What do they do? 

Senator VOINOVICH. Mr. Hindery wants to comment. 

Mr. HINDERY. Senator, I think that your concern about the problems around the creation of the Department of Homeland Security 

are well stated. We looked at that, and we all have to remember 

that DHS was born out of the tragedy of September 11, 2001, and 

many of its activities were new in their own right. 

35 

Senator VOINOVICH. Pardon me. You said something about the 

DfID model? 

Mr. HINDERY. The DfID model, which is the euphemism for the 

United Kingdom’s stand-alone department. It is called the Department for International Development (DfID). 

Senator VOINOVICH. That was the other thing I was thinking 

about when you were talking. I wonder how other people handle it. 

So you are referring to the way they—— 

Mr. HINDERY. The United Kingdom, Senator, has a stand-alone 

department. 

I would go back to the comment about the Department of Homeland Security. We need to remember that much of its problems 

were because it was also trying to start new initiatives. U.S. foreign assistance already exists, and it has existed for 60 years. It 

is a noble part of what we do as a Nation. 

If you and your colleagues looked at it more as a reformation, a 

rehabilitation of what we are doing now and not the entirety of a 

new initiative, as DHS was, the Department of Homeland Security, 

while it is not an unformidable task, it may be more comforting to 

your and your colleagues as you try to draw the contrast. 

Senator VOINOVICH. Ms. Richard. 

Ms. RICHARD. The proposal that I put forward is less than ideal. 

It was put forward because it is a compromise between people who 

would like to see a Cabinet-level development agency and people 

who think that the State Department should do more, should be 

more in the leadership. 

So as a practitioner, Paul Clayman and I were looking for a way 

to bridge these two communities. 

Senator VOINOVICH. How long were you with Secretary Albright? 

Ms. RICHARD. I was at the State Department starting in May 

1990, working actually for Deputy Secretary Eagleburger, and I 

was there most of the 1990s. And for 2 years, I reported directly 

to Secretary Albright on these activities. 

Senator VOINOVICH. So you were there for a while. 

Ms. RICHARD. Most of the decade of the 1990s I was working on 

foreign aid and trying to figure out how to work across the agencies 

that were—and try to bring more coherence. And what is happening today is a much more serious effort than we were able to 

mount back then, although every Secretary of State has cared 

about this, and usually the longer they are in the job, the more 

they care about it because they realize that this is indeed the toolkit they have to make a difference in the world. 

So our proposal is a compromise. It is not ideal, but one of the 

benefits of it is it could be done relatively easily in the first 90 days 

of a new Administration. 

Now, could you do more and could you do something more towards an ideal? Yes, you could, but in order to do that, you would 

have to have the President personally interested, I think, with the 

White House behind it, and some sort of understanding at the outset with Congress that there would be joint work to produce something useful. 

We have seen how hard it is to get foreign assistance legislation 

passed in the Congress, and that is why I do not have a great deal 

of hope that a major restructuring could be carried out. But as you 

36 

say, it is an interesting time. There is a lot more attention to this. 

You may have a better sense up here on the appetite for undertaking something large and sweeping. 

I do think there is a consensus that is changing—— 

Senator VOINOVICH. I am taking too much time. I would like to 

interrupt you. The thing that is really important here is that you 

can have a new President, and new Presidents like to do new initiatives. And you are complaining about the Millennium challenge 

corporation and other things that should have been there, and they 

did not—they wanted to have something that they could point to. 

And I think that if there is not a lot of good work done before that 

and you can go to the next President and say, look, we worked this 

thing out, we do not think we need to have a new department, here 

is the way you can get it done and try and say that his initiative 

will be that he is going to bring these other things together in a 

special way. I think it is really important you do that because if 

it does not happen, the new guy is going to come in and say, hey, 

I am doing it this way, and off we go, and a year from now or 2 

years from now, maybe we get something done. We do not have 

time for that. 

Ms. RICHARD. Well, where there is consensus is there is consensus change is needed; there is agreement the United States 

must be more effective on this. There is a general belief that foreign aid is indeed a useful tool to pursue U.S. national interests. 

There is a recognition that the United States needs a better balance between military and civilian tools. There is a desire to consolidate the large number of actors. There is an emphasis on the 

need for coordination, and there is a recognition that we need a 

longer-term strategic vision for U.S. programs. So I believe everyone here at this table would agree to that and that becomes then 

the nucleus for pulling people together around those concepts. 

In looking at what the candidates have said, they have not come 

up with well-developed proposals along these lines, but they are 

talking about change and trying to do more and investing in tools 

of reaching out to foreign countries and foreign publics. So in order 

for them to achieve what they would like to do in the concrete, specific proposals, they are going to have to have a better bureaucracy 

to support that. 

Finally, I would like to say that the International Rescue Committee benefits from private fundraising. We get grants from the 

U.S. Government to carry out programs in the U.S. national interest. We also, though, receive monies from the United Kingdom Government’s Department for International Development. And what is 

interesting to me is that they are very good at funding some of the 

forgotten and neglected crises. They provide a lot of funding for us 

for the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which has really fallen 

off the screen here in the United States, even though there has 

been tremendous rates of mortality there. And they are also very 

good at looking how climate change has the potential to really hurt 

some of the world’s more poor and vulnerable people. 

So I can only say very positive things about the U.K. example, 

and I think it is worth looking more at that example and talking 

more to them. 

Senator VOINOVICH. All right. Mr. Worthington. 

37 

Mr. WORTHINGTON. I think we have to take into account a fundamentally changed external environment. I mentioned earlier that 

our community raises $6 billion from the American public. It 

makes us a donor of the size roughly of France. When you look 

around the world, many times in a given country, the United 

States is just one of many development actors in a country. Those 

actors are the NGO community, the private sector, other development actors and so forth. 

The challenge is, as the United States, we then have multiple actors of our own. So when it comes to leveraging things—leveraging 

private resources, leveraging resources from the NGO community— 

our government does not take advantage of it the way we could. 

We could be matching you 2:1 in terms of resources in many types 

of programs, and yet it is divided across many different actors. 

The DfID group is very good at leveraging how the U.K. fits in 

a given country compared to other development actors in a country, 

and the United States, by not having a development strategy of 

where is our specific value-added, where can we make a difference, 

we do not take as much advantage of that as could other actors. 

The other is InterAction did a study of many of our members in 

terms of the implementation of the F process in the field, and unfortunately, we got some relatively negative feedback, both in 

terms of morale—and this was feedback from partners of the U.S. 

Government as well as within USAID. In a sense, at a time when 

we need to be empowering development within the U.S. Government, we should not be taking steps that disempower it. We need 

to be able to elevate as much as we can. 

Now, whether that leads to a Cabinet level, I do not know, but 

there has been a lot of consensus, and it goes from the IRC’s CEO, 

other actors within our broad community, to the Brookings Institution, the Center for Foreign Relations, other actors who have gotten together in this Modernizing Foreign Assistance. And whether 

you go all the way to the Cabinet agency one can debate, but the 

broad elements seem to run across many different groups, both 

from the Republican and Democrat, of the need, one, for fundamental reform; two, that there is a need to elevate in some way development to create a greater space for the voice, a capacity to better leverage U.S. interests in development overseas; and to do that 

under a strategy that is comprehensive and goes across multiple 

actors within the U.S. Government if it is not just one department. 

Senator VOINOVICH. Thank you. 

Senator AKAKA. I thank Senator Voinovich for his questions. For 

the second round, I have just two questions, and I will also call on 

Senator Voinovich again. But this question is for the panel. 

Like the military, the Foreign Service prefers to recruit most of 

it officers at the entry level. Dr. Adams suggests recruiting FSOs 

at the mid-career levels may be preferable since many, especially 

those who have served in the military, NGOs, or the business 

world, may bring programmatic, technical, or other critical skills. 

Do you think that the Foreign Service culture, especially at 

USAID, could find a greater role for mid-career-level employees 

who desire to join the Foreign Service? Are there any obstacles that 

would prevent this from happening on a large scale? 

38 

Mr. ADAMS. Maybe I should start since I made that point in my 

testimony. 

The answer is yes and yes. What is crucial here is that the Foreign Service is changing, and as everybody at the table has said, 

the world is changing. And so how we engage as a Nation in 

statecraft is, therefore, changing. And the old model and culture of 

‘‘report, represent, and negotiate’’ does not work even for the Foreign Service officers at the State Department. And because of the 

damage amply demonstrated in your chart, the new culture of 

managing contracts does not work very well at USAID either. 

The reality is that for both of these organizations and more 

broadly, we need to recruit a new generation, people who are able 

to walk and chew gum at the same time. Who are prepared to be 

both managers and diplomats, both planners and implementers, 

and be engaged in the field. And if you put all of those pieces together, it means both organizations need, and I think our report is 

going to make this point very strongly—to recruit, train, promote, 

incentivize, and cross-assign the personnel who promote our foreign 

policy interests. 

Can they do this at the mid-career level? Yes, they can. The Foreign Service Act that was passed in 1980 is both simple and explicit on this question. It is completely possible and within the 

range of the law to recruit people at the mid-career level and to recruit them very broadly with respect to specialization. And that is 

important. If you wait until junior officers come in with that skill 

set, it is going to be a very long time before they get to the level 

where they are defining and implementing programs, making a difference in the field. So you want to start fast, hit the ground running, and be bringing in people at the mid-career level. 

The obstacles are in the personnel rules in the two departments. 

But even USAID has moved beyond that. They are deliberately setting out explicitly, as part of the expansion you heard described 

earlier by Richard Greene, to recruit people at the mid-career level 

with the technical and field specializations that they need. So it is 

entirely possible. This is simply an act of will in the two departments to proceed down that road. 

Senator AKAKA. Thank you. Ms. Richard. 

Ms. RICHARD. I agree with what Dr. Adams said. I also might 

point out that the staff of the State Department and USAID are 

made up of political appointees, Foreign Service officers, civil servants, Foreign Service nationals, some nationals of the countries in 

which embassies are located who are the locals. And the U.S. Agency for International Development, it has a Foreign Service, has civil 

servants, and, of course, there are consultants and occasionally people on loan, such as people from the Pentagon. 

What has happened is that when any kind of change is proposed, 

because of the environment in which everyone is working, there are 

always concerns that the change will be negative, that somebody 

is going to lose something. There are going to be less benefits or 

less pay or less opportunities. And this is not a good way to run 

organizations. There has to be more working together to build an 

esprit de corps and to take advantage of a very diverse workforce 

and really pull out people’s best talents and have them move quickly into new areas to confront new challenges. And because, in part, 

39 

I think the personnel always feel under threat that something is 

about to be lost, they are very defensive to any kind of reforms or 

changes. And I think that there has to be a better look at what is 

needed and modeling a staff that can then address what is needed. 

Thank you. 

Senator AKAKA. Mr. Worthington. 

Mr. WORTHINGTON. The U.S. nonprofit community has over 

200,000 people working in development around the world, and we 

bring in experts from the United Nations, from the private sector, 

and other areas. The idea that you would bring in mid- to seniorlevel people in the U.S. Government makes a lot of sense. The challenge is: Are these jobs that people want to take? Are these jobs 

that are interesting? 

We are looking at the type of people that are coming in this new 

increase of Foreign Service officers. Now, many of them are coming 

from a background of a significant interest in transitional States 

and post-war conflict. So when we look at the world, it is not necessarily through development, but it is looking at the world 

through a lens of war. 

Our challenge is we need to bring in people who are also looking 

at the world through a lens of how do you improve the well-being 

of people and do so at the mid-career level and, in essence, be competitive with other types of jobs like our community where there 

is much more flexibility with private resources. 

Senator AKAKA. Dr. Hyman. 

Mr. HYMAN. Thank you, Senator. I was in USAID when we went 

back and forth between the very two things you are talking about. 

You can do it; definitely, you can do it. USAID did it. You get into 

this list of alphabetical acronyms. They were called NEPs, new 

entry professionals, to distinguish them from the earlier group, 

which were called IDIs, international development interns, or 

something like that. 

So what happened, of course, was that the people who came in 

at the bottom, so to speak, or earlier in their career got lower 

ranks. The people who were brought in later for so-called more professional got higher ranks. So the people that had been in the Foreign Service had served overseas for X numbers of years were suddenly confronted with Mary or John who comes in at a higher rank 

than they are in without having been in any of these countries. 

That can be overcome, but there are problems of managing personnel with bringing in people at higher levels. Definitely it can be 

managed. In my personal opinion, I think the best way to do this 

would be to have an agreement between the Congress and the Administration that we are going to go on a certain path and we are 

going to stay on it, we are not going to go back and forth. 

After the so-called NEP experience, now Administrator Fore is 

going back to the earlier model, bringing people in at a lower level. 

So the people coming in now are saying, ‘‘Well, why don’t I get a 

GS–3 rank? Why do I get a GS–6 rank? I am not any worse than 

so-and-so.’’ 

It seems to me that this going back and forth and back and forth 

is part of the morale problem in USAID and other agencies, and 

that really gets, Senator Voinovich, to your point earlier about initiatives. 

40 

One of the recommendations I made here is that the Congress resist this continuous attempt to have new initiatives with the new 

mark of whoever has come in at the top. Whether it is the President, the Secretary of State, or the USAID Administrator, there is 

a flood of new initiatives in almost every Administration, and many 

of them do not live long through the Administration, let alone enduring through the next Administration. 

The Foreign Service and the civil service bounce back and forth 

between every new initiative, and it seems to me Congress could 

do a great service by avoiding or trying to resist or asking for resistance of constantly having new programs, new directions, new 

personnel systems, new program initiatives, etc. 

That said, going back to the point that was made earlier, one of 

the reasons that USAID and the U.S. Government, I think, are 

going to have a more complicated assistance structure than, let’s 

say, the U.K. system, the U.K. system is devoted to poverty reduction. As Mr. Worthington said, he thinks that is the primary thing 

for our assistance program. If it is, you may very well be able to 

create a U.K.-type structure. But our structure has a multiplicity 

of purposes and a multiplicity of functions. If we do not want to do 

that, fine, then we should limit our assistance program to poverty 

reduction. That is not where it is now. It has now got anti-terrorism dimensions; it has state foreign policy dimensions. It has a 

whole variety of things that are all engaged in the way in which 

projects are put together. If you have that kind of complicated function, then you are going to get a complicated form as well. It is just 

like regular architecture. Organizational architecture, form ought 

to follow function. And we have a complicated series of functions 

and, therefore, need to look at what forms will best achieve those 

kind of functions. And I think that is where I think you were driving at, Senator Voinovich. 

Senator AKAKA. Thank you very much, Mr. Hyman. As I said, I 

had two questions. Now, the last one, you heard Mr. Greene give 

his top three recommendations for improving the foreign assistance 

bureaucracy, and I am going to ask the panel to submit—each of 

you submit your three top recommendations in writing to the Subcommittee. 

Now I would like to ask Senator Voinovich for any questions or 

final remarks. 

Senator VOINOVICH. I just think this has been a great hearing, 

and I really appreciate all the work that you all have done, and 

your organizations. There is this tendency when you come in to try 

and do new things and build on—it is hard to say we want to 

have—I will just remember back when my predecessor was Governor Celeste, and he put a lot of money in ‘‘Ohio is the heart of 

it all.’’ And my people came in and said, ‘‘We have got to change 

this.’’ I said, ‘‘What do you mean we have to change it?’’ ‘‘Well, we 

have to have our own thing.’’ And I said, ‘‘This State spent probably millions of dollars in hustling this ‘Ohio is the heart of it all.’ 

Why would we want to change that?’’ 

And then he put in place the Edison Centers. ‘‘Well, we have got 

to have our own centers.’’ I said, ‘‘These things are working. Let’s 

take what he has and let’s build on it and make it better.’’ 

41 

That is why I think it is real important that you guys keep doing 

what you are doing so that we get this information over to whoever 

the next President is and they do not come in and try and reinvent 

the wheel, and take the best of your thoughts and put it together 

and also do a good job of coming up to the Hill and lobbying and 

try to get some of our colleagues to understand that some of these 

earmarks and so on really are not helping the situation and we are 

not getting the best return on our investment because it does not 

allow us to put our dollars where they are needed most. For example, the international de-mining group. And it is amazing to me 

how much money they are leveraging today. We put in, I think, $10 

million, and they leverage another $10 million. And, frankly, they 

could even leverage more than that if we did the match. So there 

is this concept of how you can take your dollars and maximize 

them and get a bigger return on your investment is extremely important. That is why this public-private partnership I think is so 

important. 

The last thing I would say is that Senator Akaka and I have 

been trying for the last 10 years to deal with the issue of human 

capital, and we are talking about bringing people in from the middle level. Do you all believe that we have enough flexibilities to 

make that happen? Because I think the last time we looked, we 

only bring in about 13 percent of the people who work for the Federal Government that come in at a middle-level area. One of the 

things that we did was leave. If you work for the Federal Government—maybe it is different in the State Department. You are here 

for a year, you get 2 weeks. You are here for 3 years, you get 3 

weeks. And then you are here for 15 years, and you can get a 

month. And we have changed that situation. We have changed the 

paying off of loans—well, that does not so much deal with people 

coming in at mid-level. But do you think we have enough flexibilities there to go after some of these folks? 

Mr. ADAMS. My sense, Senator, is that you do. The issue that 

Jerry Hyman put his finger on is real; that is, you are dealing with 

an existing workforce and you have brought most of them in at a 

non-mid-career level and created an expectation about how they 

will move up through the career ranks. And, inevitably, the management challenge in doing what you are recommending—and I 

think it is highly desirable—is managing the career expectations of 

the people who are there. 

One of the keys to this is on the budgetary side, ensuring that 

we are expanding what we are expecting of the organizations. And 

expanding their funding. We are going to recommend in the 

Stimson Report, an expansion of the number of positions, which 

will require more funding. More positions and more funding will 

help alleviate some of the tension Jerry Hyman is talking about. 

But it definitely is an HR management issue to ensure that as you 

recompose the workforce and bring in the skill sets you need, you 

are not creating resentment and ill will in the existing architecture. 

It is a management challenge, but my sense is in law there is 

virtually no impediment. The challenge is going to be in managing 

the regulations and structures in the HR processes in the organizations. 

42 

Senator VOINOVICH. You are going to have to bring in somebody 

who is really good in terms of HR or identify somebody already in 

the shop that can really understand that. 

Mr. ADAMS. There are two keys here. One is bringing in somebody with the level of expertise and knowledge and credibility to 

run the foreign assistance operation, someone who really knows 

what they are doing. It is not just another political appointee. 

Somebody with real skills and talents. In my judgment, 75 percent 

of this is an HR issue, and that means bringing in somebody who 

has the real skill to do this HR job. 

Senator VOINOVICH. Thanks very much. 

Senator AKAKA. Thank you very much. I would like to thank all 

of our witnesses for being here today. There are many challenges 

that face our foreign assistance bureaucracy, not the least of which 

is, as we have been talking about, human capital. I believe that it 

is vitally important to establish a clear national strategy to not 

only guide our foreign aid efforts, but also to facilitate the effective 

management, coordination, and staffing so that our national interests can be attained. 

This Subcommittee will continue to focus on reforms of critical 

aspects of our national security. Our next hearing will explore the 

evolution of challenges to the public diplomacy bureaucracy. 

The hearing record will be open for 1 week for additional statements or questions from other Members of the Subcommittee. This 

hearing is adjourned. 

[Whereupon, at 4:29 p.m., the Subcommittee was adjourned.] 

(43) 

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Æ 


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