Larry Nowels is a consultant to ONE on foreign aid reform and budget issues. Previously, he was a specialist in foreign affairs at the Congressional Research Service.
During his thirty-three year career at CRS, he wrote extensively on U.S. foreign assistance policymaking, including the congressional role in legislating and overseeing American foreign aid programs. Nowels further served on detail assignments to the House Budget Committee and the House Foreign Operations Appropriations Subcommittee.
Upon leaving CRS in mid-2006, he served as a consultant to the Helping to Enhance the Livelihood of People Around the Globe (HELP) Commission. Following the 2008 election, Nowels served on President-elect Obama’s transition team examining U.S. foreign assistance agencies.
Yesterday, following months of negotiations, proposals that blew apart, and mounting anxiety over the state of the US economy, lawmakers and the White House finally came together with a deal. The budget package signed by President Obama allows the US debt ceiling to rise, permits borrowing to meet the nation’s obligations, places a down-payment of $917 billion on deficit reduction over 10 years, creates a new Congressional Committee tasked with finding additional deficit savings, and sets a deadline of December 23 for Congress to pass a reduction package of at least $1.2 trillion.
USAID-funded radio at Kidoti primary school in Tanzania. Photo credit: Morgana Wingard/ONE.
Over the next three weeks, Congress is expected to act on budget issues that will potentially have a critical impact on US efforts to fight global poverty and save lives around the world.
While these will not be the final decisions on FY2012 appropriations or a blueprint to drive down the federal deficit over the next decade, they will set important parameters for immediate and longer-term international affairs spending that could have long-lasting consequences.
With many in the global development community bracing for a bad outcome while the White House and House Republicans hammered out the details of a final budget package, the spending measure passed yesterday protected a number of poverty-focused programs from severe cuts. After the House had passed a budget in March that slashed humanitarian assistance and multilateral aid by more than 40 percent and essentially buried the administration’s signature food security program, Feed the Future, with a 30 percent cut to Development Assistance, restoring funding levels to current spending for many of these programs is welcome.
But for a few key anti-poverty accounts, the outcome is troubling and will have consequences for US efforts to promote stability and economic growth in a number of areas of the developing world.
Over the past 10 days, we have been absorbing and reacting to developments around not just one, but two budgets that significantly effect global poverty reduction programs. After looking at both, however, you might conclude that they were headed in opposite directions, having far-reaching, but far different impacts on the lives of the world’s poor. And you would be correct.
Last week, the House debated an appropriations measure that would finalize US spending for FY2011 -– that’s this year, nearly half of which has gone by. As approved, the House bill cuts the International Affairs budget by 19 percent from FY2010 amounts with serious consequences for poverty programs. Resources for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria are slashed by $450 million and global development assistance is cut 30 percent below last year’s amount, placing the administration’s Feed the Future Initiative in great jeopardy.
Humanitarian aid supporting victims of emergencies and disasters around the world shrink by over 41 percent with food assistance falling to levels of a decade ago. For the Bush Administration’s signature program, the Millennium Challenge Corporation, the $790 million appropriation is 29 percent below last year and the smallest budget the MCC has ever received.
Last Thursday marked the end of a 14-month wait for the release of the State Department and USAID’s Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review (QDDR), the first-ever comprehensive review of US development and diplomatic policy. The document is a draft and still requires inter-agency review and comment — the final QDDR will be released in December. Nevertheless, with this and the Presidential Policy Directive on Global Development (which was outlined by President Obama at the MDG Summit in September ), we are starting to get a much better sense of how the Administration intends to modernize and elevate US development policy in order to maximize results for the world’s poorest people.
Among a number of promising signs in the draft QDDR is a clear effort to strengthen the role of USAID in America’s development efforts around the globe. This includes increasing the agency’s control over its budgeting and policy planning processes and ensuring that USAID plays a leadership role in creating country-specific development strategies and implementing Feed the Future and eventually the Global Health Initiative, the Obama Administration’s two signature development programs. The QDDR also continues recent efforts to build human capacity within USAID, including a new plan to triple the number of mid-career development officer hires, something that will place more experienced USAID development experts in the field to drive better results. The Review proposes changes within the State Department as well, with the establishment of several new offices including an Under Secretary for Civilian Security, Democracy and Human Rights as well as a new Bureau for Crisis and Conflict Operations and a Special Coordinator for Sanctions and Illicit Finance.
The QDDR highlights the need for joint strategic planning between the State Department and USAID and an increased emphasis on the need for diplomacy and development to be mutually reinforcing. Both good goals. However, the draft QDDR opens the door for more questions since it does not address the inherent contradictions that exist between calling for an elevated role for USAID when overall policy planning and budgetary authority remains with the State Department. Let’s hope this is clarified in the final QDDR.
Another inherent shortcoming of the QDDR is that it addresses issues relative only to the State Department and USAID. With so many other government actors and policies that make up the US global development agenda, broad policy coherency will remain a challenge. Hopefully the effort put in place by the PPD will help shape a greater all-of-government approach within which the QDDR will operate.
It is also unclear whether the QDDR will require legislative changes in order to move forward. Engaging Congress as a partner in the broad effort to strengthen and elevate US global development is long overdue and the QDDR would be a great starting point to establish a collaborative relationship between the two branches and to codify some of these important initiatives.
Two other challenges remain. We now begin the implementation stage of the PPD and QDDR, the most important part of the effort. It will be critical over the next two years to ensure that these reforms are firmly in place so that they will endure beyond this Administration and current leadership. We are also arguably entering the most difficult budget environments in decades. Any retrenchment on funding resources, especially those that build capacity of both the State Department and USAID, will jeopardize success.
It has been nearly 50 years – since the early days of the Kennedy Administration – that such bold initiatives related to US global development policy have been put forward. Now the hard work begins, making the policy a reality.
As promised a year ago, President Obama came to the UN today with his plan to chart a new course for advancing sustainable, equitable economic growth and reducing poverty for the world’s poor. For the first time, the US now has a Global Development Policy that sets forward a clear sense of unified purpose, goals and a modern structure for US development programs. He also offered up some tough talk about mutual accountability and said that selectivity would be a new priority in determining how the United States invests and partners with countries and citizens in the developing world.
The President outlined four pillars of his new policy:
Defining and measuring development: Raising people out of poverty and helping them on the path to more dignified and productive lives cannot be done solely through foreign aid. Trade, investment, and diplomacy are also essential elements that must be applied.
Changing the goal of development: We shouldn’t just want to “manage” poverty but we should seek the means to take citizens around the world out of poverty.
Prioritizing broad-based economic growth as an engine of sustainable development: Prosperity occurs more rapidly where governments attract private investment through friendly business environments, where corruption is not tolerated, where the rule of law and transparency are valued, and where governments are investing in the wellbeing of their own citizens, especially women.
Mutual accountability: The path forward is a two-way street where donors, including the United States, are held responsible to deliver on their commitments and governments and the people of developing nations are ultimately accountable for their own success.
President Obama also talked about selectivity – focusing American efforts where we have good partners and a comparative advantage to achieve results. Excellent policy but very hard to execute. How policymakers work through this process of identifying the best partners and investments to scale them up, while jettisoning marginal or poor performing development activities will be something to watch. These will be tough choices, and establishing clear criteria that are faithful to the principles laid out in the new Global Development Policy will be critical. In other words, will hard-nosed, evidence-based policy decisions consistently win out over entrenched, parochial interests and short-term, strategically-driven imperatives?
All in all, we heard good words today from the President and he will be soundly applauded, as he should be. And next week we will hear more of this excellent language when five of the most key US foreign policy and national security leaders – the Secretaries of State, Defense and Treasury, and the heads of USAID and the MCC – sit down to chat at the US Global Leadership Coalition conference. It could be a fascinating conversation about how ingrained institutional interests will be set aside to adapt to a common purpose for implementing the new Global Development Policy.
And there’s still at least one more piece of the policy architecture that will fall into place in the following month or so. The State Department/USAID’s Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review is nearing completion, a plan that will hopefully provide the operational blueprint for applying the principles set out by the President today.
Late last week, USAID released an updated version of its MDG strategy, which was unveiled at the beginning of August (you can read ONE’s analysis of the original draft here).
What’s new in this version?
Most notably, the updated document says that the US now has an official development policy, which “sets out the strategic objectives and the core approach to development for this administration.” The policy– which would be the first for the US government – is one that many in the development community have been waiting for since the President Obama took office, and especially since his administration launched two reviews of US development policy (through the Presidential Study Directive and the State Department’s Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review), the results of which have been delayed for several months. President Obama offered a preview of the PSD at the G8 in Muskoka, and many are hopeful that he will provide more details in his speech at the UN General Assembly on Thursday.
The new document goes on to say that the US development policy “focuses the U.S. government on achieving sustainable development outcomes by making broad‐based economic growth and democratic governance top priorities, investing in game‐ changing innovations that have the potential to solve long‐standing development challenges, and building effective public sector capacity to provide basic services over the long term. The policy also puts a premium on selectivity, on leveraging the expertise and resources of others, on empowering governments that demonstrate high standards of transparency and accountability, and on driving our investments with evidence of impact.”
The revised strategy also raises attention to multilateral development institutions by calling for links between additional resources and organizational reforms. The new document notes its concern with the long-term relevance, effectiveness, and legitimacy of these institutions, especially the World Bank and IMF. It further calls for strengthening the capabilities of UN development agencies.
In addition to some other smaller changes, the updated document also calls the G20 the “premier forum for international economic cooperation” and, critically, says that the US “will play a leadership to ensure that development is at the heart of the Group’s agenda.” On aid effectiveness, the document says that the US wants to take the Paris/Accra agenda in a “new direction” that focuses on “development outcomes, not just process,” and says that USAID’s newly launched Implementation and Procurement Reform as consistent with the global principles agreed in Paris and Accra. The revised strategy further expands and elevates the discussion around the Global Climate Change Initiative. Although not adding new commitments, the GCCI is framed much more as co-equal with the President’s other two signature development initiatives on health and food security.
You can read the full document here. Be sure to stay tuned to the ONE Blog for updates from New York and coverage of President Obama’s speech on Thursday.
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USAID-funded radio at Kidoti primary school in Tanzania. Photo credit: Morgana Wingard/ONE.
