New Congressional Study Finds Foreign Assistance Strategy Foundering

Senator Lugar’s Foreign Relations Committee staff has released a report finding that the United States is providing billions of dollars in foreign assistance without an overall strategy for success and sense of common purpose. The report recommends reform in setting priorities and providing strategic direction. It suggests such coordination has not happened because of uneven implementation and bureaucratic resistance.

“Leadership from this and future presidents is needed if we are going to get foreign aid right. Our country faces a worldwide threat from terrorists seeking to obtain and use weapons of mass destruction. A foreign assistance program that fights endemic poverty and helps build just, open and well-governed societies will go a long way toward loosening the lure of violent extremism. The commitment must be long-term, and we must be coordinated as a government if we intend to make a difference,” said Senator Lugar.

Staff visited 24 countries over a period of four months to gather perspectives on foreign aid for government experts in the field and to examine how embassies are organizing and responding to recent developments in foreign assistance programs and their management. Countries visited were: Botswana, Ethiopia, Ghana, Liberia, Mozambique, Tanzania, Rwanda, South Africa, Zambia, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Mongolia, the Philippines, Armenia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Bolivia, Honduras, Peru, Nicaragua, Jordan, Lebanon, and Morocco.

The study recommends a number of ways to improve our development assistance efforts and to repair the broken reform process. Most importantly, it calls on the president to “design a foreign assistance strategy that explains both the national security requirement and the humanitarian imperative that drive our government’s investment in foreign aid.”

Accordingly, the Secretary of State should be given new authority to ensure that all foreign assistance, whether from the Department of State, USAID, the Pentagon or other government agencies, is in our foreign policy interests and conforms to the president’s strategic goals.

Finally, Congress has a part to play. In cooperation with the executive branch, it should undertake an overhaul of the Foreign Assistance Act, which has not been rewritten since its inception in 1961, to reflect the new structure of foreign aid and to give cohesion to foreign assistance strategy.

“This report contains findings and recommendations that form the basis for continuing committee oversight. I look forward to working with committee members, executive branch officials, and experts in the development field as we collectively work to help design and support a foreign assistance effort that reflects our humanitarian instincts and furthers our interests around the world,” said Senator Lugar in a letter to Senate Foreign Relations Committee colleagues that accompanies the report.

This work follows and builds on a related Committee staff effort published under the title “Embassies as Command Posts in the Anti-Terror Campaign” in December 2006.

Read the report courtesy of the GAO