In the years since 9/11, America's foreign assistance program has played an increasingly important role in our foreign and national security policies. Through our aid and development efforts, we have saved lives, lifted people out of poverty, accelerated economic growth in poor countries and helped stabilize fragile societies.
Besides demonstrating America's enduring commitment to humanitarian needs, our various aid programs play a key role in diplomacy and complement our military efforts. They have helped us build alliances with friendly countries and create new trading partners. They have made us safer: By fighting poverty and disease and rescuing failing states, we combat the despair that can be a seedbed for terrorism, eliminate the ungoverned spaces that can harbor terrorists, and reduce the risk that regional instability will threaten vital U.S. interests.
As the importance of foreign assistance has grown, so has the number of mechanisms to dispense it. In addition to the traditional sources, the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development, we have new organizations, like the Millennium Challenge Corporation, which targets poor countries with strong democratic institutions, or the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, and new programs from established agencies, such as the Agriculture Department and, especially, the Pentagon.
All in all, today more than 24 different agencies play some role in our development and assistance efforts. Policymakers have for some time recognized that we need to bring better strategic guidance and coordination to this system.
In particular, we need a better way to monitor and evaluate these programs to make sure they are working well and fulfilling their policy goals. We need consistent guidelines for success across the different agencies that handle foreign assistance, and a better method for translating lessons learned into improved performance.
A Congressionally-appointed bi-partisan commission found in 2007 "the systems our government uses to evaluate development and humanitarian assistance programs are either in disarray or do not exist." It criticized a too-heavy focus on narrow, technical measures of success -- number of classrooms built, number of books purchased -- rather than success in meeting foreign policy goals -- are more children reading better?
According to the report, "Out of 26,285 impact evaluations that USAID conducted between 1996 and 2005, only 30 measured the impact of the projects."
That's why Sen. Lugar sponsored the Foreign Aid Transparency and Accountability Act, voted out of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last month with unanimous bipartisan support. Under the direction of the president, it would require a uniform system for monitoring and evaluating the many U.S. foreign assistance initiatives.
Further, the Senate legislation, co-sponsored by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), requires the administration to set up a public website with detailed information about all our overseas assistance, on a project-by-project, country by country basis, updated regularly.
The measure parallels a bipartisan House bill sponsored by Rep. Ted Poe (R-Texas) and co-sponsored by the Foreign Affairs Committee's top Democrat, Rep. Howard Berman (D-CA). Both are backed by a group of charities, non-governmental organizations, private-sector development organizations and foreign policy experts called the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network, co-chaired by Mr. Beckmann.
"It is imperative that the United States get the most out of every dollar we spend on foreign assistance," a recent MFAN letter said. "The time has come for the President to issue and oversee a set of common guidelines on monitoring and evaluation... across all agencies."
The administration has acknowledged the need for such steps, but progress has been slow. Only last year did USAID issue a new evaluation policy, and State issued its own separate policy just recently. We need to move faster, and this legislation will support, accelerate and consolidate the work already underway. We should be forthcoming about where precious taxpayer dollars are spent, what goals they are meant to accomplish, and whether those goals are achieved.
This commonsense, bipartisan bill will improve the effectiveness of our development programs, and we urge the Senate and the House to adopt it promptly during the post-election session.
Important as this is, however, it is only a first step. Ultimately, to make our foreign assistance as effective as possible, we need a strong, independent aid agency, with its own budgeting and policy-making capacity, to lead the strategy, set priorities, and coordinate the activities and programs of all the relevant agencies and departments. We urge the Congress to address this important issue soon after it reconvenes next year.
Sen. Richard Lugar is the Republican leader on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Rev. David Beckmann, a 2010 World Food Prize laureate, is president of Bread for the World and co-chair of the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network.
Follow Sen. Dick Lugar on Twitter: www.twitter.com/senatorlugar
Please visit the following webpages and linked pages including the inquiry to the USAID office of inspector general facilitated by Sen. Udall from Colorado. All of which are part of the website: www.smallholderagriculture.com
http://lamar.colostate.edu/~rtinsley/DeceptiveReporting.html
Thank you,
Dick Tinsley
Professor Emeritus, Colorado State University
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http://lamar.colostate.edu/~rtinsley/CalorieEnergyBalance.htm;
Thank you,
Dick Tinsley
Professor Emeritus, Colorado State University
America has earned a bad reputation globally for meddling in other people's affairs. We need to cut way back, shut down most of our foreign posts, and mind our own business. We have lots of problems to work on right here at home!
Israel - who's prime minister has spent the summer interfering in the American Presidential Election and trying to get us into a war with Iran - And complaining that we don't give him more money so he can steal more land from the Palestinians
Afghanistan - where to money goes to crooked politicians and war lords
Pakistan - Who hid Osama B and are hiding and arming the Taliban who kill our troops.
Iraq - Who is now Iran's BFF and is helping them get around our sanctions.
And all this great work has been and is being overseen by Senator Luger!
Still, the $45 Billion or so we spend in foreign aid is peanuts in the overall budget. If people are serious about cutting the budget, they should look first to the most wasteful of all expenditures, those of the Defense department. That agency spends more than 15 times as much and produces nothing but filled body bags.
Here's an example. The Arab Spring revolutions raised the hopes of people in their respective countries that things were going to get better, and in the months since the new regimes took over there has been very little progress. For its part, the US has been adopting a wait and see attitude, but had we just given a few tens of millions of dollars to help rebuild schools, hospitals and transportation infrastructure it would have paid off both in terms of winning friends and in giving the fledgling democracies time to establish themselves. But we didn't. Our government gives arms to dictators with scarcely a second thought if the perception is that they are on our side, but withholds aid to countries like post-Mubarak Egypt because the democratically elected leader has ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.
Americans have fallen into poverty, millions of them, in fact 1/3. Tonight, even as I type, more children then we ever imagined will go to bed cold, hungry and afraid. I am sure that our enemies are proud of what they have accomplished.
Our politicians lie to us repeatedly and betray us on a daily basis.
Stabilized societies have not arisen, they have worsened. If anyone reading this doesn't believe that, they either are hiding their talents in the sand, because they are afraid, or they don't read the news, or watch the news on TV. Sadly, it is a known fact that many couples with small children actually don't keep up with the news "because" it's too frightening. This allows the corrupt politicians here in America to thrive, and the corruption in foreign lands to thrive as well as they each "fatten" one another.
I apologize if this comes off too harsh, but the USA has to start getting real, living in the real world, and not some fantasy land. utopia does not exist on earth, never did and never will.
It is as though our political body is as ignorant as our fundamentalists and actually think that life was paradice for Adam & Eve before the fall! Paradice has never existed on earth and never will.
From a fellow Hoosier. . .
In most cases, there is plenty (and often remarkable) wealth, but concentrated in a small number of hands. And those holding the wealth and power have no interest in assisting, politically or otherwise, their less fortunate fellow citizens.
It seems, then, that aid from the U.S. simply aids and abets those who prefer to turn a blind eye to problems in their own society. And at the same time, it may act as a disincentive for the disadvantaged to agitate for change on their own behalf.
So all in all, perhaps the most effective aid is no aid, except in the case of natural disasters, though to say this feels harsh and inhuman - it is essentially saying that unalleviated suffering is perhaps the most effective precurser of positive change.
Perhaps, though, this could be mitigated by providing assistance once the ball has been picked up, or is rolling, as it were.
Certainly, whatever the solution, the wealthiest and most influential people in these countries need to be doing a lot more. It is obscene, to say the least, to see the differences between one neighbourhood and the next, and to know that more help flowing to the poorest neighbourhoods from the faraway U.S. than from the top levels of society close to home.
Um, did you see what Hati with the money that poured in there over the years, including the recent disastor? A natural disaster and a natural responce of good will from others doesn't ensure that corruption is less corrupt. They probably wait with baited breath for such disasters
An interesting post with which I agree but can't fully agree. It isn't helping people that enables the corruption that goes on with our tax dollars sent to foreign countries, it's the refusal of our government to ensure that it is spent appropriately and given appropriately. If a country won't allow that, don't send it.
Equally, I think it imperative to not help countries that don't fully support human rights as we know them to be in the USA; free speech, freedom of and from religion, freedon of the press, and other Constitutional amendments; why are we financially, and/or through jobs, supporting countries that seek to destroy our values?
Transparency has been lacking because the US public is ignorant of what the USAID is doing in Muslim lands. For instance, many Americans don't know that with the aid comes agreement that calls for the US to control security in Muslim countries. Muslim countries can't say no to even the most hideous request.
In Morocco, there is a interesting article and revelation about Africom and the USAID. Africom is asking Morocco and neighboring Muslim countries to fight and kill Muslims in Mali. Why? These Muslims want to have a Islamic state. The current position for these kind of Muslim is a US Terror designation, in order to kil them outright. This has caused angry because there is a non Muslim country pushing Muslims to kill other Muslims for them! This is the transparency you don't you get in America.