Correction
by Joshua Malbin on Oct.21, 2009, under Politics
A few days ago I complained about Obama’s slowness in nominating, and included the vacant USAID Administrator post as an example. Tonight I attended a speech by Andrew Natsios, USAID Administrator from 2001 to 2005. He claimed that the White House has in fact offered the Administrator job to ten different people and been turned down.
To explain why that might be, we need to go back to the last few years of the Bush administration, when Condoleezza Rice decided it would be a good idea to bring USAID into the State Department house. The agency’s ability to make its own policy and draw up its own budgets was subordinated to State Department officials, a change called the “F Process Reforms” or simply “F.”
USAID people hate this. Natsios, a longtime USAID hand, is among them. As an example of the damage wrought by F, he mentioned Norman Borlaug, the agronomist (and Nobel Peace Prize winner) considered the father of the Green Revolution, who died about a month ago. Work on new varieties of seeds of the kind Borlaug did is still going on at the various centers of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR). After F, Natsios claimed, State Department budget-makers drastically cut USAID’s contribution to CGIAR, because they didn’t see any short-term benefit to it.
So far, the Obama administration has made no move to reverse this Bush-era bureaucratic shift.
Anyway, the real reason there’s no USAID Administrator, said Natsios, is that no one wants to be the titular head of an agency (and take all the flak that comes of that) and yet have no real budget-making or policy-setting power. So USAID is in a Catch-22: with no cabinet-level voice to stand up for it, it cannot really resist its gradual subordination to the State Department. Naturally the people at the State Department see no reason why they shouldn’t absorb USAID—not because they are bad people but because they are invested in diplomacy, not development. That’s as it should be. Yet no one with real credibility to lay on the line will want to take the Administrator job unless that subordination is reversed.