Word: usaid
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Gates' insistence on the need for bigger State Department budgets hasn't hurt. In fact, relations with the Pentagon have gone smoother, at times, than Clinton's relationship with the White House staff. Clinton was particularly irritated by the ridiculously strict vetting process that thwarted her favored candidate for USAID director, Paul Farmer, from getting the job. "It was all sorts of niggling things," says a Clinton adviser, "like, Farmer had at one point brought more than $10,000 in cash into Haiti. The money was for a needle-exchange program, but the amount was illegal...
Eighteen months since the IG report, USAID has also not adequately accounted for $16 million in project spending and has hired an outside auditor to track the money, according to Dona Dinkler, the USAID IG's chief of staff. USAID declined to comment, but it has blamed high staff turnover - four different USAID employees oversaw the project successively - and security concerns, which severely limited the number of hands-on visits to the remote Sindh and Baluchistan provinces, where the project was meant to have its greatest impact. "In that case, you have to find other ways to provide oversight...
...Part of USAID's problem is a "bunker mentality" that exaggerates genuine security concerns, he says, noting that agency regulations prevented key personnel from accompanying even members of Congress who traveled there to examine aid projects. But other observers say the problems go far beyond security issues. For Shuja Nawaz, a Pakistan security expert and director of the South Asia Center at the Atlantic Council in Washington, the core of USAID's shortcomings is that it has outsourced "its thinking, planning and local interactions with the recipients" to Beltway contractors who are more incentivized to keep money flowing than getting...
Nawaz says USAID needs to work directly with local NGOs in identifying and designing projects that local communities will "own" and sustain. That, however, would require far more manpower than USAID currently has; over the years, funding cuts have eviscerated it down to little more than a contract-management agency. USAID officials, who did not make themselves available for this article, told Congress this past summer that they are rapidly staffing up for Afghanistan and Pakistan, where the agency may soon have its biggest footprint since Vietnam. Currently the dependence on highly paid consultants means at least half of every...
...Council on Foreign Relations. "Too much of the money has never reached its intended target but stayed here in America to pay salaries or fund overhead in contracts." Ironically perhaps, one of the best things Clinton can do is to rebuild and finally install new leadership at USAID so it has a better chance of being able to handle all the money that's about to flow to crucial places like Pakistan...