Question: Why is there so little on USAID’s website about this impressive accomplishment?

Answer: I don’t know.

Elmo is stumped

Rep. Nita Lowey (D-NY), chair of the State & Foreign Operations Appropriations Subcommittee, announced that she would cut $4 billion requested for State Department and USAID funding for Afghanistan due to concerns about corruption…While the $4 billion in the fiscal year 2011 budget that Lowey wants to cut is no small amount of money, the 2011 Defense budget includes $138 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan…It’s taking the easy way out to use the money as a vehicle for criticizing the war, playing on misperceptions about the efficacy of foreign assistance, while not facing any pushback from scary Republicans who will tell them they don’t support our troops.

The best news is the headline figure: total D&G funding is up 25% from FY 2010, rising from $2.6 billion to $3.3 billion. The troubling aspect of this is that programs in Afghanistan account for just a bit over 100% of the increase. Thus, excluding Afghanistan (which accounts for 42% of the total D&G budget), there is a small decrease in total D&G funding. Given the skepticism I have shown about US policy towards Afghanistan, I do not believe this is a good use of scarce D&G funds.

Outside of Afghanistan, however, I am reasonably pleased with the allocation of D&G funds. The bad news continues to be that D&G funding remains concentrated in a very small number of countries. Five countries account for 60% of D&G funds in the FY 2011 request: Afghanistan, Mexico, Pakistan, Iraq, and Sudan. The good news is that, excluding Afghanistan, these are countries where D&G funding could do some good. While I was skeptical about funds for Iraq, Pakistan, and Sudan last year, in retrospect this was a good use of D&G funds as each of these countries has made major progress towards improved governance in the past year. Iraq and Sudan held elections. Even if the results of the former are still disputed and the latter were highly flawed, they represent progress compared to the status quo ante. Moreover, in Iraq, the key figures are using its existing electoral institutions to resolve the election dispute, not going around them. In addition, Pakistan seems to finally be taking the threat the Taliban poses seriously. I also think the funds for Mexico make sense. Most of the money is going towards human security and rule of law programs, designed primarily to defeat the influence of drug gangs. Mexico is a democracy, wants to solve this problem, and is our neighbor. Helping Mexico get a handle on fighting drug cartels thus seems like a good use of D&G money.

I have also changed my opinion on what the overall picture of US D&G funding suggests about how the US Government views these programs. In the past I have talked a lot about the militarization of aid. I don’t think that’s quite accurate, however. Rather, what the budget demonstrates is that the US Government is increasingly prioritizing governance and rule of law programs (especially human security) over democracy ones, such as working with civil society and political parties. This is no surprise as the Obama Administration has made clear that improved governance in weak states is central to current US foreign policy (although I have my doubts about whether the administration can achieve this ambitious objective). It’s also not a bad idea because without security, nothing is sustainable. In addition, while I do not like the idea of US D&G funding going increasingly to security, aligning with the Defense Department’s priorities is probably a good idea from a budgetary point of view because the military tends to get what it wants much more than other parts of the US Government. While this probably will result in a loss of autonomy for USAID and the State Department in D&G programs, budget protection from the Defense Department is a reasonable trade-off, from a bureaucratic politics point of view.

Overall, as I said, I am pleased. My main concern remains Afghanistan. The US will spend $1.3 billion in FY 2011 in D&G programs in Afghanistan, like the massively wasteful RAMP-UP. My fear is that one day Congress will ask the administration to account for these flawed, corruption-inducing programs as part of the broader “who lost Afghanistan” debate and that the blowback will be severe.