Anne-Marie Slaughter on Increasing USAID Capacity

Anne-Marie Slaughter, on leave from Princeton to serve as Director of Policy Planning at the State Department where she’s playing a key role in the new Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review process, was at CAP today to talk about putting the idea of integrated power into progress.

After the event, she sat down with Matt Duss and I for a few questions. He asked her about the perception that under pressure to produce quick results, the U.S. has increasingly shifted development responsibilities onto the Pentagon. She said it was wrong to look at the dynamic exclusively in these terms and that we need to look instead at a multi-decade process that’s led to “the complete hollowing out” of the Agency for International Development:

A huge part of the problem has simply been the complete hollowing out of AID. Not just under the last administration, indeed the last administration increased foreign aid in various ways. But it’s been a twenty, twenty-five year process where the number of employees that AID has has steadily decreased, the number of contract that AID manages has steadily increased. So instead of having an agency that has a whole set of knowledge experts and experts in the field and then also contracts that it manages, you’ve got a small number of people managing a very large number of contracts just without the number of people or the resources that it needs to be the world class development agency we want it to be. So we’re looking very specificially at what AID is going to need in terms of specific sectors in terms of, again, how does it lead whole of governmnet projects both on the grounds but also in Washington.

Of course turning this kind of dynamic around is politically difficult. At the moment, the military is in a high-resource/high-prestige equilibrium. In part because it’s so lavishly resourced, the military is able to do a good job. Having lots of competence makes the military well-respected. And having lots of prestige makes it possible for the military to make politically potent claims on its own behalf. USAID has been, as Slaughter says, in a different place for a long time. One promising sign, however, has been that figures like Robert Gates and others from the Pentagon side have increasingly shown some indication to use some of their clout to help build up AID capabilities as they more and more find themselves convinced that more robust civilian partners are what they’re looking for.