Empowering The U.S. Agency For International Development

Floor Speech

Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, I was pleased to join with Senators Dodd, Cardin, Bond, Kerry, Lugar, and many others in passing a resolution on the need to empower and strengthen the U.S. Agency for International Development.

The resolution calls for three important steps--that a USAID Administrator be named without delay, that such Administrator be included in key national security deliberations, and that USAID's staffing and expertise be significantly increased.

Development assistance is part of any comprehensive American approach in foreign policy, whether it responds to regional conflicts, terrorist threats, weapons proliferation, disease pandemics, or persistent widespread poverty. Assistance programs not only provide help to those most in need but also are a symbol of American values.

Our own security depends on the stability of far-flung places beyond our borders. And America's generosity and ability to help other countries is becoming more important to the effectiveness of our foreign policy.

In the United States, the responsibility for development falls largely to the U.S. Agency for International Development.

USAID was founded by the Kennedy administration in 1961, becoming the first U.S. foreign assistance organization with the primary goal of long term economic and social development efforts overseas.

During its first decade, it had more than 5,000 Foreign Service officers serving all over the world, often in the most difficult of conditions.

Today--at a time when the United States is engaged in two wars and needs development expertise more than ever--USAID operates with just 1,000 Foreign Service officers. USAID's managed program budget in real dollars has dropped by more than 40 percent since the mid-1980s. And the Agency still does not have an Administrator.

From the early 1960s until 1992, the Office of Management and Budget enforced a rule mandating that all foreign aid programs and spending must go through USAID, except when USAID chose to contract with other Federal agencies. Today more than half of all foreign assistance programs are administered by Federal agencies other than USAID, and funding for such programs is spread across more than 20 U.S. Government agencies.

This decline in personnel, budgets and coordinating leadership has diminished the capacity of USAID and the U.S. Government to provide development assistance and implement foreign assistance programs.

Quite simply, as the United States works to win hearts and minds around the world, our efforts have been diminished by an underfunded and understaffed lead development agency. USAID has been shortchanged--and America's efforts abroad have suffered as a result.

Secretaries Clinton and Gates both recognize the need to reverse this trend.

During her first month as Secretary of State, Clinton told USAID employees, ``I believe in development, and I believe with all my heart that it truly is an equal partner, along with defense and diplomacy, in the furtherance of America's national security.''

Secretary of Defense Gates has made a similar case, stating ``The problem is that the civil side of our government--the Foreign Service and foreign-policy side, including our aid for international development--[has] been systematically starved of resources for a quarter of a century or more . . . We have not provided the resources necessary, first of all, for our diplomacy around the world; and second, for communicating to the rest of the world what we are about and who we are as a people.''

Military and civilian experts agree that the wars in Iran and Afghanistan will only succeed in the long term with a sustained and strategic development program to compliment military efforts. We owe it to the brave men and women serving in those nations to get this piece of our foreign policy right and to so without delay.

That is why earlier this year I introduced the Increasing America's Global Development Capacity Act, which calls for a tripling of USAID's Foreign Service personnel over the next 3 years. The bill seeks to address the considerable personnel loss that USAID has experienced over the course of the last two decades. I have also worked with Senator Leahy to help appropriate additional funds for USAID.

And that is why I was pleased to support Senator Dodd's resolution expressing the Senate's view that we must rebuild USAID, starting with the urgent naming of an empowered Administrator, inclusion of that designee in top-level national security deliberations, and continued long-term investment in USAID staffing and funding. I thank the Senate for adopting this important resolution yesterday.

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