A group of senior lawmakers and global development experts called Tuesday for an overhaul of the US foreign aid system, saying such assistance was vital to keeping the United States safe.
In a new report, the experts -- backed by foreign policy heavyweights in Congress -- said the way US aid was delivered overseas was "badly outdated, poorly organized and generally ill-equipped" to face today's global challenges.
"We have spent a lot of money over many, many years on foreign assistance programs ... it has been over the years, a bit fragmented, sometimes unintended as to where those dollars will go, sometimes contradictory, sometimes almost ricocheting from crisis to crisis without large strategic context," Senator Chuck Hagel, a member of the Senate foreign relations committee, told a meeting in Washington launching the report.
The authors call for a new Foreign Assistance Act to replace the 1961 law which governs US foreign aid, and a single body to replace the 12 departments, 25 government agencies and almost 60 government offices now delivering it.
They say there is no single person, office or department responsible -- or accountable -- for coordinating projects and no national strategy.
"We spend billions of dollars a year on development and we don't have a policy," said Gayle Smith of the Center for American Progress, co-chair of the new Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network that produced the report.
Staffing is also an issue -- more than half of USAID personnel are not specialists, there are not enough engineers and a third of the agency's most seasoned staff are on the verge of retirement, they said.
The report calls for development to be elevated alongside defense and diplomacy as a foreign policy tool, and the politicians at Tuesday's meeting stressed the importance of development in ensuring the United States' safety.
"Our assistance programs are a means of alleviating poverty and suffering, advancing human rights and promoting democratic governments," said Congresswoman Nita Lowey, chair of the state and foreign operations subcommittee.
"But it's also in the interests of the United States of America to pursue a vigorous aid and development program.
"Open, healthy, functional societies are consistent with and indeed essential to global security. They directly confront the conditions that give rise to radicalism."
The report also notes the shift in the amount of aid delivered by the US military -- the Department of Defense now administers more than one-fifth of the country's development assistance funding, worth about 36 billion in 2007.
Congressman Howard Berman, chairman of the House of Representatives' foreign affairs committee, said this must change.
"While we deeply respect and greatly appreciate the US military, our civilian agencies and their civilian partners must be the face of America around the world, not the military," he said.
Hagel added: "We are not going to fix the problems in Iraq and many other areas of the world with the military. We have got to do a better job of using all the instruments of power."
Such is the disarray of the US aid system that in Afghanistan, eight separate agencies are working on behalf of the United States with little or no coordination, according to Ray Offenheiser of Oxfam America.
In one case, he said a grant was made to an aid agency in Geneva, which subcontracted a Washington agency, which then hired an Iranian firm to deliver timber to Afghanistan, each agent taking their cut along the way
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