Foreign Aid Bill v. State's Quadrennial Review, Cont.

Remember about the conflict between that foreign aid bill I mentioned and the State Department's first major quadrennial review I wrote about earlier in the week? The arguments over it are continuing, with Deputy Secretary of State Jack Lew asking for the review to be given room to breathe, and Sen. Jim Webb coming out against the legislation. The Cable reports:

"I believe that the problems in foreign assistance effectiveness are largely those of poor leadership and supervision, to be solved by the streamlining of executive branch responsibilities rather than the creation of yet another layer of infrastructure," Webb wrote.

Webb was talking about the bill's proposal to create a Council on Research and Evaluation of Foreign Assistance, or CORE, that would have oversight powers over all government foreign-assistance programs, a key component according to committee staffers.

When I wrote my first post about this commenter Danielle Ellingston wisely chimed in that some of the changes in the bill might be quite important and minimally interfering: