Proxy Wars

ashington's frequent battles over bureaucratic reorganization aren't always about improving managerial efficiency. Such fights often have more to do with impeding an agency's ability to perform a function that has lost favor with Congress.

A case in point is the Agency for International Development, which recently emerged more or less intact from a long and rancorous struggle to consolidate it into the State Department. The conflict officially was settled in 1997 with a murky compromise under which AID remains a separate agency, but its administrator reports to and is under the direct authority and policy guidance of the Secretary of State.

Reverberations and recriminations, however, are still being felt. Former AID Administrator J. Brian Atwood had combatively resisted the effort, led by Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Jesse Helms of North Carolina, to strip his agency of its independence. Recently, he withdrew his candidacy to become U.S. ambassador to Brazil in the face of Helms' disinclination to act on his nomination.

As he took leave for the private sector, the outspoken Atwood took some potshots both at his enemies on Capitol Hill and budgetary rivals within the Clinton administration foreign policy apparatus. "I regret that we not only had to battle the traditional opponents of foreign aid in Congress--a group that was reinforced by the non-passport-carrying members of the class of 1994--but also that the battle had to be fought with administration colleagues who should have known better," he declared in a June speech to the Washington-based Overseas Development Council.

Conceding that money has grown tight for all foreign affairs activities, Atwood ruefully observed that "the budget pressures within the international affairs accounts have made people more aggressively parochial than ever [and] the easiest target in town is the development assistance account."

After six years of partisan wrangling, it's no wonder that Atwood left AID with a sour taste in his mouth and deep regrets, as he put it, "that we wasted so much time here in Washington fighting for our very existence." But the restructuring battle that tied him down was mostly just a diversionary skirmish in the larger struggle to reshape U.S. foreign policy in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Empire.

The bickering over boxes on an organization chart masks a failure to come to grips with difficult choices about America's global leadership role. "It illustrates the difficulty that those at least nominally responsible for foreign policy--most notably the State Department but also Congress--have had in making the adjustment to a world without the Cold War," Overseas Development Council President John W. Sewell said in an interview. "There isn't any agreement, nor has anybody addressed the issue, of what we want our bilateral aid program to do in this new world. We haven't had that discussion."

It's a discussion that's badly needed. AID traces its origins to the 1961 Foreign Assistance Act, a law passed at a time when the United States believed that by seeking to alleviate poverty and illiteracy in the developing world it might also recruit allies in its Cold War fight against Communism. Over the years, the bulk of the assistance funds administered by AID were awarded for strategic rather than humanitarian reasons and went to key U.S. allies such as Israel, Egypt, Turkey and the Philippines, by no means the poorest of developing nations.

Indeed, out of AID's fiscal 2000 budget request of $7.4 billion, only about a fourth--$1.85 billion--is for the sort of core bilateral development assistance that most people think of when the term foreign aid is bandied about. This is money for objectives such as increasing female literacy, promoting sustainable economic development and curbing AIDS and other diseases that many experts believe are critical for preventing instability in a world where the gap between rich and poor is widening.

Yet this is an area where the budget ax has hit hardest. According to the Congressional Research Service, sustainable development programs, which received $2.1 billion in 1995, were cut more than 20 percent to $1.6 billion after control of Congress shifted to Republicans.

In an era when overall foreign affairs spending is shrinking and the costs of intervening in humanitarian crises are rising, it's not surprising that spending for development programs that lack a short-term payoff get crowded out. But the squabble over who controls AID has been a poor substitute for a clear debate over America's interests in the developing world.

Atwood, in taking his parting shots, suggested that the costs of avoiding that debate will be measured in more failed states, more wars, more South-to-North migration, more transmission of infectious disease and more terrorism. Most of Washington apparently is betting he's wrong.

Dick Kirschten is a contributing editor for National Journal.