I am not DOGE

But, boy, does the leaked Rubio aid reorg plan look eerily familiar

An unofficial aid reorganization proposal, presumably from Secretary Marco Rubio, has been circulating around DC and reported by Politico, which also posted a fuzzy scan of the plan (weirdly, with pages out of order). Assuming this document is real, it proposes some radical changes. The highlights:

• Recreate a new humanitarian agency inside State to cover disaster response, global health, and food security.

• Merge MCC and TDA into the DFC to align programs for private investment, technology, energy, and other infrastructure.

• Move all politically-motivated programs (democracy, conflict prevention, etc) inside State.

I need to simmer on all of this, but a few initial reactions:

1. I’m happy to see a plan — any plan! — to retain these capabilities, not just tear everything down.

It’s a relief that some kind of rebuild is under serious consideration. So far, all we’ve seen is destruction. The manner of USAID’s dismantling has been painful and disrespectful toward a lot of dedicated professionals. I think planned job cuts at DFC seem utterly at cross-purposes with White House aims to supersize the agency. So I remain pretty worried that the enthusiasm for slashing will not be matched by the rebuilding effort.

2. Efficiency is great, but the budget will need to match.

Streamlining can be constructive. Yet State will still need lots of dollars to run an effective humanitarian agency. Bringing it in-house might save some modest administrative costs, but the programs still need real resources. Will the admin also propose budgets to meet the new ambition? I have doubts.

3. State has no development expertise.

I’m less concerned about where aid functions sit in the federal org chart as much as whether they can work. (The British moved their aid agency out, in, out, and then back into the Foreign Office without too much pain.) Yet, in my experience at State – I was a DAS in the Africa bureau under Secretary Condoleezza Rice – the agency is good at diplomacy and has lots of smart capable people, but knows zilch about long term development. Or how to manage big grants.

That’s just not what diplomats are trained to do. That’s what USAID was for. Sure, State could create that capability, but they just fired most of the public servants who already know how to do this. I’d like to know more about how they’re planning to build back up – and I hope it’s not to outsource more to beltway bandit contractors.

4. Holy sh*t, the plan looks a lot like my reorg video from 2011.

Way back in the Obama years, when Ben Leo and I were first pitching the US Development Finance Corporation, I made a short video for CGD to make the case for a full service DFI and how it might fit within a more clearly-delineated US aid system.

The narrow problem was that OPIC was too small and weak. The bigger context was that US foreign assistance was a convoluted mess. It had too many goals, too many agencies, and no functioning system to make the pieces fit together. The frustration of it all was best articulated in Lael Brainard’s ridiculous spaghetti bowl.

The video starts with President Obama's plea for restructuring (anyone remember his SOTU salmon joke?) and then proposes 3 steps to streamline development in the USG:

• Bucket the laundry list of aid objectives under just 3 umbrella goals of growth, recovery, and security.

• Consolidate the 20+ US agencies with aid programs down to 7, including creating a new private sector focused “US Development Bank” (which we later detailed and renamed the US Development Finance Corporation.)

• Clarify a lead agency for each: DFC → growth, USAID → recovery, State → security.

Since then, the convoluted mess of (w)hole of government has, if anything, gotten worse. Watching it today, the video is embarrassingly low-tech, but the ideas are, I still think, good ones.

How does that old reorg idea compare to the new Trump/Rubio plan?

Much of the original video ideas seem to resonate with at least some parts of the current admin crowd.

• The new proposal consolidates all assistance under three pillars: Safer, Stronger, More Prosperous. These line up almost exactly with our original Recovery, Security, Growth.

• We already have the new DFC, created by Congress in 2018 and opened under Trump 1.0. While DFC absorbed some relevant parts of USAID, the new proposal is trying to add several more entire agencies. Ben and I originally proposed also merging TDA into DFC but keeping MCC wholly separate (although the new plan does say explicitly that MCC will retain its selection process and compact structure.)

• The proposed designated leads are State/Humanitarian → Safer, State → Stronger, and DFC → More Prosperous. Also pretty near exact, except we envisioned USAID as separate.

  

Alas, No, I am not DOGE.

One of the risks of putting big ideas out there is that people will run with them in unexpected directions. I’m very much in favor of robust US foreign assistance and obviously believe that we can do far better than the longtime status quo, which frustrated nearly everyone. But we can't succeed without real budgets, retaining public sector talent, or anticipating the consequences of wild disruption. Most of all, to make aid work better, we have to follow through with a genuine plan to rebuild core functions in support of US global aims.

I hope we get to see Rubio & Co try.