CHAPTER 2: WHAT IS (OR WAS) USAID?
Before getting to my own stories, here’s a short description of USAID and a bit of commentary about foreign aid generally.
Examples of US foreign aid can be found that predate the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe following World War II, but they are few and far between. Congress appropriated $50,000 to help survivors of the earthquake that destroyed Caracas, Venezuela, in 1812. After World War I, the US provided $387 million to the Committee for Relief in Belgium to help feed the hungry. Before he was president, Herbert Hoover, as the head of the American Relief Administration, led a large relief effort to address famine in Soviet Russia from 1921 to 1923. There were some others, but the modern version of our foreign aid program, most of which has gone through USAID, dates from a 1961 Executive Order by President Kennedy and the Foreign Assistance Act enacted the same year.
There was never a consensus about how to say the Agency’s name. Some pronounce each letter—you ess ay eye dee—while others say yoose aid, accent on the yoose. Earlier it had been called simply “AID,” a clever acronym that officially meant, not “aid” in the sense of assistance, but rather “Agency for International Development.” They could have said “for economic development,” which would have been more accurate and understandable, but then the acronym would not have been a cute pun.
A word about the many other acronyms used throughout the foreign aid world: These show, in small part, the great variety of targets USAID was asked to deal with, for which we often went to great effort to develop meaningful project names. Some examples:
• SUPER (Support for Uganda Primary Education Reform)
• PEACE (Programming Effectively Against Conflict and Extremism)
• ASPIRE (Achieving Sustainable Partnerships for Innovation, Research, and Entrepreneurship)
• BRIDGE (Building Research and Innovation for Development, Generating Evidence)
To lighten the bureaucratic grind, I once half-jokingly suggested one for a project I still seriously think could be used to combat the rampant sexual violence in so much of Africa: EMAJO (Encouraging the Men of Africa to Jerk Off).
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Structure—How it Worked
USAID had a large staff of civil servants, both foreign service (FS) and civil schedule (GS, for “general schedule”), in Washington, DC. It was divided into operating units, most of which were called Bureaus. Some were geographic; some were thematic, related to crosscutting areas or functions (health, education, management, policy, legislative affairs, and more). Names of the Bureaus changed, but the functions remained largely the same during most of my career.
Overseas, USAID had Missions, most of which (when I joined in 1987) were offices physically located in their own buildings. After 9/11, Missions were moved into the more-secure embassies. In 2024, there were about sixty Missions, but the number was nearly one hundred at one time. Most of the larger Missions were organized around the so-called “technical” areas: health, education, agriculture, economic growth, democracy and governance, etc. Each Mission also had its respective “support offices,” such as the legal advisors, the contracting and grants officers, the financial controller’s office, and the “program office.” The latter was the office most directly involved in assisting the Mission Director and, if they had one, the Deputy Mission Director, with planning, budgeting, and reporting to DC.
Each Mission was staffed with both local and American employees. Some might have had only one or two Americans; some twenty or more. The acronyms here were USDHs, for US direct hires, and FSNs, for foreign service national employees, i.e., local staff. The overseas USDHs were most generally members of the US foreign service, but sometimes we would have people from other federal agencies, like the Center for Disease Control (CDC) or Forest Service, or even from the Department of Justice or Treasury, on loan. There also was an important group of staff called “personal service contractors” (or “PSCs”), who were under time-limited contracts and did not participate in either the civil service or foreign service retirement plans. USAID had both US, local, and even third-country PSCs.
Most, though not all, of the actual work of foreign aid was carried out through the “implementers”—organizations, whether for-profit companies, nonprofit organizations, or universities, who, with some exceptions, competed for financing. The group also included public international organizations (PIOs) such as the World Health Organization or other UN organizations.
Two former USAID lawyers created a school in Rome and qualified it for “public international organization” status. It was the International Development Law Institute, IDLI—now IDLO, because the “institute” became an “organization.”
Agreements with implementers fell into two broad categories: contracts and assistance instruments (aka, “grants”). The main distinction is that contracts gave the Agency more control. Assistance instruments imposed less onerous reporting requirements on the recipients and sometimes could be put in place more quickly. There was a category of assistance instruments called “cooperative agreements” which allowed for more management involvement by the Agency but were still not legally “contracts.” They, like ordinary grants, had fewer remedies if there was a mistake, but they allowed for more direct USG participation in the management. Both contracts and assistance instruments normally had to be awarded following federal regulations requiring competition, but there were ways to avoid competition in the right circumstances, such as a grant to a PIO, or when it was clear that only one organization could do the work well or on time. To design, compete for, and award any instrument could take many months, often well over a year.
The implementers had their own staffs, both local and US-based, or even from third countries, normally housed outside the USAID Missions. (Some of the most heartbreaking stories from the destruction of USAID involve the non-US implementers, for whom we have abandoned the teach-aman-to-fish approach and instead thrown them under the water.) The boss of an implementer’s staff was called the “Chief of Party” or COP. COPs normally took their instructions from the Missions, although some of the so-called “Central Bureaus” (the crosscutting, thematic Bureaus without geographic names) managed overseas implementers.
What these implementers really did in country obviously depended on the project design and area of work. The variety of work was mind-bogglingly extensive. A list of random examples follows, minus any cute acronyms. They are all but drops in a very large bucket:
• Teach tax collectors better ways to detect corruption.
• Teach teachers better ways to teach kids how to read.
• Teach hospital managers better ways to manage.
• Teach poor communities the how and why of eco-tourism and forest preservation.
• Teach judges and local lawyers how to implement a trial-by-jury system.
• Organize community health workers to spread information about sanitation practices
• Teach local aspiring entrepreneurs how to, say, sew and market their products or make chocolate candy from locally grown cocoa instead of only exporting the beans.
• Create a network of farm suppliers to lobby their own government for reforms.
• Teach farmers how to better manage and maintain a group irrigation system.
• Set up a group of human rights defenders in the country to defend prisoners.
• Give training to game wardens on how to best detect poachers.
• Help local emergency response agencies get better prepared.
• Install more effective payment systems in rural communities to facilitate commerce.
• Teach local governments how to detect stealing from the national electrical grid.
• Create a microfinance organization to make small loans to groups of women entrepreneurs.
This bullet list could go on for pages, perhaps occupying this entire book, and other books could be written about each such bullet.
For any one of these, there could also be a “please buy and provide the following stuff to ____” budget line item. Where I worked, the biggest part of the program was normally for staff and travel. The projects and programs I saw financed a lot of meetings, mainly for training and consensus-building, both critical for true social change. In a few countries, however, the “stuff” part would be a majority of the budget: roads in Afghanistan, schools in Pakistan, etc.
USAID was charged not only with promoting economic development overseas but often also with accomplishing US goals concerning a host of other issues, basically anything for which the USG at any given time decided a nonmilitary response was necessary and appropriate. As shown, this is an enormous universe of possibilities, so setting priorities was difficult. Our jobs were to choose the technical areas to focus on in each country (or accept priorities given to us by Congress), justify our choices to the State Department, the Office of Management and Budget and Congress, put the agreements in place, and then facilitate, monitor and adjust the work of the implementing partners when necessary. We support staff (lawyers, controllers, contracts officers, program officers, etc.) were not the technical experts. Instead, we had the privilege of dabbling in thousands of different subjects while doing our main jobs. The same was true for the senior managers as I learned after I became one.
The term “AID” itself did not automatically announce that the Agency was part of the US government. It could be mistaken for the name of some international or UN organization, e.g., the IMF, ADB, OAS, WFP, OECD, etc. Such confusion was never intended, but at one point in my career a USAID Administrator insisted that we only call it USAID. The shorter acronym nevertheless remained in use at the State Department (they all knew the US bit anyway, and he was not their boss), so “AID” can still be heard there and among academics. USAID had long been an independent agency with its own appropriation. It was always much smaller than State, and, by law, required to “take direction” from State. Since ambassadors could expel any one of us at any time for any reason, or even for no reason, on a personal level the US Ambassador was always the ultimate boss of field staff in any country.
In most countries, USAID was not the only aid donor. Most major Western countries, along with Japan, New Zealand and Australia, have aid programs. Except for some of the UN units, these normally do not have large staffs in the countries. They also often use other implementers. The United Nations Development Program (UNDP), the various Development Banks, the World Food Program (WFO), etc., are examples of such donors. While it is dwarfed by the “military/industrial” complex, the foreign aid/consultants/PVO 4 complex was and remains a very large industry.
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