Major Thomas D. Howie Congressional Gold Medal

— 268 — Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise In effect, humanitarian aid is sustaining war economies, creating financial incentives for warring parties to continue fighting, discouraging governments from reforming, and propping up malign regimes. Nefarious actors reap billions of dollars in profits from diversions of our human- itarian assistance, but so do international organizations. The WFP charges 36 percent in overhead while Oxfam International’s overhead has reached 70 percent in Yemen, reflecting the high costs of foreign staff, security, and logistics. With pow- erful lobbies in Washington, D.C., and in leadership positions throughout USAID and the Department of State, the aid industry adroitly exploits Congress’s dispo- sition to increase funding year on year to assist those in dire need but provides no evidence to justify the mounting budget requests. In 2020, USAID’s leadership fused formerly bifurcated food and nonfood emergency relief operations into a single Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance to improve the management of the agency’s largest portfolio, but this reform was not sufficient to address the problem. The next Administration should resize and repurpose USAID’s humanitarian aid portfolio to restore its original purpose of providing emergency short-term relief, prepare vulnerable communities for tran- sition, and do no harm in the following ways: l Work with Congress to make deep cuts in the IDA budget by ending programs that do more harm than good in places controlled by malign actors, such as in Yemen, Syria, and Afghanistan, where our aid is consumed by fraud, diversion, and partner overhead costs. l Require USAID and the State Department to devise country-based exit strategies that term-limit the duration of humanitarian responses and transition funding from emergency to development projects. This will require robust diplomacy to press host governments to integrate displaced persons in lieu of keeping them in expensive and dehumanizing camps financed by the international community. l Transition from large awards to expensive, inefficient, and corrupt U.N. agencies, global NGOs, and contractors to local, especially faith-based, entities that are already operating on the ground. This approach provides a far less expensive and more effective alternative for aid delivery. Local partners more ably navigate corrupt environments and are more likely to steer vulnerable populations away from dependence on aid toward self-sufficiency. l Require that BHA avail itself of existing IDA authorities that it fails to use, including to dispense with the cost-reimbursement model that disqualifies — 269 — Agency for International Development undercapitalized local NGOs; accept other donor vetting of local partners; streamline the award-approval process; and expand the use of fixed-amount awards to rein in cost overruns. l Direct USAID’s Bureau for Management to hire more procurement officers for BHA to strengthen the Bureau’s award management capacity and reduce the incentives to issue large awards to aid industry giants. l Allow BHA to manage the process of hiring Personal Services Contractors. l Require BHA’s partners to adopt stricter vetting procedures to prevent aid from being diverted to terrorists. l Increase efforts to obtain greater contributions, not just pledges, for humanitarian operations from other donors and make this a condition for receiving additional U.S. aid. Leveraging Foreign Aid to Unleash the Power of America’s Private Sector. During the 1960s, when USAID was launched, 80 percent of financial flows from the United States to the developing world was in the form of U.S. government assistance. Today, that figure is under 10 percent, overtaken by private investment, remittances, and private charities, all demonstrating the power of America’s pri- vate sector to promote wealth-generating economic development in poor countries. Leaders in the developing world routinely press U.S. officials about their preference for “trade and investment, not aid.” Instead, the Biden Administration is leveraging private-sector financing to promote its climate and other progressive agendas worldwide. The next conser- vative Administration must return USAID to a foreign aid model that leverages its resources to promote private-sector solutions to the world’s true development problems and end the need for future foreign aid. Private capital investment in these markets is the greatest enabler of job creation and sustainable economic growth throughout the developing world. A key tool of American soft-power leadership is the U.S. Development Finance Corporation (DFC). Launched in December 2019, DFC sought to unleash the power of America’s private sector to advance our interests by providing emerging markets with blended financing opportunities to help end wretched poverty, create new markets for U.S.-made products, strengthen bilateral partnerships in strategic parts of the world, and offset China’s predatory loans and investments. The Trump Administration launched a USAID–DFC Working Group to maximize development outcomes and review individual investment projects through a counter-China lens and ensure a cohesive interagency development response.

— 270 — Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise As development agencies, USAID and DFC must do a better job of aligning their respective activities and closely integrate both structurally and operation- ally. The easiest way to foster this alignment is to “dual hat” the role of DFC’s chief development officer so that he or she serves simultaneously in both institu- tions. Like all U.S. federal bodies, DFC should be restored to its original intent of deploying its commercial risk-reducing financial services instead of its current misuse as another global vehicle to promote economy-killing climate programs, meet irrelevant diversity objectives, and overfocus on low-impact or misguided gender-based activities. Branding. A deeply embedded culture within the foreign aid bureaucracy views public recognition of U.S. assistance as secondary to a larger philanthropic mission and is embarrassed by the American flag. Citing vaguely defined secu- rity concerns, USAID’s implementers—U.N. agencies, international NGOs, and contractors—often fail to credit the American people for the billions of dollars in assistance they provide the rest of the world even as they engage in self-promoting public relations to raise other donor funds. This approach has negative foreign policy implications as China relentlessly promotes its own self-serving efforts to gain influence and resources. Worst of all, malign actors sometimes appropriate credit for unbranded U.S. assistance: Houthi terrorists, for example, claim to pro- vide for the people under their occupation with anonymous U.S. humanitarian aid. The United States is in a struggle for influence with China, Russia, and other competitors, and American generosity must not go unacknowledged. The next conservative Administration should build on the Trump Administration’s brand- ing policy, which revamped ADS Chapter 320, to force the aid bureaucracy to fully credit the American people for the aid they are providing. The Senior Advisor for Brand Management in the Bureau for Legislative and Public Affairs (LPA) (dis- cussed infra) should be a political appointee who is responsible for maximizing the visibility of U.S. assistance by enforcing branding policy on every grant, coopera- tive agreement, and contract. The LPA should liaise with counterparts at the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM) to ensure local media pickup of these activities. OTHER OFFICES AND BUREAUS Office of Administrator. The next conservative Administration should leave in place the current structure of two presidentially appointed, Senate-confirmed Deputy Administrators, one for Policy and one for Management. The Deputy Administrators and the Chief of Staff must be individuals with extensive previous service in the executive branch, ideally at foreign-affairs agencies, and be fluent in the language and practice of federal procurement. Bureau for Foreign Assistance. As noted above, the next conservative Administration should name the USAID Administrator as Director of Foreign Assistance (F) at the Department of State with the rank of Deputy Secretary. It

— 270 — Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise As development agencies, USAID and DFC must do a better job of aligning their respective activities and closely integrate both structurally and operation- ally. The easiest way to foster this alignment is to “dual hat” the role of DFC’s chief development officer so that he or she serves simultaneously in both institu- tions. Like all U.S. federal bodies, DFC should be restored to its original intent of deploying its commercial risk-reducing financial services instead of its current misuse as another global vehicle to promote economy-killing climate programs, meet irrelevant diversity objectives, and overfocus on low-impact or misguided gender-based activities. Branding. A deeply embedded culture within the foreign aid bureaucracy views public recognition of U.S. assistance as secondary to a larger philanthropic mission and is embarrassed by the American flag. Citing vaguely defined secu- rity concerns, USAID’s implementers—U.N. agencies, international NGOs, and contractors—often fail to credit the American people for the billions of dollars in assistance they provide the rest of the world even as they engage in self-promoting public relations to raise other donor funds. This approach has negative foreign policy implications as China relentlessly promotes its own self-serving efforts to gain influence and resources. Worst of all, malign actors sometimes appropriate credit for unbranded U.S. assistance: Houthi terrorists, for example, claim to pro- vide for the people under their occupation with anonymous U.S. humanitarian aid. The United States is in a struggle for influence with China, Russia, and other competitors, and American generosity must not go unacknowledged. The next conservative Administration should build on the Trump Administration’s brand- ing policy, which revamped ADS Chapter 320, to force the aid bureaucracy to fully credit the American people for the aid they are providing. The Senior Advisor for Brand Management in the Bureau for Legislative and Public Affairs (LPA) (dis- cussed infra) should be a political appointee who is responsible for maximizing the visibility of U.S. assistance by enforcing branding policy on every grant, coopera- tive agreement, and contract. The LPA should liaise with counterparts at the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM) to ensure local media pickup of these activities. OTHER OFFICES AND BUREAUS Office of Administrator. The next conservative Administration should leave in place the current structure of two presidentially appointed, Senate-confirmed Deputy Administrators, one for Policy and one for Management. The Deputy Administrators and the Chief of Staff must be individuals with extensive previous service in the executive branch, ideally at foreign-affairs agencies, and be fluent in the language and practice of federal procurement. Bureau for Foreign Assistance. As noted above, the next conservative Administration should name the USAID Administrator as Director of Foreign Assistance (F) at the Department of State with the rank of Deputy Secretary. It — 271 — Agency for International Development should reorient the bulk of F staff from focusing on the formulation of the annual President’s budget proposal to the execution of already appropriated resources. This should include eliminating the duplicative Mission and Bureau Resource Requests; speeding up the availability of appropriations by delivering to Congress within 60 days the report required by Section 653(a) of the Foreign Assistance Act (FAA); and fast-tracking the approval of Congressional Notifications (CNs) and other pre-obligation requirements. Management Bureau. As indicated previously, the next conservative Admin- istration should name a political appointee as USAID’s Senior Procurement Executive and Director of the agency’s Office of Acquisition and Assistance (M/ OAA). Political appointees with the appropriate credentials (including warrants) should be placed within M/OAA, and the agency should exercise its authority to engage qualified experts from other federal departments and agencies and outside of government (if they are free of conflicts of interest) on the Technical Commit- tees that review applications for USAID’s contract and grant competitions. The Administration should change the designation of USAID’s Competition Advocate to an individual favorable to innovative types of contracts that can reduce the aid oligopoly’s grip on the agency. Office of Human Capital and Talent Management. As soon as possible after Inauguration Day, the next conservative Administration should name a political appointee as USAID’s Chief Human Capital Officer (CHCO) and Director of the Office of Human Capital and Talent Management. USAID’s White House Liaison must be an individual with substantial experience with federal personnel sys- tems. The White House Office of Presidential Personnel should allow the USAID Administrator to explore with counterparts at the Office of Personnel Management whether the agency could hire personnel under both the Administratively Deter- mined authority and Schedule C of the Excepted Service of the Federal Civil Service. USAID should be one of the agencies to pilot-test a reinstated Executive Order 13957,16 which created a Schedule F within the Excepted Service, and should aggres- sively recruit and place candidates into term-limited positions under Schedule A of the Excepted Service (especially veterans). The new CHCO should examine how the existing members of the Senior Executive Service (SES) at USAID should be reworked throughout the agency and should institute an SES Mobility Program to encourage the regular rotation of senior career leaders, including through details to other departments and agencies. Bureau for Policy, Planning, and Learning. The next conservative Admin- istration should shift the policy functions of the Bureau for Policy, Planning, and Learning (PPL) to the Office of Budget and Resource Management (BRM), located in the Office of the Administrator. It should rename BRM the Office of Budget, Policy, and Resource Management (BPRM) and staff the policy team with political appointees. The Administration should also move the responsibility for reviewing