President Obama’s Spotlight on Global Development
Jim Kunder, Former USAID Acting Deputy Administrator
GMF Blog
The American humorist Mark Twain once famously exhorted: “Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest.”
Just before the Labor Day weekend, the Obama Administration gratified the advocates of enhanced U.S. foreign aid, and probably astonished some cynics, by announcing a full-blown review of global development policy. The review, structured formally within a Presidential Study Directive (PSD), will be headed by National Security Advisor General James Jones and Larry Summers, Director of the National Economic Council.
The Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network, clearly among the gratified, immediately hailed the initiative as a “landmark” event that establishes “clear White House leadership” on revising America’s approach to global development. Some cynics – while clearly on the defensive – are still suspicious about the Obama Administration’s intentions in making the announcement. Some of these grumble that a PSD is the perfect Washington “study-it-to-death” delaying tactic, to deflect attention from the nine-month hiatus in either naming a USAID Administrator or submitting Foreign Assistance Act reform legislation to Capitol Hill.
