Tag Archives: QDDR

Earlier this week, Foreign Policy blogger Josh Rogin published a leaked White House document detailing the Obama Administration’s “New Way Forward on Global Development.”

The optimistically-titled document is the draft output of the Presidential Study Directive (known as the PSD-7), ordered by the Obama Administration nine months ago as a government-wide review of global development policy, and conducted by the National Security Council and the National Economic Council.

The document proposes to “elevate development” as a “key pillar of US foreign policy.” How so? The most significant change in the draft is the creation of interagency committee reporting to the President to run US development policy. This would essentially pull responsibility for development away from State, (where it has been since Condoleeza Rice initiated the mysterious-sounding “F process” in 2006), although not completely since the USAID Administrator would still report to the Secretary of State.

Meanwhile, the State Department is also promising to “elevate development” as a “central pillar of all that we do in our foreign policy.” The State Department’s own review of development policy, called the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review (QDDR to close friends) has not yet been published (or leaked), but will most likely not propose that State relinquish budget and policy planning authority over USAID.

What would be the best outcome for the people around the world on the receiving end of America’s imperfect largesse? Will it make any difference which one of these plans wins out in the upcoming political turf battles? One thing’s for sure, US foreign aid reform has a long and inglorious history, and tinkering at the margins (or stirring the spaghetti bowl, as a recent Oxfam editorial put it) will only make things worse.