Michael Cohen over at Democracy Arsenal has a great post noting that we’re eighty days into the Obama Administration and it still hasn’t appointed a USAID Administrator:

Quite simply, if you are going to have an national development agency - and you are going to take it seriously - then you need to make its ability to do its job a priority. In our recent report on improving democracy promotion and fixing the foreign assistance bureaucracy, we call for AID to be made a cabinet-level agency - and with the lack of attention that the Obama Administration is paying to this issue that is something that will have to be emanate from Congress and a potential re-write of the foreign assistance act. But not surprisingly, my confidence is not high.

But in the meantime, if the Obama Administration is really interested in making its rhetoric about development and democracy promotion being a priority in US foreign policy - they need to put somebody in charge of AID. And they need to do it immediately.

Cohen is absolutely right.  Whether it is because of the extended vetting or other reasons, the pace of appointments at State can’t even be described as a crawl anymore.  According to WaPo, of forty-three posts requiring confirmation, only thirteen have been nominated (of which nine have been confirmed).  Only two of the six undersecretary positions have people in place, and both are foreign service holdovers in the Bush Administration.

And those figures exclude USAID, where the numbers are worse:  ten slots, zero nominations.

I have heard a rumor that the White House is holding off on appointing a USAID Administrator until Deputy Secretary of State for Management Jacob Lew is conducting a top-to-bottom review of foreign assistance, and any USAID nominations are on hold until that’s done.

I have no problem with such a review — the current foreign aid bureaucracy (including but not limited USAID) is not designed to maximise return on the taxpayers’ investment.  (In fact I’m going to spend part of my weekend reading Cohen’s new report on the challenge.)  But if the Administration can conduct a comprehensive review of AfPak policy in sixty days, and is supposedly on target to evaluate the fiscal soundness of the nation’s twenty largest banks in ninety days, you’d think that they could pull this off as well.

Furthermore, unlike every other senior position, I’ve seen no rumors — zero — of who’s being considered.  That isn’t a good sign.

But this isn’t merely a USAID problem — the whole foreign policy bureacracy is frozen right now.  As a friend inside the building noted to me, almost every bureau is currently being headed by an Acting Assistant Secretary, most of whom are talented senior foreign service officers who want to make sure they don’t do anything that will screw up their next assignment.  And nobody is even acting in the case of the vacant undersecretary positions.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:  no matter how talented Secretary Clinton may be, it’s awfully hard to manage a large bureau without senior-level support.  If USAID is a crew without a captain, then Hillary is a captain without a crew.

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