U.S. Aid Agencies—Then and Now

My colleague Connie Veillette recently commented on President Obama’s call to “merge, consolidate, and reorganize the federal government” in his State of the Union address.  The whole-of-government bandwagon has seen a lot of riders lately, without much thought to the underlying reasons that have given it currency of late.In the case of foreign assistance, it is the proliferation of U.S. government agencies delivering aid that has necessitated the all too common whole-of-government approach.  But, if you look at the list of agencies with a hand in foreign aid just 15 years ago, the number of agencies involved is chopped in half.  Not only does the number of agencies decrease from 21 to 10 but the percent of official development assistance (ODA) delivered by each agency seems much more reasonable.  In 1996, USAID delivered the vast majority of ODA with the State Department and Treasury coming in a distant second and third.  The Department of Defense had a minimal role and HHS was entirely absent.In the spirit of Connie’s challenge to tell us how you would reorganize the government agencies involved in foreign aid delivery, take a look at the table below and see how it was done in 1996. How would you reorganize foreign aid delivery for 2011?Note: 0.0% represents values less than $500,000.