Can Jami Rodgers fix USAID's contracting crisis?

For Jami Rodgers, taking over as director of the U.S. Agency for International Development’s main procurement office is a homecoming. It’s also a return to planet Earth. For the past year, Rodgers has been at NASA, serving as director of the space agency’s Procurement Strategic Operations Division. Now, after five years away from USAID, he has been tapped to fill what many consider one of the most important jobs at the world’s largest bilateral aid agency. The director of the Office of Acquisitions and Assistance is in charge of procurement, leading contracting officers in Washington, D.C., and around the world who carry out what is arguably USAID’s core function — designing, awarding, and overseeing contracts and grants for development projects in lower-income countries. USAID did that to the tune of $38 billion last year, requiring the procurement office to undertake over 23,000 individual actions, such as making and modifying awards or approving additional funding. “Almost nothing happens” without USAID’s procurement office, Rodgers told Devex in an interview. “So our ability to be successful is the agency's ability to be successful.” Rodgers, who took up his new post in December, hopes to bring NASA’s spirit of innovation and ingenuity to USAID — perhaps with the help of artificial intelligence. His resume has raised expectations among some outside observers, who see the clock ticking quickly for hopes of meaningful change in U.S. foreign aid spending. Rodgers’ experience “puts him in an excellent position to make an immediate impact during this final year of the current term of the Biden-Harris Administration,” Unlock Aid, a coalition pushing for USAID reforms, wrote at the time of his appointment. “I want to be the premier enabler of the premier development agency in the world,” Rodgers said. The right tools Success is not a given. Under USAID Administrator Samantha Power, agency leaders have warned that a “staffing crisis” centered around a shortage of contracting officers threatens to put some of the administration’s biggest foreign aid priorities out of reach. As the amount of money the agency spends increases alongside a proliferation of global crises, the number of people capable of signing those checks and making sure the funds are spent properly has not kept pace. That takes a particular toll on USAID’s ambitions to think outside the procurement box and advance priorities such as localization — which tends to require more, not fewer people, involved in the funding process. To address those shortfalls, USAID has hired more civil service and foreign service contract specialists. Rodgers said the agency also needs to continue current collaborations with minority-serving institutions and other educational institutions to bring more people into the procurement workforce, rather than perpetuating a cycle in which federal agencies “cannibalize” each other’s high-demand contracting professionals. “This is something that I'm not going to be able to solve overnight, but it is central to our agency's success,” he said. Staffing numbers are one issue; staff empowerment is another. Some USAID veterans have argued that the agency could make better use of the contracting workforce it has by giving those employees more flexibility, greater risk appetite, and by rewarding innovation aimed at improving program performance. Rodgers said that “making sure that our contracting officers feel empowered and that they have the resources they need to do their job” is his biggest priority right now. Contracting officers “have broad flexibility in how they exercise their authority,” Rodgers said. “I think it's important to encourage folks to do business differently if it makes sense.” Space age procurement Rodgers also hopes his years spent at NASA and the U.S. Department of Energy — both highly technical, scientific agencies — will yield lessons he can bring to bear at USAID. “They embrace that spirit of change and innovation, and that's something that I hope to bring back to USAID now that I've had those experiences outside the agency,” he said. High on the list: artificial intelligence. “It could be things as small as automating checklists, using AI to help generate documents in the procurement and financial systems process, using AI and data analytics to help see what we're buying and are we buying it in a smart way,” Rodgers said, noting that there are also contract writing systems on the market with AI incorporated into them. “We're really looking to take a hard look at what others are doing across the government, and benchmark and maybe bring some of those best practices back to us,” he said. Having spent more than five years away from USAID — after more than five years at the agency earlier in his career — Rodgers said he is struck by how different government agencies are all dealing with similar acquisitions and assistance challenges. “I think it's important that we hear from folks at all levels, maybe even from outside acquisition and assistance, to better inform how we can make improvements,” Rodgers said. The front lines of localization Some of USAID’s procurement-related challenges are unique to the agency. Among them is its ongoing push to shift more of its funding from U.S.-based implementing partners to organizations located in the countries where it implements programs — known as “localization.” Rogers’ new role puts him at the center of a localization struggle that has humbled USAID for over a decade. Despite the efforts of multiple USAID administrators to move the needle, only about 10% of the agency’s funding goes to local organizations — and the majority still flows through a relatively small number of established partners. The acquisitions and assistance workforce is “on the front lines of localization,” Rodgers said. A key focus has been making sure the agency’s business practices are accessible and flexible for organizations that may not have years of experience navigating the federal contracting system. That has primarily happened through WorkWithUSAID.gov, Rodgers said, describing the website as USAID’s “front door” to increased work with local partners. In particular, he highlighted the free translation services USAID has implemented through that website, with dense contracting documents available in French, Spanish, and Arabic — with Portuguese and Swahili on the way. At the same time, Rodgers believes that with USAID’s budget reaching record levels, the localization agenda does not necessarily pit new partners against existing ones. “We can do both at the same time,” he said. “We can look at localization and make sure we're increasing direct awards and getting work as close to the beneficiaries, and we will still have a need for larger instruments and awards with some of our traditional partners.” Rodgers, who started his career at the Environmental Protection Agency, said USAID’s mission is what first brought him to the agency in 2012. When he moved to NASA it was also to work for “the benefit of humanity.” Now he’s “focusing here, on this sphere, not necessarily the universe,” he said. “And there's plenty of work to do.”