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.