Exclusive: USAID plans to break up a bureau in latest 'readjustment'

Just two years after the U.S. Agency for International Development wrapped up one of the biggest structural reorganizations in its history, the agency’s leaders are planning another round of changes — while acknowledging not everyone is on board with the idea. One reason for these readjustments is that a new bureau representing a major piece of the previous administration’s “transformation agenda” for USAID isn’t working, officials say. A second reason is that USAID’s leadership wants to create a new policy office at the agency to support Administrator Samantha Power’s elevated role on the White House National Security Council, where she is the first USAID chief with a permanent seat. “Doing a further reorganization was like the last thing I wanted to do. So we go into this wanting to do it in a very limited way,” USAID Chief of Staff Dennis Vega told members of the Society for International Development, a network of development professionals who work with USAID, on Sept. 8. Devex obtained a recording of the private briefing, which was held to get feedback on the proposed changes. The decision to make structural changes came out of an assessment by USAID’s new leadership of the changes implemented by former USAID Administrator Mark Green that have not worked out, Vega said during the briefing. That led them to one big conclusion: The Bureau for Development, Democracy, and Innovation — one of the central pieces of the USAID reorganization that took place under former U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration — is too complex and needs to be broken up. Three other bureaus — ​​resilience and food security; policy, planning, and learning; and budget and resource management — would also see adjustments. In addition, USAID plans to establish an Office of the Chief Economist. As of Sept. 8, Power had approved the proposed changes and USAID planned to officially notify Congress by the end of the fiscal year, which was Sept. 30. That would begin a process of drilling down into the restructuring to determine what it would mean for staffing changes within the newly configured bureaus and offices. Vega said that USAID could make the proposed changes without additional hiring, but noted that bringing more staff onboard remains a key priority of the administration regardless of what happens with these proposals. “USAID is proposing limited structural changes to better align with the Mission of the Agency and position the Agency to address the development priorities and complex global crises more effectively. We are currently engaging internally and with the appropriate congressional committees on the proposed adjustments,” a USAID spokesperson wrote in response to an inquiry from Devex. “Doing a further reorganization was like the last thing I wanted to do. So we go into this wanting to do it in a very limited way.” --— Dennis Vega, chief of staff, USAID Too many meetings When Green announced the details of his transformation plan in 2018, the new DDI Bureau was billed as one of the “most innovative changes” his team was making. It was envisioned as a “one-stop shop” for technical and program design support that USAID missions would be able to tap into. “The thinking … of creating that bureau was really to be a technical hub for the entire agency, but just the size and the scale of the bureau is … organizationally impossible to manage,” Vega said in the briefing. One problem, according to Vega, is that there is now a mismatch between the structure of USAID’s DDI Bureau and its closest equivalent at the Department of State, the Bureau for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor — making coordination between the two difficult. With several other sectors — including environment, economic growth, and education — grouped together with democracy, human rights, and governance at USAID, the bureau has become overly siloed and its leadership overstretched, Vega said. “A lot of time we’re not speaking at the same level from a structural standpoint, or we have like Karl [Fickenscher], who leads our bureau for DDI, has to attend like seven different meetings across all of the different functions,” Vega said. As part of the adjusted structure, USAID plans to propose moving the Center of Excellence on Democracy, Human Rights and Governance and the Anti-Corruption Task Force from the current DDI Bureau to a Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance Bureau. That would more closely mirror the State Department’s structure. Under this proposal, the parts of the DDI Bureau that relate to environmental programming would be merged into the Bureau for Resilience and Food Security, Vega said. He added that the remaining pieces of the DDI Bureau that are designed to deliver technical expertise to other parts of USAID will be consolidated into a more focused hub. Those include priorities such as localization, private sector and faith-based engagement, gender, and technology and innovation. Reorganization fatigue Another component of this readjustment proposal would be the creation of a new Office of Development Policy, which Vega said would help USAID to engage in broader U.S. government policy processes, such as those run by the White House National Security Council. President Joe Biden elevated the position of USAID administrator to a permanent seat on the NSC. But Vega said that without a separate office, too much of that work has fallen to the Office of the Administrator. A new Office of Policy would combine some parts of the existing Bureau for Policy, Planning and Learning with some parts of the administrator’s “front office” in an effort to elevate long-term policy planning, Vega said. The proposal to create an Office of the Chief Economist would also elevate that position within the agency, Vega said. He noted that USAID has selected someone to fill that role, and they are currently in the security clearance process. What is unclear — even to those leading this reorganization — is whether U.S. lawmakers will sign up for another round of structural changes at an agency that is at the center of U.S. humanitarian response to Ukraine, the global food crisis, and other urgent challenges. “There’s some hesitancy from Congress to do any kind of reorganization no matter how limited it is or how necessary it is. … Some of the initial conversations [with lawmakers] have been — ‘we told the last administration that this structure wasn’t a good idea, but please don’t fix it,’ which I think is just kind of an interesting approach,” Vega said at the briefing. “Every administration since the Bush administration or earlier has done some level of reorganization. This is much more limited than previous efforts, and if I thought we could make it work, we would, but it’s not, and the more these things get entrenched the harder it is to do,” he said.