Q&A: Where does the US aid budget go after Trump?

Former President Donald Trump’s administration presided over a tumultuous four years for the United States foreign assistance budget. The White House repeatedly sought deep cuts for development, humanitarian, and global health programs, while officials that led them sought to recast America’s aid spending in ways that would appeal to Trump’s “America First” outlook. The U.S. Agency for International Development sparred with the Department of State over a proposed initiative to respond to pandemics, the White House repeatedly sought to reclaim money from aid agencies that U.S. lawmakers already appropriated, and yet USAID managed to undertake a significant internal reorganization with bipartisan support. One of the people at the center of many of those efforts was Jim Richardson, who served as USAID’s Transformation Task Team coordinator and then as director at the State Department’s Office of Foreign Assistance. Before that, Richardson served as chief of staff to Mike Pompeo when he was a member of Congress. Devex spoke to Richardson in the final days of the Trump administration about what he viewed as successes and challenges during a turbulent four years and where President Joe Biden’s administration might look for opportunities to build a more responsive and effective foreign assistance budget. “I think whenever you have a situation like this where things are becoming partisanized, it's in danger of becoming permanently partisanized. And that's a real concern of mine,” he said. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. You wanted to restore trust between the Department of State and USAID, which have often had a contentious relationship. The effort you oversaw to create a new pandemic response initiative — America’s Response to Outbreaks — seemed to exacerbate that tension. Were USAID’s concerns misguided? I think where you sit was where you stand on this issue. If I was at AID, I'd be paranoid too. There was talk of creating an undersecretary of global health. Ultimately, [then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said], “No, we're not going to do that.” … Both organizations have clear roles and responsibilities, and State wants to implement more assistance programs constantly. And this is why I think this honest broker of [the Office of Foreign Assistance] is so important to be able to say, “No, we’ve got to keep that at bay.” I could never get AID to truly understand that that's not what we were really trying to talk about. … I fear that they focused on a tier-two or tier-three issue and missed the larger point of what we were trying to accomplish. Again, if I was in their spot, I would probably have done the same thing. Over time, we ended up getting to a good place. AID ended up approving the ARO concept that was very clear that AID would continue to implement programs, that State would not do it, that all existing lines of effort at AID and [the Department of Health and Human Services] were continuing to be managed by USAID and HHS, that there was no desire to fold global health or humanitarian work into the State Department — by me. Now, granted, at the beginning of the administration, I think there was a real desire [to do that]. And that's why the joint redesign work was so important for us to do well, because that was ... what was actually at stake. So there is a lot of history there, and there's a lot of suspicion. I think if people were able to finally see the proposal that didn't actually get off the president's desk ... they would get it that this was not designed to be an assistance program. There is a level of discomfort in the U.S. development community about the idea of using foreign assistance to prevent migration to the United States. Is there a point at which you cross a line and make development assistance instrumental to things that are not actually development goals? When it comes to something like outflow migration, the reality is, it was the administration's top political objective in the region, and it was the sticking point for getting assistance to the countries, and it honestly was talked about as sort of a meta objective. And so it wasn't a far stretch that people talked about the idea that [our assistance] had an impact on outflow migration. We did have to connect the dots, and we did have to do some additional geotargeting and those types of things to have more of an impact. The reality is, our programs don't actually have to really change. We just have to change the way we talk about them. When you talk about development assistance, I really think about the [Development Assistance] account. ... That is supposed to be long-term, multiyear type of work. That 100% should be much more [about] helping countries become vibrant democracies and respect rule of law and have education systems that can educate their kids. And it's much less about our national security interests. [The Economic Support Fund] was really designed to be more on the national security side. The reality is Congress — in the way that they've approached the earmarks — they've really blurred the two lines so much. Obviously the administration advocated for the complete merger of the two accounts. The development community needs to grapple with: What's the right role for DA versus ESF? Should ESF be as earmarked as DA is? The reality is, it's earmarked about the same amount now, which is not historically normal but has really sort of gone that way. And so we're using ESF and DA almost interchangeably. This is what makes it so difficult for us to have these conversations about funding towards [other countries’] national interest and helping countries progress to the point of self-reliance, versus our national security interest. It's gotten more complicated because of the way that our budgets are being funded. Do you think bringing USAID’s budget and policy together is a goal that can be achieved, and more broadly, is part of what you're saying that Congress has too much authority over the specifics of USAID spending? Congress has full authority to do whatever it wants to do that the administration concurs with. I strongly support the new [Bureau for Policy, Resources, and Performance]. I hope Congress does approve it. I hope the next administration embraces it. But what that really would allow us to do is to have a better conversation with Congress about the true challenges facing countries around the world. [For example], does Malawi need more education money or more environment money? The challenge is that most of our missions around the world and our employees are almost conditioned to say, “Well, I always get X number of education dollars and X number of democracy dollars, so that's what I'm just going to budget around,” rather than asking the hard question of “Well, what does the country actually need?” This is why we redid all of our country strategies. One, we wanted to make it a lot shorter and more digestible and easier to use as a leadership tool. But for the first time, we really put budget numbers in there to say, “What do you actually need in order to achieve the results that you're talking about in your strategy?” And then you can have a conversation with the State Department, with OMB [the Office of Management and Budget], and with the [Capitol] Hill to be able to say, “Look, I don't care if you earmark me 100%, but I'm just telling you these are the actual needs and requirements.” It allows USAID to have a stronger devolvement voice to better articulate what are the true challenges. Otherwise, Congress is just going to continue to make decisions — and they've made great decisions, I'm not questioning that. But this really would allow the department to have a more informed conversation with the Congress and Congress to be more informed about what the true challenges are and what they think we can actually achieve. Considering the public opinion impacts of the Trump administration’s attempts to slash aid funding and put it in opposition to coronavirus relief, do you think the U.S. foreign assistance enterprise is in a better or worse position today than it was four years ago? That is a great question and one that I'll probably be much more comfortable answering [after the inauguration]. ... Let me generalize it so that I don't get prematurely fired. I think whenever you have a situation like this where things are becoming partisanized, it's in danger of becoming permanently partisanized. And that's a real concern of mine. We launched the “foreign assistance for impact” campaign in order to talk about the value [of and] translate foreign assistance into language that the administration, that policymakers in Congress, that the American people can more gravitate towards. And that's such an important effort, and I hope the next administration will continue that. ... Whenever you have an initiative or a concept that becomes partisan, it's hard to reverse course.