Trump complicates USAID's already 'broken' budget process

WASHINGTON — The two seed drill machines were meant to help an Ebola-hit region of Sierra Leone increase rice yields by giving farmers the tools to plant crops more efficiently. Along with other equipment, the agricultural machinery was purchased to help accelerate local food production and improve nutrition outcomes during a five-year, U.S.-funded project and beyond. “If the cuts don’t happen, is there still harm? And the answer was yes.” --— Sally Paxton, U.S. representative, Publish What You Fund But the people of the rural area of Tonkolili never benefited from $500,000 in already purchased machinery after the U.S. Agency for International Development cut the program 10 months after it began. Unable to continue planned training for the community, implementing partner Catholic Relief Services gave one seed drill machine to an organization working in another part of Sierra Leone. “The other one we were asked to leave with the community, and as far as I know, it’s still sitting in the corner of the field going rusty. It was a colossal waste of taxpayers’ money,” said Paul Emes, Sierra Leone country director for CRS. “It could have been easily used and maintained if we’d have time to train people.” The project was canceled in 2017, when U.S. President Donald Trump released a White House budget request dramatically reducing or zeroing out key U.S foreign assistance accounts. In the first year of the administration, it wasn’t yet clear how Congress would react to the cuts — which were proposed for a fourth time Monday. The community now feels a cautious optimism that Congress will continue to fund U.S. leadership in the global arena, as it has done the last three years by disregarding Trump’s cuts in appropriations bills. But aid advocates say the first year’s cuts still reverberate. The continued threat of drastic budget slashes, combined with a slow congressional appropriations process, are damaging U.S credibility with partners and wasting administrative time for staff who must adapt programs to budget requests that will never become law. ‘Absolutely horrified’ Sierra Leone, which ranks 181 out of the 187 countries on the human development index, had lingering food security issues following the Ebola outbreak that began in 2014. The $16.9 million project, part of the U.S. food security initiative Feed the Future, was designed to provide 27,000 people in Tonkolili with agricultural training and technology to plant new crops and improve community nutrition — before it was abruptly canceled. CRS was told the termination was due to anticipated budget cuts. “The new American administration came in and announced drastic budget reductions,” Emes said. “The USAID mission here in Freetown reacted to those in the only way they felt they could — although I don’t think they liked it very much. But they were told the budget was being cut, so they cut programs in order to save money, which I guess they didn’t have a lot of choice in.” Emes said the program was designed to help increase domestic production in Sierra Leone, which still imports $200 million in rice despite having adequate rain to generate more of the staple crop at home. He said that in less than a year since it began in 2016, the program reached 18,000 people, reduced slash-and-burn practices, and increased yields for farmers by up to four times on the same land. Without funding to complete the program, CRS had to withdraw from the community. Emes said the potential for a five-year program like Feed the Future in a country like Sierra Leone, which had a 30% decline in agricultural production after Ebola, “was enormous.” “To have it cut off at 10 months was going to be devastating. It was appalling for the participants for the communities involved. It was acutely embarrassing for our relationships with governments,” Emes said. “The [local and national] governments of Sierra Leone were absolutely horrified — largely because there’s so little foreign aid coming into this country that the government had thought, ‘OK, fine, Tonkolili is being dealt with by Feed the Future and the U.S. government, so we’ll put all of our interventions and steer other donors to other places.’” This damaged the nutritional status and agricultural progress of the region, Emes said, as well as relationships between CRS and the community it was serving. To capitalize on progress made during the project before USAID stopped its support, CRS mobilized some of its own funds to finish off irrigation channels that were under construction. A USAID spokesperson told Devex that Feed the Future funding for Sierra Leone "helped facilitate economic opportunities in the agriculture sector" after the Ebola epidemic, but fiscal year 2018 funding was "phased out" from the country to align with the Global Food Security Strategy. Bilateral funding for Guinea was also stopped. ‘The budget process has broken’ Although the Trump administration is a drastic case, adjusting program allocations to budget proposals has become an increasingly more complex process for USAID over the years, according to Susan Reichle. She worked at the agency for 25 years, including as assistant to the administrator for policy, planning, and learning. “Missions prepare years in advance for budget requests … That goes up through USAID Washington for each country, what [amount of money] they will need,” Reichle said. “Then it takes a very long time, obviously, before it's ultimately reviewed and approved.” This means that missions are often juggling three budgets at a time, Reichle said: ongoing programming with prior years’ money, new money just received from the previous fiscal year, and planning for the next fiscal year’s request. Before the White House makes its public budget announcement, bureaus in Washington tell missions what the request will be for each country. That number is reached after a back-and-forth between Washington and the missions, according to Michael Casella, former chief of the international economic affairs branch at the Office of Management and Budget. He said that OMB sends out guidance stipulating the maximum amount that agencies should ask for in their request, generally based on the prior year’s budget. If that guidance includes a certain percentage in cuts, missions then engage in negotiations aimed at getting back some of the money that may be eliminated. “Before this administration, there were cases, but it was pretty rare and it was usually in one area, where the administration might say, ‘We want you to eliminate a request for this account,’” Casella said. “When you have a 30% cut, it’s really dead on arrival … Where do you even start?” This takes up staff time, Reichle said, noting that additional delays by Congress in passing appropriations bills add further budgetary gymnastics for staffers in determining how projects will be impacted by a decrease or delay in funding. “It’s tremendously time-consuming. The time that the average officer in the field spends trying to figure out, ‘If we don’t get the money by this point, what can we stop doing, what can we slow down, and then start up again?’ — it impacts everything from not only just the goals of that program, but staff that you’re able to keep on,” Reichle said. “The budget process has broken.” Ceding ground to China Even though the development community now knows the Trump administration budget released at the beginning of every year has not — and likely will not — become law at proposed levels, damage is still done by suggesting such drastic reductions, according to research conducted by Publish What You Fund. The organization conducted four country case studies in 2018 to examine the impact of Trump’s proposed cuts and demonstrate how better data on foreign assistance can improve the budget process. “Sometimes, there’s an assumption that — just because the proposed cuts don’t go through — that everything’s fine,” said Sally Paxton, U.S. representative with Publish What You Fund. “If the cuts don’t happen, is there still harm? And the answer was yes.” Paxton said host partner governments and other donors told the organization’s researchers that USAID’s credibility is hurt by the proposed cuts. They were also told by partners in Cambodia, where the U.S. had proposed cutting agricultural funding, that were the U.S. to stop foreign assistance there, the gap would not remain for long. “China is going to be the one that fills the vacuum,” Paxton said. “To me, if we're worried about the role of China and the way it provides its money, then I just don’t know why — when we were running what were viewed by the other donors as very successful programs in Cambodia … What is the strategy behind making these cuts?”