USAID has a new bureau with a very long name. What will it do?

For years, the U.S. Agency for International Development has tried to pull its policy, strategy, and budget operations back under one roof. It’s the approach USAID had for most of its history — that is, before a political back-and-forth shifted budget oversight to the State Department. But now, a new Bureau for Planning, Learning and Resource Management is taking center stage — setting USAID policies and aligning the budgets to implement them. “Ultimately, budget is policy, and how you decide to spend your money is important,” Michele Sumilas, the head of the new bureau, told Devex. Before Sumilas’ bureau was created, the agency’s work on budget and policy operated in separate lanes. The former Bureau for Policy, Planning and Learning shaped USAID’s programs and policies; and the Office of Budget and Resource Management linked programs and operating expenses. Now, the merger means those operations have come together, leaving Sumilas’ bureau in its wake. That team is also working in partnership with the Office of Policy, another new, independent team that was launched late last year. Under the leadership of Cindy Huang, the office is helping USAID track, analyze, and respond to trends in U.S. foreign policy, and develop recommendations to support USAID initiatives across the world. While the Bureau for Planning and Resource Management creates and implements internal USAID policy, Huang’s office examines what she calls “megatrends,” the wide-ranging issues shaping foreign policy across the world. Sumilas and Huang hope these different yet complementary approaches will help bring the agency to a new, more streamlined level — and even for those who were initially worried about the carve-out of a separate policy office, the early indications are that Sumilas and Huang’s strong relationship is making it work. “Michele and her team are really leading on the policies that govern program requirements, whether it’s the gender policy or the localization policy,” said Huang. “We’re looking at policy in terms of these cross-cutting, really hard-to-resolve policy issues — and how they fit into national security and foreign policy thinking.” Many hope that the blending of policy and budget will provide a long-missing link in USAID’s development progress. Susan Reichle, who held leadership positions at the agency for more than two decades, said that in the past, those gaps have led to weak implementation. In 2022, for example, USAID issued a robust Youth in Development policy — but due to the lack of funding, there was little chance to push its programs forward. “There weren’t really the resources to deliver on a lot of the aspirations of that policy,” Reichle said. “It’s such an important step that finally, policy planning and budget are together.” The new bureau, in a nutshell The Bureau for Planning, Learning and Resource Management is one of four central bureaus within USAID, equipped with a seven-pronged team. Within the bureau, there are offices centered on programs, budgeting, policy implementation, donor relations, strategic planning, evaluation, and the office of the assistant to the administrator — the last of which wraps the work of all the others together. “With the budget coming together with strategy, planning, and policy work, our hope and expectation is that we will better be able to use all our tools in the bureau to make decisions about where funding is allocated,” said Sumilas. “So, in a scenario where we’d have to make trade-offs based on crises in the world or decisions by Congress, we will be able to pull in the tools of our monitoring and evaluation office to look at which programs are working and not working, and think further about how resources are used.” By creating USAID policies, matching them with the right resources, and spearheading their implementation, the bureau is working to advance the agency’s policies, such as those relating to gender, humanitarian response strategies, and locally led development. That cohesion will make the world of a difference, said George Ingram, a former deputy assistant administrator at USAID — both for informing the agency’s leadership and ensuring USAID work is aligned. “You now have budget and policy in one office, reporting to the same assistant administrator,” said Ingram, who is now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “That means policy and budget people are going to a lot of the same staff meetings, getting to know each other better, and knowing where they get each other’s information and resources from. There’s much better integration of the two when they’re in the same locale.” Another priority of the bureau is working with other donors. That means raising and leveraging resources, engaging with other bilateral and multilateral agencies, and working with foundations to push USAID’s aims further. That also relates back to policy planning — if there is a shortfall in funding, Sumilas’ office can analyze how other resources should be provided to a country, consistent with a program’s strategy or policy priorities. “This is an opportunity to really see development diplomacy in action,” Sumilas said. “Take our locally led development agenda. There are foundations that are really interested in helping us pursue that strategy in particular countries — and when we know the budget and strategy in those countries, we can work with those foundations to think about how they can support local organizations to help us reach our targets.” And, Sumilas added, the bureau also leads on efforts that are big priorities for the administration and connected to “core countries,” such as the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment or the Global Fragility Act. Sumilas and her team are also responsible for creating the internal guidance on how to implement those policies — and then evaluating how they’re implemented by the agency’s technical partners. “[We help missions understand] how these programs should be implemented, and [how] to put budget, strategy, and projects behind these priorities,” Sumilas told Devex. “We really are trying to work with our missions to say, how do you bring all these tools together and make it all sing?” The role of the Office of Policy Meanwhile, the 22-person Office of Policy is focusing on a different set of priorities: those set outside of USAID. Through three functions — policy planning, coordination, and engagement — Huang’s team is looking at the trends rippling across U.S. foreign policy, and analyzing how they could inform USAID’s work. That includes tracking development trends, managing task teams on specific policy issues, and boosting support for USAID initiatives, both within the United States government and beyond. “USAID has these superpowers that we want to elevate and inject into the policy dialogue,” said Huang, who described four: deep technical expertise, connections with local communities, medium- to long-term time horizons, and a focus on humanity. “We can really bring those superpowers into the policy dialogue, especially to the extent that there’s a greater overlap between development and foreign policy priorities.” And that is no small task. Huang’s team is tracking topics from artificial intelligence to debt distress to economic resilience, and how each of these topics — and many more — affect development. One example, Huang explained, is the office’s work with migration. “Remittances to low- and middle-income countries is about three times the volume of official development assistance, and in many years, it has exceeded foreign direct investment as well,” said Huang. “We need a strategy on how to leverage that for development impact. And to do that, our task team is expanding to have a global remit.” Huang described how some of the United States’ key allies, like Korea and Japan, have aging populations and a declining workforce. At the same time, there are countries — especially across Latin America — where people are seeking safe, legal migration for employment. A task team is now thinking through whether those two contexts can come together, and whether the U.S. can work with both sides of the remittance funnel to elevate economic development. Working together Though both the new bureau and the new office focus on policy, the definition of policy in each context is slightly different. Whereas Sumilas’ team leads on policies that govern USAID — such as the agency’s localization ambitions — Huang’s team looks at how USAID can fit into what she calls “the grand U.S. strategy.” “So, it’s like a two-step,” Sumilas said. “You have to have the idea and the theory, and then you need to think about how you actually put it into practice.” To demonstrate that point, Sumilas pointed to an example: the work both teams are undergoing with USAID’s priorities on economic resilience. While the Office of Policy is laying out the parameters of that work in response to macroeconomic trends — and doing so in partnership with the World Bank, U.S. Treasury, and USAID’s Office of the Chief Economist — the Bureau of Planning, Learning and Resource Management is focusing on translating policy thinking into the projects within specific countries, and the allocation of money to make such activities come to life. “These are really investments in the agency’s ability, and the agency’s capacity and infrastructure, to be a strong player in the space going forward,” said Sumilas.