USAID says it faces a staffing crisis. Is a hiring spree the answer?

The U.S. Agency for International Development has been telling anyone who cares to listen that the agency is facing a staffing crisis. Administrator Samantha Power told Congress two years ago that the agency needed to address its staffing shortfalls. The situation, officials have said, has now hit a crisis point. Last month, Power said that the agency’s workforce was “depleted” as she launched the new strategy that governs the bulk of how it spends its money. What’s at stake is USAID’s ability to deliver on its agenda, including the ambition of awarding 25% of its funding to local organizations by 2025, the process known as localization. “If we want to achieve the agency’s localization goals, goals around diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility, we have to deal with our staffing crisis,” Mark A. Walther, who heads the agency’s Office of Acquisition and Assistance, the department that shapes 85% of USAID funding, said last month. To respond to these challenges, Power said the agency will go on a hiring spree and give authority to some local staff to administer USAID’s contracts. The agency will also conduct an analysis to better understand how workload is distributed across its departments. More spending than hiring But questions have emerged as to how the agency got to this point and whether this is an issue of failing to recruit enough people. USAID said it had hired 182 of 195 contracting officer positions, with approximately 132 currently holding warrants, which refers to employees who have the authority to manage awards. The agency said one of the biggest issues that has contributed to the staffing crisis is hiring has failed to match the growth in spending on programs, meaning there aren’t enough people to process and manage all that money. In 2015, the agency committed to releasing $16 billion in funds. That number ballooned to $36.4 billion last year, with funding to support Ukraine in its war against Russia and the COVID-19 pandemic contributing to the rise in spending. While there has been a boost in funds for hiring in the last two years, it is not enough to meet the agency’s needs, Dennis Vega, Power’s chief of staff and one of her most senior advisers at USAID, told Devex. “If we want to achieve the agency’s localization goals, goals around diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility, we have to deal with our staffing crisis.” --— Mark Walther, director, USAID Office of Acquisition and Assistance “It's just not even close to the rates to keep up with the staffing [needs],” Vega said. “It just makes it very difficult when you're having to manage that big amount and you're not getting the help you need from a staffing standpoint.” Congressional approval The agency’s budget is divided into two parts: The program budget funds actual development work and humanitarian responses, while operating expenses cover the cost of doing that work, such as salaries and rent. But while lawmakers have regularly approved more money for the agency’s program budget, they have been less willing to appropriate commensurate increases for USAID’s operating expenses budget. As the agency looks to extract more money for operations, the key will be whether it can get legislators to approve the move. During a congressional hearing last month, Michele Sumilas, an assistant to the administrator for the Bureau for Policy, Planning and Learning, asked legislators to give USAID the authority to spend up to 15% of its program funds towards administrative and operational costs. The agency is able to do that for its work in Central America, and Sumilas asked that authority be extended to other regions of the world. “That will help us increase the number of staff more quickly, help us hire more foreign service national staff, which is a very big priority of the administrator,” she told lawmakers. Foreign service nationals are local staff who work for USAID in the country of the agency’s operations. Asked how the agency plans to wrangle this request at a time when government spending is at the center of debate in a divided government, with some Republican lawmakers proposing drastic cuts in foreign aid, Vega insisted that it was not a budgetary issue. “That's less of a funding issue. That's an authority issue,” he said. “That is something that we're looking to do, not because of the funding challenges that we're having, but as a way to better align programmatic increases with operational needs.” Vega explained that this would entail using funds that have been already approved for the agency but redirecting up to 15% of it towards operations. “In specific areas, those are things we are exploring not for the total of USAID, but similar to what we did with Centroamérica Locall where we knew we were going to do this localization piece and within that, carve out some authority to be able to do that,” Vega told Devex. The localization conundrum USAID is in the midst of a huge transformation as it tries to move towards its ambitious goal of transferring a quarter of its funding towards local organizations by 2025. That move is not without its challenges. The agency is trying to cut red regulatory tape to make it easier for new, local organizations to access its funds. But that may mean more work for its staff as they try to award smaller grants to more organizations, some development experts say. Vega acknowledged that USAID’s regulations have, in the past, acted as a hindrance to deliver on localization. He pointed to the new acquisition and assistance strategy that, for example, would have new applicants fill out concept notes instead of fully fledged applications, which would help ease the complexities of awards. Asked whether the thicket of regulations that agency staff have to navigate may have contributed to the crisis, Vega said, “I don't know and I haven't understood that, that is making people leave the agency.” He said that the complex regulatory burdens were making it harder for people to work on localization even if they believed in its mission. “To engage, really, with local partners when there are those barriers not only for the partners, but for you, it's very time-intensive with the structure that we have,” he told Devex. “That's part of why it feels like we don't have enough people because every individual action is so time-consuming and it takes the same amount of time to do a $5 million program as it takes to do a $100 million program.” More hiring will ease that toll, he said, and streamlining within the agency to lower barriers for local partners will also help make it easier for staff. When it comes to hiring, the agency is facing a challenge in the labor market that all employers are grappling with post-COVID-19 — workers have more choices and hiring managers have to compete extra hard to entice them. The agency, Vega said, was taking a holistic approach to recruitment to attract talent. USAID is working to build a more inclusive workforce and a culture of support for its employees that he hopes will retain current staff and help bring in new people. “Our attrition is not outpacing our hiring,” Vega insisted.