WASHINGTON (Reuters) An influential senator warned the official US overseas aid agency: come down to earth with the impoverished people or see your funding cut.
Senator Patrick Leahy said he was concerned that the US Agency for International Development (USAID) had become “distant from the trenches,” sometimes more eager to deal with foreign elites than the suffering masses who had no voice.
Leahy’s opinion matters because he chairs the Senate appropriations subcommittee that oversees the budget for USAID, which the Obama administration hopes to transform into an important tool to boost the US image abroad.
“There is a disturbing detachment between some USAID employees at missions overseas who spend much of their time in comfortable offices behind imposing security barriers, living in relative high style — and the impoverished people they are there to help,” Leahy told the agency’s administrator, Rajiv Shah.
“USAID needs to change its culture, and change the way it does business, if it wants the kind of money you are asking for,” Leahy said during a hearing on USAID’s budget request, which is roughly $21 billion for the fiscal year starting in October.
Shah told reporters after the hearing that he saw Leahy’s remarks as “comments of support” from someone who wanted to help make USAID “the primary development agency around the world.”
USAID has thousands of workers in 82 countries, and “the vast majority of our people are both hugely committed and make tremendous personal sacrifices,” Shah said. Some, as in Afghanistan, were “taking huge personal risks.”
But in some environments they did not have the security they needed to go out and review projects, contributing to a feeling of distance from the work. “In some situations that places us behind the fence when we don’t want to be there.”