[US] Fight over Uncle Sam's wallet

From The International Herald Tribune

Andrew Natsios finished almost five years this past week as head of the United States' main foreign aid agency, and he's going out swinging.

Unusually for a political appointee in the Bush administration, in recent interviews and public remarks, Natsios, 56, has provided an insider's view of the way America deploys its billions of dollars in foreign aid and seems determined to make it plain that the system is deeply flawed.

He has described it as "constipated," splintered among too many federal agencies and tied in knots by myriad congressional directives and earmarks. He seems especially galled that policy is overly driven by domestic interest groups - including major charities - that get a large chunk of his agency's $14 billion budget.

"That's one of the greatest frustrations of the last five years, to see this stuff," he said at a recent forum in Washington. "It's just - it's intolerable."

His comments - combative, impolitic, impassioned - admirers and detractors say, are characteristic of a man who in his time as administrator of the United States Agency for International Development took on battles, both within and outside the Bush administration, on behalf of an agency whose standing and clout had declined over the years.

For him, these battles had personal resonance. As a boy, he went to his family's native Greece and saw rural deprivation. He returned a generation later with his wife and three children to visit his family's village and found prosperity had replaced poverty.

"Development works," he said. "Poverty is not permanent." But over the past quarter century, AID, created by President John F. Kennedy in 1961, has lost too much of its best talent - in agricultural sciences, public health and road engineering, among other discipline, he said. The number of career employees has shrunk from more than 3,800 in 1980 to just 2,200. Even as the agency's budget doubled to $14 billion on Natsios's watch, the career staff rose only 10 percent.

The agency itself was so beaten up when he took over in 2001, he said, that it was "almost like an abused child."

He says he takes pride in its achievements since then - helping rebuild Afghanistan and Iraq, assisting victims of famine and natural disasters and building new collaborative efforts with corporations and foundations on anti-poverty programs.

But Natsios, whose contrarian edge doubtless served him well as a Republican in the Democratic dominated Massachusetts legislature, said he now believed he could have more influence from outside government on the intensifying debate about how to make foreign aid more effective in reducing poverty and restoring stability to conflict-ridden countries where chaotic conditions, he said, threatened America's national security.

"I've done what I can do within the constraints of the position," he said, when asked in an interview in Washington why he had chosen to give up a job he had said he intended to keep through Bush's second term.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, whom he reported to as AID's administrator, has been exploring a possible reorganization of U.S. foreign aid programs. Natsios said he favored one idea the State Department has broached - having the AID administrator also serve as a deputy secretary of state in charge of foreign aid.

But he went further, saying all foreign aid should be consolidated in a cabinet level department, as the British have done, even as he acknowledged such a step was unlikely in a Republican administration. He traced the fragmentation of authority over foreign aid to the Clinton years, but in an interview did not raise the fact that President George W. Bush had contributed to it.

Bush's two most far-reaching foreign aid undertakings have been a $15 billion program to treat people with AIDS in Africa and the Caribbean, and the multibillion dollar Millennium Challenge Corporation, which provides big grants to relatively well-governed poor countries.

Both were established independent of AID, long perceived in Washington as an ineffective, slow-moving bureaucracy. When asked, Natsios did not hide his disappointment.

The big fight was for control of the HIV/AIDS program. Natsios recalled a pivotal meeting on the blueprint for it. A plan that favored the Department of Health and Human Services was sprung on him at the last minute, he said, and he spoke out against it. Bush was not happy.

"He stormed out of the room and he yelled at the staff," Natsios recalled. "He said, 'Don't come in here and tell me that AID has agreed to this when they haven't.' He ended the meeting. You know what it was? Certain people involved in this intrigue in the White House didn't believe I would actually say anything because the vice president was sitting in the room, the chief of staff was sitting in the room. They thought I would just sit there and say nothing. Well, those people got in trouble."

The president's AIDS initiative wound up being run by Randall Tobias, a retired pharmaceutical executive who was given the rank of ambassador and reported to Colin Powell, then secretary of state. Powell said in an interview that while Natsios may have wanted the program to stay in his own agency, he was a team player once the decision was made.

"We wanted it to be a special program of the State Department," Powell said. "Randy worked for me."

Patrick Cronin, who was then a senior administration official at AID, said the meeting with the president damaged Natsios within the administration - a view Natsios disputed.

"You have to make trade-offs and compromises and Andrew often refused to do that," said Cronin, now director of studies at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.

Powell said he believed Natsios leaves an improved agency. Natsios pointed to recent presidential initiatives - on malaria, bird flu and tsunami relief - that have gone to U.S. AID as evidence of the changed perception of the agency's competence.

Natsios's last big fight was on food aid. He convinced the administration to propose last year that the government be allowed to buy some food for starving Africans in Africa, rather than shipping almost all of it from the United States at huge expense.

But a so-called Iron Triangle of interests with deep financial stakes in the status quo - agribusiness, shipping and nonprofit groups - successfully squashed it in Congress.

As his departure crept closer, Natsios seemed less sure the administration would take it up again, but said he would not let the issue die. As he heads to academia as a professor at Georgetown University's school of foreign service, he said he will be freer to speak his mind.

"I'm going to continue to push it," he said, "whether the administration or the Congress or either party does, because it's the right issue."