Politicizing Aid

Americans concerned about global hunger, disease, and deprivation have long argued that our country should take leadership in providing development assistance to impoverished populations abroad. After 9/11, even more citizens pointed to foreign aid as a means to create strong international ties, promote democratic institutions, and build a safer world. That the U.S. should catch up with European countries, which provide much larger infusions of foreign aid relative to the size of their economies, seemed like a reasonable and timely demand.

As it turns out, we might want to be careful what we wish for.

Currently, the Bush administration is overhauling the structures through which the U.S. provides such assistance, and there are reasons to fear that the changes will not be for the better. Under the banner of "transformative diplomacy," Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is promising an aid program that is more overtly politicized than ever--one tied less to the ethical imperatives of alleviating poverty than to the White House's short-term political and military objectives.

This month, the Senate has worked to confirm Randall Tobias as the new administrator of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Once promoted, Tobias, currently head of the White House's Office of Global AIDS, will also be the first Director of Foreign Assistance. This position is a deputy-level post at the State Department that will report directly to Secretary Rice.

The administration is also moving USAID inside the State Department. The diverse programs that disperse some $19 billion in foreign assistance each year will be consolidated under the new director's supervision. Streamlining bureaucracy can be a good thing, to be sure. But there are several problems with the changes.

The first is that Tobias's record makes him the wrong man for the job at USAID. Before joining the Bush administration, Tobias was a major Republican campaign contributor who served as CEO of the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly & Co. There, he worked to counter demands for better access to generic AIDS drugs in the developing world by lobbying for corporations' intellectual property rights.

As director of the Office of Global AIDS, Tobias received criticism from groups ranging from Planned Parenthood to Human Rights Watch for pushing a politically loaded, abstinence-based response to AIDS prevention in Africa. According to guidelines issued by Tobias's office, two-thirds of the prevention money channeled this year through the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief must be directed to abstinence and faithfulness programs. The guidelines, first reported by the Baltimore Sun in December, have been publicized by the Center for Health and Gender Equity, which campaigned against Tobias's appointment.

In a March 2004 Congressional hearing, Tobias went so far as to question the well-documented effectiveness of condoms in reducing transmission of HIV. He repeated his claims the following month, saying, "Statistics show that condoms have really not been very effective." Such actions led the New York Times to write an editorial about Tobias's promotion arguing that the ambassador "proved himself unable to resist pressure to abandon proven AIDS prevention strategies in favor of the abstinence programs supported by the religious right."

Tobias's propensity for injecting an ideological agenda into purportedly apolitical programs bodes ill for USAID. It may fit nicely, though, with the Bush administration's larger goals for restructuring our country's foreign assistance programs.

Since its creation during the Kennedy Administration, USAID has operated outside of direct State Department control. This allowed it to pursue long-term development programs that were not necessarily tied to the geopolitical priorities of any one president. In practice, of course, U.S. foreign assistance has always been politicized. During the Cold War, aid was expressly deployed as part of the fight against Soviet Communism. But the formal independence of USAID helped the institution value its staff members' expertise in development over their ideological fervor.