Posted at 4:37 PM ET, 11/17/2010

Catnip for policy wonks: Clinton's QDDR

By Glenn Kessler
Checkpoint Washington

Washington Post

Nothing delights denizens of Washington more than proposals for new boxes on organizational
charts. So the Obama administration's long-awaited Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development
Review should be a huge seller.

Even the name bespeaks Important Thinking. The project was the brainchild of Secretary of
State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who fashioned it after the Pentagon's quadrennial review of the
nation's military posture. She believed that a scheduled review of development aid -- and how to
integrate it with U.S. diplomatic efforts -- was necessary to keep development efforts fresh.
(Never mind that her predecessor, Condoleezza Rice, had done her own review of foreign aid,
which resulted in grabbing some power away from USAID.)

The administration sent a draft summary to Congress Wednesday, and it is filled with ideas that
aid specialists and members of Congress can chew over for months. New assistant secretaries!
New titles! New missions! New hires! But, of course, no price tag was attached.

Time to dig in.

UPDATE, 6 PM:

First reaction, from Todd Shelton, InterAction's senior director of policy:

"The tension inherent in the draft is the same one that has been playing out over the past 14
months of the QDDR process -- namely how to 'Build USAID as the World's Premier
Development Agency' on the one hand, and integrate both the diplomatic and development
components into what is being called "civilian power" on the other. As
InterAction said in our response to Secretary Clinton's recent essay in Foreign Affairs magazine,
we agree that diplomacy and development should be coordinated and complement one another,
but the two should not be confused as the same thing."

"From a development expert perspective, the QDDR PowerPoint appears to give with one hand
but take away with the other. It talks about building USAID's capacity in a variety of ways. For
example, it formally recognizes the new budget office at USAID, but then makes clear its
recommendations will be subject to review and final approval by the Deputy Secretary of State.
USAID also will have the lead in formulating the development component of "integrated
strategies" referred to in the draft but the chief of mission at an embassy will have the final say
on the strategy, which forms the basis for budget requests. The draft calls for expanding
USAID's Office of Transition Initiatives while reinforcing that it must report in-country to the
embassy chief of mission."