Watchdog criticizes State Department foreign aid staffing

The amount of foreign assistance delivered directly by the State Department almost doubled between 2000 and 2006, but the department has not stepped up its efforts to make sure those funding programs are monitored by staff with the right skills and training, according to a new report from the Government Accountability Office.

"State workforce planners said they do not have a systematic way of identifying personnel working on foreign assistance unless it is obvious from their job title," auditors wrote in the report, released Monday.

State Department officials contested some of the report's criticisms. They said the agency has a number of efforts under way to better define the responsibilities and requirements of foreign aid positions, and cited the Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration as an example of State's oversight capabilities.

But auditors said seven of the 10 bureaus they examined lacked a clear way to track which employees are working on foreign aid programs. As a result, State cannot tell if it needs to step up training and recruiting, GAO found (GAO-07-1153).

The Population, Refugees and Migration unit and the International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Bureau were exceptions to this situation, the report found, because they have staff devoted directly to their assistance funds. The population bureau has 22 full-time Foreign Service officers stationed at 18 overseas posts, while the international narcotics bureau has 35 Foreign Service officers and 428 Foreign Service nationals in 47 locations.

The Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs provided GAO with information on its assistance staffing in 15 countries. The remaining bureaus told investigators that the information they provided was the result of their "best guesses."

A number of factors contributed to staffing confusion, according to GAO.

The report noted that because "State bureaus and offices manage foreign assistance programs in support of their foreign policy objectives . . . it is difficult to separate the foreign assistance activities from State's diplomatic function." Rather than tracking staffers by their function, the department tracks their work by objective, further blurring the lines between aid and diplomatic staffers.

In addition, State's aid programs are overseen by two different sets of officials, which have different educational requirements, and are appointed by different authorities.

Grants officers are responsible for the legal aspects of foreign aid awards; they determine who should receive grants, draft aid agreements and amend them. Grants officer representatives are in charge of management and oversight of those awards.

While grants officers must have a bachelor's degree and complete 56 hours of grants-management training, a directive governing designation of grants officer representatives doesn't spell out what training and education they should have.

Even though grants officers must approve aid awards, GAO found that they "do not have control over whether or not the grants officer representatives are qualified, because the bureau for which the assistance award is made generally appoints the grants officer representative when it submits the award package."

As the size of State's aid programs has grown, grant officer representatives chosen by the grant recipients have assumed more management responsibility, grants officers told GAO.

"They said they receive a number of program and financial reports from the grantees at the same time and consequently do not have enough time to thoroughly review them," the report said. "They said that they rely on the grants officer representatives . . . to review the reports and notify them of problems."

Francisco Zamora, vice president of the American Foreign Service Association for the U.S. Agency for International Development, said that training issues were only symptomatic of the problems caused by State's incursion into USAID's territory.

"The State Department is not and should not function as a development agency," he said. "USAID has that role and has been doing a good job for almost 50 years. State personnel are not trained in development. Their people are mostly economic and political officers who just happen to be assigned certain roles for which they are not prepared."

State Department officials said the Population, Refugees and Migration bureau had a far more integrated model of oversight that proved that State could deliver aid effectively and oversee it vigorously.

"In addition to field travel," they told GAO, "PRM staff conduct ongoing desk monitoring by reviewing program and financial reports, triangulating information about field conditions with awardees' reporting, communicating regularly with awardees to address concerns and provide guidance on program progress, meeting with key stakeholders, and consulting independent or third-party information sources."

The State Department's comments also cited an ongoing effort by its Bureau of Human Resources to classify positions with major foreign aid responsibilities so skills gaps could be tracked more easily, but suggested that more resources might be necessary to address GAO's concerns.

"To the extent resources permit, the department will consider further training of grants personnel and grants management," the department wrote. "Greater centralization of the grants business management function and increased staffing levels, in conjunction with adequate travel funding to ensure adequate oversight of grantees, is a key component for successful grants management."

But the AFSA's Zamora disagreed with the idea that centralization would fix inherent problems with the State Department's foreign aid programs.

"Very few people understand who is responsible for making important policy and implementation decisions," he said. "The fragmentation has resulted in confusion about who is in charge, and hyper-centralization of [decision-making] is paralyzing implementation."