Global Policy Forum

Ever since Washington began giving foreign aid, administrations have been coming up with plans to reform it. Now it's Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's turn. She has put a single official, reporting directly to her, in charge of coordinating the State Department's multiple foreign aid programs. Duplicate efforts are a problem, but they are not the main problem, and Ms. Rice's proposed solution could easily end up cutting programs that fight disease, send children to school or provide clean water.

Such basic antipoverty work is what most Americans would like our foreign aid to do. We know how to do it, and success is easy to measure. Yet the vast majority of overseas aid goes elsewhere. Economic aid for strategic allies and military aid make up more than half of the foreign aid budget. About 30 countries on the front line of the war on terror receive aid, mainly to buy their governments' support. Development assistance is only 30 percent of the budget, and a lot of that goes into projects undertaken in the name of promoting economic reform, democracy and good government. These are worthy causes — but not ones that Washington is very good at doing. Nor is it easy to know what works.

Secretary Rice's reforms are likely to take even more money away from real development. An Agency for International Development director inside the State Department will be under tremendous political pressure to take money away from effective antipoverty programs, which have very small political constituencies, and divert it to the State Department's geopolitical goals, which have little to do with development.

The risk is particularly high because Secretary Rice has chosen the wrong man — Randall Tobias, now the head of President Bush's overseas anti-AIDS initiative — to be her new foreign-aid coordinator. Mr. Tobias, a former chief executive of a pharmaceutical company, had no development experience before taking the job as AIDS czar. He is a good manager, which is important. But he has also proved himself unable to resist pressure to abandon proven AIDS prevention strategies in favor of the abstinence programs supported by the religious right. Congress should pass a law mandating that a decent percentage of the foreign aid budget go to basic antipoverty efforts.

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