Thursday, 01.31.08

Taking a millennium

photo of the Millennium Falcon by flickr user ckirkman under a CC license

Bush's foreign aid legacy

Institutions born of so-called "bipartisan efforts" should be judged guilty until proven innocent, and the Millennium Challenge Corporation is a bipartisan baby.  Four years ago, Congress created the MCC to revolutionize foreign aid by parceling it out countries that showed progress in political and economic reform.  In his State of the Union address last Monday, George W. Bush praised this hulking sloth of a bureaucracy, quite rightly, as one of the legacies of his administration.

In those four years, it has paid out only about 3% of the $4.8-billion in its coffers, and critics whine about its having done too little to fulfill its revolutionary mandate.  Fair enough.  The MCC's mission deserves praise, and its sluggish execution careful study.  Aid experts have said that is complex programs take time to execute properly, and the countries they serve tend to be too corrupt for the accountability the US government demands.

Push forward, MCC.  The US should see this experiment to its end and continue to find ways to pass out money thoughtfully.  Since forty years of doing the same damned thing has yielded at best mixed results, it should try other experimental approaches with foreign aid, as well as alternatives to it.  If after a few more years of trying, the best it can do is mete and dole foreign aid with a teaspoon, then that will suggest finally that the government is no better at the aid business than it is at anything else.  It would be better to know that for sure, than just to strongly suspect it.
— Graeme Wood

Filed Under: Africa, bureaucracy, Bush, foreign aid, Latin America, Millennium Challenge Corporation, State of the Union