Aid Needs Help - By Raymond Offenheiser | Foreign Policy - 1 views
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confused and conflicting responsibilities, mandates and authorities, with no clear goals, and no shared vision.
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responsibility for U.S. aid is shared between 11 different government agencies, each with different agendas and sometimes conflicting priorities.
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United States collects several times the amount in tariffs than it provides in development assistance, essentially taxing the very trade U.S. leaders tout as the solution to poverty
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Cambodia, government officials typically find it easier to get information on aid resources from the Chinese government than from the U.S. government
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humanitarian aid efforts has been promised -- two separate USAID contractors recently discovered by chance they were doing virtually the same project, in the same town.
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But his. government is still trying to address this 21st-century challenge with a 20th-century toolkit.
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The Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 integrates 140 different goals and priorities and 400 directives, and is executed by at least 12 departments, 25 different agencies, and almost 60 government offices. Moreover, successive presidents and congresses have often chosen to work around the act, enacting more than 20 additional pieces of legislation to achieve their foreign-aid goals. As a result, the existing system's mission has become muddled and confused, cluttered with earmarks, special coordinators, and loopholes.