 I'm Dan Rondie. I hold the Shrier Chair here at CSIS. It's a real pleasure to have Congressman Ted Poe to talk about his Foreign Assistance Transparency and Effectiveness Act. It's won at 390 votes to zero. How many times have you heard of a foreign assistance act that has passed 390 votes to zero? He's tapped into something very deep and very important in the international assistance world. And so I think we're very fortunate to have him come speak and then we're gonna have a panel discussion after. We're gonna start the discussion now, the conversation now, because Congressman Poe may be called to to votes up on the hill at any moment. So I'm gonna ask Congressman Poe to come up. Congressman Poe from Texas, please come on up. Well thank you Dan. Appreciate it very much and I think appreciate all y'all being here just so it's clear because I can see that some of you are not from Texas. Y'all is singular. Therefore all y'all is plural and now you know. But I appreciate the chance to be here and I appreciate our panelists that are getting ready to give you some expertise in this issue of foreign assistance. When you mentioned the word phrase, foreign aid, a lot of Americans kind of bow their back, cross their arms, and they don't get warm fuzzies inside. They don't. It's been that way forever. It's not just a recent phenomenon. When I was a kid I would hear about foreign aid, believe it or not, and people would have a reaction that wasn't very good. And we would talk about how much money we spend in foreign aid, you know, and the big budget that we pass or the money we spend every year. Foreign assistance is just one percent. It's not much. And you don't get that reaction for for other things that government spends money on except foreign aid. And I don't know that we're gonna be able to change that perception by a lot of Americans or not. But we have to deal with that as really a reality for a lot of people. Last night I did a telephone town hall, several thousand people on the phone. We're talking about the Ukraine and and what we're trying to do to help in that situation. And the callers, a lot of them, were talking about just foreign aid, you know, not in favor of it. It's what I'm trying to say. So that's a reality that foreign assistance has to deal with that other types of aid, money that government spends, doesn't have to deal with for some reason. So one thing we can do to to promote the concept of a foreign assistance, I say we, all of us in this room, is to monitor the money that is spent by American taxpayers to see where it is spent. I've been working on this legislation for a while and it's this legislation is bipartisan. You hear a lot about the, you know, the gridlock, nothing, no one cooperates or anything else over in the Congress. But this is bipartisan legislation. And Representative Connolly and myself are the sponsors of the current legislation. It passed the last Congress in the House 390 to zero. I mean, there wasn't one no vote of anybody that voted. And from a far right to the far left, anybody, all 390 that voted voted for the legislation. Why isn't it the law? Well, when we sent it down the hallway to the Senate, the Senate has a rule that one member of the Senate can block legislation. And so that's what happened. In the last Congress we had one, one member exercise his ability to stop the legislation over in the Senate. So we introduced it again this Congress and we hope we can get a vote in the House and we can get the Senate to approve the legislation as well. But the whole concept is let's see how we're spending our money and evaluate it. Since we've been having foreign assistance, there hasn't really been much of an evaluation of how that money has been spent. What do you mean by that? Well, we need to monitor how the money goes to different NGOs. We need to know the good and the bad and the ugly. Those programs that are working, well let's support them. Those programs that aren't working, well maybe we ought to put our money somewhere else. Let's just find out and deal with the reality and the truth of foreign assistance and make the changes where we need to make the changes. And all that comes from just evaluation of the programs. I call it an audit. You can call it whatever you want to of foreign assistance. The nonprofit publish what you fund produces the only report really that looks at all the foreign aid organizations around the world and compares how transparent they are. In their latest study, the State Department of the United States was listed as poor or poor, whichever way you want to say it. Not so good. Here's why. The United States government has a website where it's supposed to post on the website foreign aid work and how our foreign aid is working. The State Department responsible for that hasn't posted on the website since 2010, four years. I mean the people who post on that what are they doing? You know I don't know but you would think that we would post what we're doing with foreign aid and that ruins our credibility. I'm talking about our credibility, our country's credibility with our citizens and of other countries we try to help is that we're not posting even the basics of how we're doing with foreign assistance. The State Department has posted what they intend to do in the future but there's no data from the State Department about how much of it is actually spent on a particular project in a particular nation. It even has less data posted than the secretive Department of Defense. I won't talk about the Department of Defense, it's not the place. But after four years of this website's existence only eight of the 22 federal agencies that are involved in foreign aid have posted any information at all. So why? That's my favorite question. Why? We just don't know. Don't know what the real answer is. They just hadn't got around to it. So we need to know how the money's being spent. We need to know. You need to know. Citizens need to know. NGOs need to know. What's working? What's not working? What's something we can improve on? And that's part of the reason why this legislation is being sponsored. Let's just have a look see, have a little more transparency in government. That's a word, phrase, you know, we've heard a lot about that. And frankly, we're getting a little pushback from the State Department on this type of legislation. And I ask my question, I ask the same question again. Well, why is that? Doesn't the State Department want to know what the State Department's doing with American money? With NGOs? NGOs that are working or maybe we should support them more than NGOs that aren't working. Why? I don't know. I can't give you the answer to that. There's some simple things that we can do. For example, those that are carrying out the projects shouldn't be really making the decision as to whether the project is working or not. A USAID country director in charge of all the programs in a given country is also in charge of the evaluations of those programs. That's like a student taking a test and the student grading their own paper. You know, that's what we're doing. Every student would make a hundred, except maybe some would not. But anyway, it doesn't make a lot of sense. Why don't we have somebody else evaluating the project to see if it's working so that we can get a true evaluation? And of course, we should figure out to have a baseline on the evaluation. In other words, evaluation means different things to different folks. You know, you can just say, well, looks like this is working to me. Oh, it's not so good. What's the baseline? Why has the evaluation done? What protocol is used in the evaluation of a project? And we need to know which projects are working, which ones are not working, which ones can be improved, and which ones are not going to be improved. Now, the Millennium Challenge Corporation is head of most federal agencies when it comes to evaluations that are rigorous evaluations. And even the MCC only completed its first impact evaluation in 2012. USAID, the State Department and others are even further behind and have yet to even do one. So, evaluation is important. It is important for all the reasons I think that we should be transparent about aid. You know, there is no group, there's no country on earth where the people are more giving than Americans. And one way Americans give is through foreign assistance. Let's make sure that that assistance is good assistance, that it's working. If it's not working, it doesn't help whoever we're trying to help. It sure doesn't help the taxpayer. So, it's evaluated. Let's be transparent about what we are doing when it comes to foreign assistance. So there's a lot of policies and the policies are not being implemented. Administration, this administration, every administration, since foreign aid started, has a lot of smart people in the foreign assistance business. And they know we can do it better and they need to give us the impact of evaluations and what those evaluations result in. There's a lot said about foreign assistance, that it's great and we're helping folks and all of that. But you know, people are cynical about foreign assistance as I started out. My grandfather used to say, when all is said and done, more is said than done. And that's really kind of true. We hear a lot of great things about foreign assistance, but let's look at it and make sure it's evaluated instead of just saying it's working that's evaluated and make sure that the right NGOs are getting that aid, that NGOs that are working, that we improve that whole concept with that particular NGO and those that are not working, they're not helping whoever we're trying to help. We don't use those folks. Evaluation, evaluation, evaluation. And thank you very much for being here and I want to thank our experts for being here as well. Foreign Aid Transparency Act. Let's pass it again. Thanks a lot. Thanks very much, Congressman. The Congressman's got to go. He's got he's got votes. He's got to vote. He's got some votes. So I think we're gonna we're gonna let him depart. Thank you very much, Congressman. Please join me in thanking Congressman Poe one more time. How many times have you heard of a bill in foreign assistance that gets 390 to zero? It's unheard of. So I think it's really quite an accomplishment. Let's get it passed and let's make it turn it into law. So we have a very interesting panel, I think, but before we do that, I just want to make a couple comments about Congressman Poe. He's a, you know, he is not out of develop the development community central casting as somebody who you would think of to push on this. And frankly, I think we needed somebody who was not from the development community central casting to push on this. He said he did a very sobering floor speech in 2011. If you can go on YouTube, it's a it's definitely a palette cleanser and very helpful and spoke for much of the rest of the country outside of Washington. We asked why we provide assistance to countries like China. And he said it's time to reconsider foreign aid. And he concretely channeled that those quiet that question into a whole series of constructive steps to review foreign assistance. It is currently too hard to see where $8 go and how well those dollars are spent. And Congressman Poe's proposed a bill, as I said, the Transparency and Accountability Act, which tapped into a large stream of concerns and changes in the broader world of foreign assistance. His timing couldn't have been better. Frankly, development, you know, his bill seeks to eliminate ineffective aid programs and bolster those that that around the government's efforts around monitoring evaluation. And hopefully at the same time, save the taxpayer money. He partnered with Congressman Jerry Connelly, as he mentioned, Democrat from Virginia and in the Senate version that Senator Marco Rubio and Ben Cardin took up his call. So he's really tapped into something on a bipartisan basis. As I said, 390 to zero in the 112th Congress. The bill calls for a website to centralize public access to all foreign assistance analysis data, project and program information to do so on a country by country basis. As he said, evaluation, evaluation, evaluation, everything on one place. His bill comes at a time when development dollars are and have been and will remain under scrutiny and pressure, not just in the US, but around the world. Those rare donor countries that are increasing assistance like the UK have only done so in the context of returns and effectiveness that they're getting. The UK government famously reviewed its multilateral investments in 2010 with those criteria in mind, plusing up some multilateral agencies keeping some multilateral agencies the same and cutting some entirely out. His bill also comes at a time when many middle income countries have space exploration programs like India or large dollar reserves like China or kicked out donors like Russia. Maybe I think that's definitely for the better in my opinion. I'm glad we're out of Russia. When donors around the world are having to rethink what it means to engage with developing countries in this context, I think it's a much more complicated world than sort of traditional donor and recipient. His bill comes at a time when there is a data revolution that makes information more easily available, but currently not yet available as the congressman said. It comes at a time of the IADI initiative, the aid transparency initiative, a voluntary multi-stakeholder initiative that seeks to improve transparency of aid in order to increase its effectiveness and tackling poverty. They're the folks that do publish what you fund. It comes after 10 years of the Paris Accra Busan Global Partnership. That's a quite a long title around aid effectiveness and development effectiveness and the concept of country ownership. So and the administration is doing what it can under existing law through its evaluation framework at aid through its foreign assistance dashboard as but there obviously lacks information as the congressman was saying from a number of agencies in terms of what's what's up and what's put out in the public domain. It's also at a time when the MCC is which was built around country ownership has been hard at work on a whole exercise around aid effectiveness and feeding that back into its programming. I'm really pleased that Sheila Hurling is here from MCC to talk about that. So with that, I'm going to ask my five panelists. You have their bios in front of you. I'm going to just slightly rearrange the check chairs here on the name plate, but I'm going to ask my friends to come up and I'm going to have Ed over here and I'm going to have Sheila here. This is like rearranging the deck chair. Now come on up. Okay. So I won't go into long biographical detail about each of the folks on this panel, but I think suffice to say that many of you know them and you have their bios in front of you. And I think provide interesting perspectives on this whole conversation around aid effectiveness and selling assistance and telling the assistance story. I think that's what brought a lot of you to this to this conversation invest your late afternoon here as well as the fact I think this is a very interesting group of panelists. So let me first start with my friend Ed Fox. So Ed, 390 to zero. How many times have you seen a foreign assistance bill get past 390 to zero? You were Assistant Secretary of State for Legifairs, you were Assistant Administrator at AID for Legislative and Public Affairs as well. So you've thought about this from a State Department perspective, you thought about this from an AID perspective, you were on the hill for a long time. So when you hear talk about what what what the congressman is tapping into but then talk about the how this how this plays on the hill. Thank you very much for having this panel and allowing me to be a part of it. I appreciate it. It's a very difficult subject which can go into 1000 directions and trying to keep it straight and narrow is going to be a bit bit tough. But one of the things that I found out about foreign assistance in general is trying to get everybody to agree what it is and what it's for and how it ought to be provided. There's 1000 different answers to those very questions. So when you're trying to monitor it and you're trying to sell it to somebody, you're also going to get a lot of different views. And what over time those things do change as the role of foreign aid has changed as an important part of our national security foreign policy, but also the role of Congress and the way they view it and the support that you have in the general community for these things changes over time. But the big issue for the State Department and USAID, I think for a long, long time is they don't have much of a constituency. And in this town, you need a constituency. I remember when I was at the State Department up on the hill trying to sell foreign assistance. My colleague at the Defense Department had a lot more tools than I did. We'd have a meeting to discuss how you did this. And they would bring a book about this big and they would open the book open and it would show congressional districts and states and it would show the number of soldiers from that area, the number of army installations, the number of manufacturers, the suppliers, the whole chain network of people, and also an estimate of how many jobs and how many tens of millions of dollars that went to that district from the defense budget. And then they would turn to me and say, how do you do it? And I say, well, I, you know, try to get you to give your hard earned taxpayers dollars to foreign ingrates. And that's about the way that it goes. But there is a serious problem there, the American public. And for a long time, the Congress does not have a very good sense of what the constituency elements of this are and why it should be important to them. I will say that over time, these things are changing partly because the importance of this work is changing, both in terms of the scientific aspects, we know more about what foreign aid doesn't do, maybe we're learning somewhat about what it does do. So that's an important thing. And as we've seen over the last decade, as foreign assistance has become paired with other aspects of our foreign national security, the three D's concept, the whole of government concept, those have pushed up the importance of foreign assistance in general, and have given it a stronger seat at the table. Having Secretary Gates and Secretary Clinton testify together on behalf of the foreign assistance budget was as equally surprising as a vote of 390 to nothing a few years ago. So those are all important aspects. A lot of this goes back into history as well. But I don't know if you want to just one more minute, go ahead. Okay, well, there's there's a lot to be said about this that the nature of Congress has changed over time to when I started getting involved in this on the foreign affairs committee staff in the 70s, we passed legislation. Every two years, we did an authorization bill. That was your key to power. That was your key to success. If you wanted to be relevant to the process, you had to pass legislation. And we did that. But then later on in the 70s, the country started to change. It was sort of the follow up to the Vietnam situation. It was sort of the follow up to Watergate. And there was a whole group of young members of Congress who said we're not going to wait any longer. We're not going to spend 30 years so I can be chairman of some committee. I want power now. And they broke down the internal workings of the Congress. It had nothing to do with us. It was across the board. They threw out old chairman throughout the seniority system. They demanded subcommittee chairman had more power. But by doing so, you defused the whole situation. And we got away from having as many bills for a variety of reasons. And pretty soon we had a situation where the only thing that was relevant were the appropriators. And for years, the appropriators became the dominant focus. And then guess what, even that blew up in the Congress for the last several years has been impossible to even get appropriations bills done. Now, that has nothing to do with foreign aid other than the fact that without the Congress, there is no legislation of any kind. So the concept of trying to improve and change from what we've learned has been pretty much impossible because the mechanism that we need to get it done does not work any longer. I remember just a couple three weeks ago, you had Gary Edson here. Gary is a friend of mine. We worked together at State and he was a senior White House aide in the Bush administration. And it was one of the primary movers behind MCC and behind the PEPFAR and things of that nature. And there was a big fight as to where this kind of authority ought to lie. You know, should we have one major source like USAID or are we going to have 100 sources? The answer was solved very quickly and it had nothing to do with either foreign aid or any of the institutions. It was the fact that the White House did not have the political capital to spend to go to the hill and fight it out to make it the right answer. So you create something new and you move around existing structures. And that's what we have today. Sadly, is a paralysis of the situation that doesn't allow us to set foreign aid aside and give a dispassionate discussion about whether it works or doesn't work or how to use it. We can't get to that point because the mechanisms will not allow us to go forward in the evolution of the necessary policy changes to meet the 21st century. Thanks a lot. Thank you very much. Ambassador Simon, thank you for being with us. You were at AID working on policy planning issues, I think as well, thinking about evaluation issues in a past life. You were at the White House. You were at the NSC. You also then were the number two person at OPIC and then you were ambassador of the African Union. So for the United States and now you have a you have a new life working on impact investing. So you think you've thought about impact and assistance at AID. You've thought about impact and how the US uses its its assistance through OPIC and then you've also you're selling impact now in your in your current age up. So when you when you hear this conversation and you hark back to the various hats you've worn, what what's your reaction to this? Well, thank you Dan first off for this convening this meeting for giving me the opportunity to speak in your wonderful new building or newish building and to see old friends and colleagues. And I guess I also want to thank you for giving Ed one more minute. I thought that was probably one of the most cogent explanations of our current dysfunction in this town. Amen. I think if more people could understand where this all came from, maybe we'd go some ways towards fixing it. And finally, I'd like to thank in abstentia Ted Poe for I think, you know, putting on a putting a piece of legislation and explaining it that maybe also goes some way towards solving our dysfunction by focusing on the concrete impacts that we're trying to achieve with impact investment with with with foreign development assistance. I'll get to impact investment in a moment. And I think it's a great thing to see the hill focusing on development aid as a whole, as opposed to its little constituent parts, which I think has been another part of our challenge in trying to create a coherent functional development policy for this country. I would say, though, that there's another challenge when you think about aid as one component of development policy. And I think it is important to recognize that our whole development policy is not just aid, that there's a whole lot of other pillars that we'll talk about in a second. But when you think about aid at its heart, aid involves the imposition of the donor's values on the recipient. We we we try in and address that issue in many ways. We can debate whether the donor's values, in fact, are in some way superior to those of the recipient. That debate's actually happening right now in Africa and places like Nigeria and Uganda. But the one thing we know is that one of the most important factors and we know this from the development literature and I think you can it's a consensus among our old colleagues at the Center for Global Development and places like that. The one thing that we know is that one of the greatest contributors factors to aid success is local ownership, is country ownership and local ownership. And the act of providing aid and imposing values on the recipient, that very act undermines local ownership. And a lot of the things that have happened over the last 10 years have been out there to try and address this fundamental flaw in development assistance. MCC was created in part to address this issue of a lack of local ownership. The Paris Declaration and the Busan Declaration, the Acre Accords, all those things are about trying to do this. The country coordinating committees that are part of the global fund. All these things are measures to that try and address this fundamental flaw. And I would argue that impact investing is also a measure that tries to do that. I think these things have varying degrees of success in doing so. Many of them try and do it from the top down. And what impact investing does is try and address it from the bottom up. So rather than creating a model where you have donor money coming in and says here's the donor money and to get this money either explicitly or implicitly, these are the things you have to do. You focus on a transaction, a market transaction. And a market transaction has the virtue of being something that all the parties enter into voluntarily. And an impact investment is a market transaction where the parties are not just interested in a financial return. They're also entering at least some of the parties, some of the parties may be purely interested in the financial return, but many of the parties, particularly the investors, are investing because they also want to see a social return. And those investors can be folks like the Gates Foundation or the Omidyar Network or the Soros Economic Development Fund. They can be folks like my former agency, the Overseas Private Investment Corporation or its sister development finance agencies like CDC or PRPARCO or FMO or IFC. They could be foundations that use program-related investment. I think in the future they could be places like sovereign wealth funds or pension funds that see a long-term value in investing in things that, A, meet the interests of their constituents and, B, provide a return that's somewhat diversified from the global market returns. But of course, part of the idea of impact investing is that you're investing where commercial money won't go. It's not that you're investing in things that are bad investments, but you're investing in a place or a sector that doesn't quite deliver the same risk-adjusted return that a commercial investment would be, otherwise a commercial investment would be there. So you have to find risk mitigants to basically make that investment more attractive. One of the risk minimins is investors who have a longer time view or more patient capital and are willing to accept some trade-off on financial return to get social return. But the other way that this investment can happen, and that's been true in many of the investments that we've worked in, is to have donors who basically take the risk that the investor can't. So you still have that underlying dynamic of a bunch of willing parties getting together to find this. You don't have a dynamic where it's one person's money and someone else who's supposed to implement and carry it out. And there's this discontinuity or this kind of dissidence between the values of the giver and the values of the recipient. Everyone who comes into an investment deal is seeking to get a return out of it. But the fundamental difference is that you take some of the risk that the investor cannot bear and you have development dollars underwrite that. Sometime that can be done through something like the Overseas Private Investment Corporation and the Development Finance Institutions, which statutorily are looking for a market rate return, but have a bit more patient capital than a lot of folks out there. Otherwise it can be done with grant dollars like the SME Challenge, the G8 SME Challenge that provided grant dollars to help buy down the risk. And sometimes it can be provided through things like the challenge funds that the British government pioneered and now the Canadian government and the U.S. government are doing. So I think I can stop there and just highlight that. That's one method to address this real challenge to aid effectiveness. And again, I think it's only one in many, but it's it is the fundamental challenge that has to be addressed to get the results that the congressman's legislation seeks to measure. Thank you. Thank you, John. Sheila Hurling, you're the Vice President for Policy and Evaluation at Malayum Challenge Corporation. You've got over 20 years of experience leading on issues of aid effectiveness from a variety of roles. You were Deputy Director of Development Policy at the Treasury Department. You were Director of the Rethinking Development Assistance Program at CGD. And we're very glad you're back in government. And the, you know, MCC has a 10-year track record of implementing a development model based on aid effectiveness principles. Last year you guys were ranked first among international donor agencies on the Aid Transparency Index. I pledge what you fund. I think too often we spent a lot of time criticizing aid agencies for needing to do more. I think MCC deserves a lot of credit for getting that recognition. I suspect you and your team have a lot to do with that, so congratulations. Can you talk about the lessons learned at MCC that can inform how we all think about having greater impact with fewer aid dollars and what is the impact that aid transparency can have on improving effectiveness? Yes. Thank you so much, Dan. And thanks for bringing forward this group of folks and this audience and a shout out as well to Congressman Poe for putting such an important issue into legislation and I'm hopeful for his success. I guess let me just start with what I think about MCC. When I think about MCC, I really think about it as an agency that is testing this idea that foreign assistance should be treated like a business. And when you're talking about 50 billion dollars a year spent by the U.S. government alone, multilaterally and bilaterally, there's really no excuse for not having a business-like approach to that. And so as the Congressman said, yes, there's something to foreign assistance being defended as doing good, but there's something better defending it about doing good smartly. And so that is a lot of the principles that have been learned over the last 50 years by the entire international community that has been put into practice through the MCC. And so what I can say about the biggest things we've learned and the biggest things we're trying to do in terms of putting a business-like approach to foreign assistance is really three things. Use evidence at every single major decision point. It's not always going to be great, but it's best available. Bring it to the table to inform your decisions. Be transparent on everything. It just increases the impact of what you do. Evaluate, evaluate, evaluate, to quote the Congressman again. And then fourth, make sure that you, when you take those lessons and learn those lessons, that you share them broadly and that you feed them back into your own business model and are constantly improving and adapting your business model. So from where the MCC sits, we've learned a lot about trying to bring those four things into practice. And they really are at every decision junction. So they are from the very start of what is your mission grounded in the evidence. So for the MCC, it's about if you're interested in poverty reduction, you have to accelerate growth. There's a lot of talk about inclusive growth and growth period, but it really for us is about there will not be poverty reduction without growth. That is grounded in literature. The second is deciding who you partner with. So as folks I think know, we have 20 indicators we look at across every single country. They are independent data sources not produced by us. You either pass or fail a scorecard and that helps ground the board's decisions on who you partner with. Then where do you invest? And this, we do a whole bunch of economic analysis to decide where are the binding constraints to growth in a country. So if growth is your mission, understand what if you attacked and removed a constraint to growth could accelerate growth in this country and thereby reduce poverty. So we have a whole bunch of analytics that we bring to the table again, evidence data to decide where to go in the country. And then we demand a return. So very much like a business, we demand an economic rate of return of greater than 10 percent on our investments. And we do that by basically saying for every dollar put you put in, you want to get at least a dollar out in increased household income in the beneficiaries that you're trying to help. And then evaluate. And here for two reasons, the one that most people focus on in which even the congressman focused on, which is accountability, accountability for taxpayer dollars, but accountability for sure for your partner countries and the citizens in your partner countries. Did you deliver what you promised? So that's the kind of pure audit type function of evaluation. What I would argue and wish is that there was much more attention placed to the learning piece of evaluation. Learning about what works, learning about what doesn't work, because I can guarantee you we're all human. We learn much more from our failures than we do from our successes. They sting more. They stick more. And therefore you don't want to do it again. You feed those things back in. And so to have the courage to get out and talk about what doesn't work and have the space to do that, which we certainly have had the space to do that. So it's a good sign, as Ed and others were saying, of a different environment within which to operate. And then in terms of just quickly what the administration is doing, you know, the congressman attacked the State Department and wonders what it's doing. Building this foreign assistance dashboard is not easy. It's not an excuse, but it is not easy. No administration has done this well, so it is a starting point. It will take some work and what is the State Department doing? Trying to get every agency's data good enough, comparable enough. Get the basic mechanics down. It will include them over time. It will. We've got another year to put it all in there. But also challenge each other by looking at who's doing it well and helping each other get there. There's also open government partnership. So I encourage you guys to focus on what's the U.S. open government partnership going to be. It's a big down payment on use of data, on transparency. So pay attention to that space. And then I think most of you are aware of the big focus on evaluation and selectivity in the president's first ever policy directive on development. So again, the core elements of a lot of the issues that are captured in the po-bill are also captured in this directive and guiding the administration's efforts forwards. So why don't I stop there? Let me just, Sheila, just taking advantage of your time. You just spend just another minute on how you think. Talk a little bit more about the open government partnership as well as can you talk about the IOT and publish what you fund stuff and how that's impacting your day job? Yes. So the open government partnership from the MCC will actually be our outward facing disclosure policy more or less. So very much a presumption of transparency, of publishing, everything you possibly can. And I think other agencies will also be encouraged to do that. And so that will be the spirit within which we embrace the open government partnership. On IOT, yes. Thank you for pointing out our number one ranking. It was really very, very hard earned and unexpected really when we looked at our competitors. It really is a bit easier for the MCC. We are a small agency. We are a new agency. So we were built in our DNA was this idea of using data of having quality data, of being transparent. We unlike almost every other US government agency were not retrofitting. We really weren't. We had a much easier play and much easier starting ground from which to understand the mechanics of that rating and figure out how to organize our data accordingly. Much like our country ownership spirit as well, we want to have data that is sure accessible to us. Accessible to the dashboard but really accessible to the countries so that their citizens can look at where money that's coming into their countries is spent and what are they getting for it? And so that really is our incentive but a lot of technical work, a lot more technical work than I ever would have thought I would have had to understand. And so hard hard work went into it and much harder work for other agencies. Thanks very much Sheila Porter. Thank you for being with us. You're a founding partner of the Kyle House group. You've got over a decade of experience working on the Hill including on foreign assistance and aid effectiveness in a number of ways. You helped start the consensus on development reform which I think both John Simon and I I think are both part of as well as you worked at the chamber and you also have helped start something called ALGD that I hope you'll also talk about as well. But I suspect in this context you know Congressman Poe quite well and I think that you've also been very helpful to Congressman Poe and his team and helping I think Luke Murray does there's a lot of the credit but I think he also got some outside help from some folks including yourself and so talk a little bit about how the context of where this bill is coming from you talked to a lot of private sector actors you talked a lot of folks in government you talked to a lot of folks in Washington. I think he tapped into a number of veins of support and I mean 390 to 0 I think speaks to it but Porter what's your take on this. Thank you very much Stan pleasure to be with you participate in this discussion. I will just focus as you said maybe a little bit more on kind of the legislative politics and the context and environment there. I think evaluating what Congressman Poe is doing and what he laid out in terms of the challenges but also the necessity for this type of legislation. It's helpful to understand it in a bit of a broader context in terms of what political environment created that bill the bill came into if you go back just the short term and we've heard the efforts around reform surely go back much further particularly considering the fact that you haven't had a reauthorization of the foreign assistance Act since the mid 80s but in the more recent time and my own personal experience doing advocacy around foreign assistance the 2000 2008 period really was a heyday you saw in terms of massive increases in funding new programs like the Millennium Challenge Corporation created the big PEPFAR HIV AIDS initiative the President's Malaria initiative so it was a time that Congress had a a very deep imprint working in a bipartisan way in terms of reshaping the focus and the resources and the role of U.S. foreign assistance in the world but if you look over the last 60 years so the beginning of the Obama administration coming in during the 2008 financial crisis much more limited budget environment that's all had a major impact on our foreign assistance strategy the way Congress is engaged in this and certainly a shift from a resource driven to maybe a bit more of a efficiency minded approach to and I think Congress imposed bills should be understood you know also in terms of some bills that proceeded and so you did have an effort going back to 2009 with Congressman Howard Berman to really take on this challenge of rewriting the Foreign Assistance Act and trying to create a more streamlined and accountable basically authorization for these programs one of the challenges you have with foreign assistance absence an annual foreign assistance act rewrite or even a consistent State Department authorization is you don't have that same level of accountability and review and congressional engagement that you would on the Department of Defense with their National Defense Authorization Act or other agencies and so I think it it creates more impetus than to look at measures like Congress impose on monitoring evaluation transparency but the bigger I mentioned the bigger bill in terms of foreign assistance act rewrite because unfortunately there really isn't at this time the political energy to get something of that size a 900 page bill through Congress and to get it done and so what you saw was then a more targeted approach to look at well what's the most important aspects of congressional oversight you need to see and I think the monitoring evaluation and transparency which Congress and Po decided to emphasize really are important in the sense that you saw foreign assistance budgets from 2000-2008 in some areas the world tripling increasing massively so it's a logical conversation then in the next phase to think about more performance measurement of those programs and some newer programs like the William Challenge Corporation and PEPFAR were created at a time where we have newer methods to evaluate Ashila was explaining but those don't necessarily translate across the 60-some odd departments, agencies, offices that do foreign assistance all of which should be participating in this transparency dashboard initiative over time it's cumbersome I think looking at it from the standpoint of the Ashila appropriately says the nature of the challenge is appropriate in terms of it takes time to get the state out there I would see the purpose of the Congress and its legislation is somewhat different which is not just to get it up there but to make it something that's not at the discretion of a single administration but to put it into a law and make it a long-term requirement that this is how we do our foreign assistance we report to Congress we report to the American people in terms of where the resources are going and distribute publicly the evaluation reports increasingly there being developed by the MCC by USAID and so I think in that respect it's not surprising Dan that you would see 390 votes to zero who would be against greater performance measurement of a much larger although now static foreign assistance budget and then similarly you mentioned on the business side you can look at it legislatively there's also legislation in a bill called the Economic Growth and Development Act that was introduced in bipartisan fashion in the last Congress to be introduced again in this Congress it takes more sort of the commercial perspective on how can the private sector better partner with U.S. development agencies it's an MCC does this and USAID and other agencies OPIC and XN Bank and others really exists really to do this in terms of looking at using finance and risk mitigation tools to bring commercial partners into markets to promote development and this Economic Growth and Development Act I think represents a greater engagement Dan that you've seen from the private sector of working together to try to find ways to utilize the smaller public sector investments 9% of the overall pie what's going into these least developed countries to help create a more transparent rule of law oriented environment where U.S. companies can play a larger role through their investments through their operations to promote long-term development and so I just mentioned that as an area where I think you'll increasingly see Congress when they they can't just roll out big increases in funds when they're thinking more about what to get out of these investments the multilateral side of things which you're more of an expert on than I am Dan I think you're going to see more and more interest on the private sector engaging Congress and Congress getting engaged with these multilateral development banks international financial institutions to ensure that it's serving broader U.S. interests and creating market conditions and investment conditions where companies can compete and I certainly would be someone who would advocate that that will lead to development occurring more quickly in a more sustainable fashion so I think all of those are elements that are at play in Congress now the challenge of getting this bill done remains you know so for all who are are here in representing different organizations like this 390 to 0 vote shouldn't create any sense that this is done it wasn't passed in the last in the last Congress even though there is a bipartisan bill on the Senate there's much work to be done that speaks to what Ed was talking about in terms of the current just nature of getting legislation through Congress and maybe some dysfunction but it's probably the best opportunity that exists this legislation to really in a long-term way carry forward some of these foreign assistance principles we're hearing about today so I'll leave it there just just Porter I think when I was saying earlier about having Ted Poe who maybe may not come to this conversation from sort of a traditional development standpoint was really important and then constructively channeling his concerns and criticisms in a very constructive and positive and effective way I think also this movement of the private sector that you've been a part of bring to the table and we've been very happy at CSIS to be supporting that as well could you just spend 30 seconds explaining what is ALGD to this group sure and it really is truly an outgrowth of a project that Dan leads at CSIS but the American leadership and global development coalition is a coalition of U.S. corporate leaders of large multinational corporations across sectors but also inclusive of partners in the development community with the focus of looking at what are some of the policy issues that are either directly in the foreign assistance space or a link to it from trade and investment policy areas issues like development and export finance authorities issues like trade facilitation and trade reference reform infrastructure policy all of which you can talk about in a development context or more of a commercial context because the linkages are very clear but I think what it represents Dan is again companies you know ranging from Chevron to GE to Land O'Lakes and across every sector trying to band together and look at the role of global development policy from the U.S. government as more of an opportunity for them to look at their philanthropic endeavors but also for them to advance their commercial interests I think having the private sector coming to this development conversation like you said changes the discussion similar to the way Ted Poe by coming to this conversation has helped bring a positive conversation and bring a broader coalition to the table. There's one last point which is that there was a comment that Congressman Poe made about you know the cost of foreign assistance and I think it's come up in context here and maybe even some pushback from the administration on costs to do effective you know evaluation and monitoring a program certainly comes with a financial cost I think it's worth considering what is the alternative in terms of wasteful spending and not just to say that these development programs wouldn't do good work on their own but without evaluation without the resources that are required as an example USAIDs operating expenses account you cannot do the type of valuation that Congressman Poe's calling for so I just think it's important to keep that this isn't just about slashing budgets it's about using resources to perform evaluation to approve performance. Let me Greg Adams your director of aid effectiveness at Oxfam America so you get up every morning and think about aid effectiveness so this is this is if it was me I'd be saying I pay my mortgage on this stuff you must pay your mortgage on this stuff so this is it's great to have you you direct Oxfam America's advocacy work on aid effectiveness in reform of U.S. foreign aid and development policy I think Oxfam America brings a very constructive perspective and a and a needed perspective to the conversation about assistance and and seeks to eliminate global poverty so I'm really glad you're here thanks for being here Greg. Thanks Dan and just to be clear because I do work for an NGO I barely pay my but it's it's really great to be a part of this panel and here speaking to you all about this subject I think it's important to take a step back and remember what the central challenge here that we're all focused on it's the fact that almost one in five people around the world are locked out of the current global economy global global system of governance and that creates a tremendous challenge to the security the prosperity and most importantly the values of the United States the American people get that this is this is what I think Congressman Poe is most channeling when he brings his his energy to this topic the American people get that that this is a very real challenge it's not that they question the challenge they very much support the idea that the government of the United States should be focused on this challenge they distrust that aid is the solution and they're right aid is not the solution to poverty people are the solution to poverty aid no more solves the poverty challenge than a shovel digs a ditch or a hammer builds a house you ultimately need people picking up those tools picking up the tool of aid and using it to solve their development challenges we're advocates for official development assistance at Oxfam but only if it can be delivered in a way that actually supports the energies of people who are working to change their own societies too often as a community we can find ourselves I think getting in our own way and I think you guys have have probably all experienced this you're I'm assuming you're here either because you've dedicated your life to to working on this challenge or you're here to get out of the cold on a day like this my guess is you're here because you're committed to the challenge and you probably have a story like mine my first story in development which I want to try to share with you briefly I was 22 years old 1995 dating myself a little bit as an election monitor in Haiti and I was in a rural area in the north and half midway through the afternoon a report came in that there was a problem with the lists in Grand Riviere so we hopped into the car we rushed over there I pull into the the voting place and start flipping through the lists up at the table and asking questions of the election judges and trying to figure out exactly what's going on at some point I can just feel the top of my head burning and I look up everything in this busy election place everyone had stopped and they were looking at me they were looking at me the one white face in this room and it dawned on me oh my god I'm now expected to fix whatever this challenge is and I can't and the next thought was even worse it was I don't even know that there's a problem here and what if I just created one by coming in here and acting officially in the midst of what could otherwise be a free and fair election that's stuck with me the burden of that has stuck with me and I'm sure many of you who have worked in the field have similar challenges like that the fear that what we are doing is actually substituting our wisdom for the wisdom of people who live in these communities who are not sitting still they're not sitting on their hands they themselves are getting up every day trying to solve these challenges in their communities the challenge for us here in the United States here in Washington is not how can we do it for them better it's how can we listen to their wisdom and augment it with some of our own in a way that supports their efforts to do it better I think the history of U.S. engagement on global development is is marked with examples of successes most importantly where we have stepped back and actively worked to not substitute Washington wisdom for wisdom in the field for the wisdom of the people who are actually fighting to change their own societies that is the spirit in which congressman pose bill is advanced and what makes it most so exciting to oxfam the idea that for that that we've actually got energy here behind putting information about what the United States is doing actually in the hands of people in the field who can use it to change their own societies information about what we're doing in terms of where the aid is going and information about what's working and what's not working and what the obstacles are that they can use to drive change in their own societies this has been the impetus behind the reforms of the bush administration when the mcc was originally created the reforms that the Obama administration has advanced in an effort to try to get more data out and try to have more decisions driven at the local level and it's again the thing that's driving congressman pose bill I want to give you just a couple examples because I've gotten back in the last month from Ghana and Cambodia of how I'm hoping that this is going to work in practice if we can get this bill passed and get more of this data out there I had the chance in Ghana to meet with local government officials who are trying to advance agricultural development in their area in the north of Ghana too often the budgets that they get from a craw end up being fictional by the time the tasking orders actually get down to their level how might greater transparency in U.S. agricultural investments actually provide them a reference point to demand more accountability from their government I had a chance to meet with some CSO officials in Cambodia who are very much concerned about the government's effort to in the latest national development plan define the role of civil society organizations only as service delivery vehicles not actually as advocates to hold their government accountable how might more information from the U.S. government about what programs are working and what programs are not working actually strengthen their hand as an intellectual partner as opposed to just a service delivery partner for the Cambodian government these are some of the ways that we can really advance not just prosperity and security but our values through our development policy and I'm really excited about Mr. Poe's effort to do this legislatively I think it's one of the most powerful actually democracy pieces of legislation we've seen in recent years and we're really enthusiastic to be supporting it so thanks thanks a lot Greg can I I wanted a couple of questions for the panel and then I'm going to open it up guy I think it's really tremendous that at five o'clock we've got such a great crowd and I think it speaks to the fact that people are held by this this compelling set of topics could I want to hear from Porter and from Ed about why is this why is something that passes 390 to zero why is this stopped so for Porter why don't I start with you I'm going to start then I'm going to ask Ed that question yeah I mean with this bill I think specifically Dan I mean there are a few pieces that have sort of been working across purposes with it I think that the administration is very committed to their to their policies on improving development the President's policy directive specific agencies like MCC and their impact evaluations I think they're like any other administration that would rather not have Congress mandating how they do these types of policies and so they're having consistent you know points in the process where the administration has has taken steps that have delayed you know moving this bill forward and I don't mean that in an overly critical way and certainly not in a partisan way but that I think in order to get this bill to this final conclusion point you know there will need to be a final sort of coming to terms with the key agencies the State Department in particular that this longer term objective needs to be achieved through statute and and yet I wouldn't it wouldn't be fair just to point the finger solely at the administration there have been challenges within Congress as well and within the leadership and as Congress imposed that on the Senate side of those who will look at aspects like the scoring of a bill like this going back to the cost of actually implementing monitoring evaluation that need to be overcome in Congress but with the vote of 390 to 0 and with more time now in this Congress than we had this bill showed up in the Senate mind you in December 30th basically a legislative session was done there was no time to address any opposition to it at that point now you have time and so I think you got to address these cost issues you got to ensure that the administration is on the same page if those two issues can be achieved there's no reason it can't get done okay Ed any other color commentary I'm not the specifics on on this you may I'm not going to ask you to say the specifics about this bill but perhaps given what you've just heard from Porter you just reflect a little bit more about why why is it so hard if it's 390 0 I can't understand why this is so hard to get passed well I think it reflects a little bit about the diversity of opinion as to what foreign assistance is all about the view from the Hill is is fairly black and white for most members they don't have the background of the experience they haven't had the interaction some of them have but most of them haven't and so when you talk about foreign assistance it is something that to them should be like an accounting practice every other program we have has this so why don't we have this well I look out in the audience here and I see a number of colleagues and former AID and other development experts and as I'm sure they can tell you it's one thing to take a piece of paper and say we want you to do X and give it to you but it's quite another to actually have it work in a manner that makes sense that is actually going to provide something useful at the end of the day and the cost factors involved I get a little upset when I see the reports come out from Segar and other places the special inspector generals not because I'm opposed to good governance and all that but I know that the people that are doing these evaluations perhaps do not understand that if you're going to build a school in Iowa it's a little different than building a school in Afghanistan and it's a little different on how you measure things it's a little different on how you account for things I'm not saying don't do it I'm just saying it's not black and white it isn't like a domestic program you have to understand most importantly that the primary purpose of these programs is to support the United States foreign policy and national security objectives sometimes those are not solely development objectives they are much broader than that and what this does is it drives the bureaucracy nuts the State Department opposes this I understand that because they're just saying we don't have enough people we don't have money to do what we're doing and now you're going to just throw this on top of us and you're not going to give us any guidelines you're going to make us develop this and no matter what we do it's not going to satisfy the audience so it's it's a discussion that needs to be had with people on the hill and the public in general because I don't think we really have the same view of what these issues are all about okay John and Sheila you've been in different government agencies and you've thought about measurement and evaluation and impact this bill talks about a five percent set aside for making allocations for resources how to how from your the various past lives that you have or the current life that you have how do the agencies that you've been and how do they think about measurement and evaluation and how they found the money for that because I think that I think that may be one of the issues here that's that's been raised is okay five percent that seems like five percent of 50 billion dollars if you whatever the number is that's a quote unquote a lot of money how how do how do different agencies think about this so maybe Sheila I'll start with you if you would because I obviously you you're doing this for for a day job right now well for the MCC we spend on average about four percent of our compacts on monitoring and evaluation our compacts are typically 350 to 700 million dollars so it's a it's a substantial amount and I think it so this is a good opportunity if you're a development consultant they should be coming to you now and it's true I mean 100 percent of our of our evaluations are independent they are not ours so yes there is an industry around this for sure but it's an industry that as Ed was saying does understand the business of development I'll take a little bit of issue with it's so different than than regular evaluation I don't think it is it's a it's a discipline it's a practice but knowing your client and in particular which is what everybody doesn't spend enough time on really spending the time to work through your program logic your program design your evaluations are only as good as your program designs and too often in the aid business the program designs are rushed for for many reasons but the program designs are rushed you think you can figure out later and then a lot of attention on the evaluation which frankly just can come out and tell you you didn't have a good program logic so therefore did you achieve the results you set out to maybe mixed or we don't know yet so part related to that is the experience of having patients so congressman poe referred to it sounded a bit of frustration on the time it's taken to for even agencies like the M.C.C. where it's been embedded in and in how we do business to get out the impact evaluations so there's the cost side of it there's the time side of it to do them right and there's also really importantly the timing piece of it which is do not do evaluations and rush them when you really if you're measuring impact you have to give it a couple years before you evaluate it so that you can see whether your program made any difference in particular if your end game is increased household incomes that's a little bit down the road so one of the biggest lessons that we're learning from the first round of our impact evaluations coming out is a lot of them are gonna say we don't know yet why because you did your evaluation too early why do we do our evaluation too early because we're getting pressure from congress from ourselves from others to get that stuff out there that stuff out there for accountability not for learning so back to my point on please can we start emphasizing the learning piece of this which is what I think we all should be should be much more focused on because that in some respects will enhance the accountability side I'm just Sheila let me this maybe not be totally a fair question for you but my sense is that the way MCC is funded it may be easier for MCC to set aside money for M&E than say AID where I'm gonna get into the weeds here but there's different accounts there's something called operating expense at AID and there's something called program funding not clear to me where you go for for measurement and evaluation monies at AID I don't think MCC is set up that way and I think Gary Edson and others when they were designing they said we're gonna do an end round around some of these this thicket of problems that aid and some of the other traditional aid agencies in the US government have to deal with so to some extent do you have are you blessed by that and are able to kind of dodge this this broader question of finding the monies for this that maybe other agencies don't have that have that luxury I think so I mean we embed we certainly Gary Edson and others did learn from the experience of USAID who I know would love to change the way that that they're constructed because it does stand in the way of doing due diligence right and so yes the MCC was constructed in a way that program funding can fund them any but we also do a whole lot of funding of due diligence including the setting up the results frameworks through our own administrative budget and so see you need to do a little bit of both John you were at aid and you were at OPIC and you thought a lot about this talk about talk about how how those different agencies think about think about impact and evaluation there are a number of strands that have just been mentioned I think are worth addressing before I get into sort of the way we focused on at OPIC and why I think there again there's a fundamental difference between the way you do evaluation and a measure impact in aid programs versus investment programs so first off to resolve perhaps this burgeoning dispute between Sheila and Ed on how easy it is to do impact evaluation in the field I think Sheila's right that doing the actual evaluation of counting and seeing what actually happened I mean that can be done the challenge is understanding the context which people are operating in that circumstance so I remember one of the first cigar criticisms of the coalition provisional authority in Iraq was that they took bags of money to the ministries and they handed out bags of money to people to pay them and it wasn't this horrible where was the accountability for that in that context that was probably the best thing you could do they identified who got the bags of money that everyone knew that person was and if people didn't get paid they knew who to blame and that people in that environment that was a great accountability metric and so I think it's not that it's tough to measure but you have to somehow infuse into this the context another aspect that I want to build on though in terms of what I'd said before I get to the difference between measuring impact and investment in aid is this fact that when you look at foreign aid the objectives of the different pockets of money are not as clearly articulated as they should be and so we have money that goes to places not for development purposes but purely for political purposes we have money that goes to places purely to keep people alive irregardless of whether they're you know they're an environment that has good governance or bad governance and then we have money like the MCC money that is very much tied to helping to improve the economic and governance policies that are there we do not explain that clearly to the world so if you evaluate money that was designed to help support a political ally or money that was designed to help people keep them alive by the same metric that you're measuring the MCC you're going to come up with a very different result than what's there and part of what I mean Ed referenced that we tried a bit of this foreign aid reform of moving boxes and we're going to have a grand scheme and then it boiled down to a very small scheme that still was heavily criticized some of you may know this is the F process but part of what was but part of what was behind that was this idea and I believe this should happen and the and the State Department should not be afraid of this of trying to be clear about what you're trying to accomplish with your dollars and rather than waiting for Congress to sort of impose that on you as a bureaucracy say here's the money that is going to go for this and we're going to have clear metrics about whether we accomplish that or that I mean this is what the MCC can do but very little the rest of governments can do here's the money that can go for that and we have clear metrics for that and at some level try and tie together if we can keep people alive in this country today maybe tomorrow we can start thinking about what we do about building the seeds of democracy and if we can keep this country in our column as an ally today maybe tomorrow we can talk about political reform and being clear about that unfortunately there's a real aversion within the bureaucracy to being as clear about that and I think ultimately it's self-defeating and I and one last last point on this sort of issue with the resources to measure aid no business would operate itself by saying I have a limited number of dollars to do monitoring to do results reporting to do the administrative functions they'll say what's the most effective way to do those things and that's how much they cost and that's what I should allocate the split between program and OE is lunacy and yet it really hinders the ability to do aid effectiveness and I guess this gets down to the point about why I think monitoring in aid programs and investment programs are fundamentally different we had a very hard number when we were at the overseas private investment corporation about whether a program was basically successful we could look at its profit and loss the things we funded were businesses that had P and L's and that they weren't all for-profit businesses some of them were NGOs some of them were for-profit businesses but they all had a P and L we made investments that had to be paid back and we could in the first instance is the money being paid back if no we have a problem if yes how's the business performing if yes there then what's happening with the development development impact and you have a 16 point matrix that looked at a whole series of things how the workers were treated how many jobs were created whether there was technology transfer what was the environmental impact to see what was happening now I would argue that was too many metrics I'd like to know the two or three things that this business was going to accomplish that would make a real difference in development and focus on those and ideally in an impact investment those things are fundamental to the success of the business so you know if the business is succeeding they're delivering healthcare to poor people or they're delivering education or they're solving a fundamental infrastructure problem if the business is failing then those things probably aren't happening and again that's why in my mind one of the ways that you solve this principal agent problem in development I mean where you where you one way is to have clear transparent data like the MCC does the other way is to have the incentives aligned so the people implementing you know are you know if they need to deliver more healthcare to make the profit to fund their own salaries and what they're going to do and that's where the difference comes in in terms of my mind in metrics between investment and aid okay so Greg I want you to talk about this this question about measurement evaluation but I wanted to hear from you I want to hear from Porter and I want to hear from Ed on the question of the a foreign assistance act rewrite do we need such a thing so jump jump in a two finger on this issue of M&E that Sheila and John have been talking about and then I want you to answer that question about do we need one and why right um you great thanks that I I do just want to emphasize something that John said that was really important it's impossible to get a meaningful evaluation result of a program if you're lying to yourself about what you're trying to accomplish and we do this too often in the United States government we're not clear on what we're either either intentionally unintentionally unclear about what we're actually trying to accomplish there's been some great work on this showing how this actually damages America abroad I think the most powerful stuff has been done by the Feinstein Center out of Tufts Michael Kleinman had a report a few years ago many of you probably remember it the money quote from that report was from a gentleman along the coast of Kenya outside of Mombasa who was quoted as saying the most powerful country in the world comes halfway around the planet to repair not build but to repair a latrine and they and they think that we don't expect that they want anything in return do they think we're stupid to the to to every person around the globe it's very transparent when we are taking a political or security purpose with our assistance now Oxfam does not argue in favor of aid for political purposes we argue in favor of aid politically sophisticated aid to fight the challenge of poverty but let's be realistic the United States does have an array of interests let's just be honest about every dollar we're spending and what standard it should be measured against when we measure it shifting the foreign assistance act rewrite this for me is the most powerful reason why you do need to do this this thorough rewrite of the foreign assistance act and it's to be clear and honest across this town at least as to what it is we are trying to accomplish with our development programs that is so confused at this point we get you know a few moments of clarity on this but we're still lacking this real political consensus about what the few aims of our development programming should be that's the real that's the real need for the foreign assistance act rewrite it's not simply to clean up the U.S. Code the you know for me the some of the most pernicious words in Washington are my general counsel tells me I have all the authorities I need of course State Department has the authorities to pursue any strategy they want of course you say it has the authorities to pursue almost any strategy they want it's not about what the law lets you do it's about what Congress and the American taxpayer trusts you to do and that for me is the fundamental missing piece of the failure to rewrite the foreign assistance actor at least get some some new authorizing language that would clarify the purpose of our development programs Porter I'm sort of torn and answering that because I think on the one hand you absolutely need it to have the type of oversight and to ensure that the strategy from Congress is respected that's guiding our foreign assistance is up to date and reflects you know changing dynamics on the ground on the world and priorities for the U.S. on the other hand I think politically it's it's such a challenge and so what do you do when you know you need it but you may not be able to have it in the near term and I think that bills like Congress impose bill but working the State Department authorization through Congress on a regular basis which ends up leading the conversations about other programs all can sort of move it towards the right direction I mean the fact that the William Challenge Corporation great agency was authorized originally through an appropriations bill speaks to this broken process in the sense that sort of authority should not rest within the appropriators as much as I've got many friends and appreciate what they do and they have an important role to play they shouldn't be making all the decisions and they're not designed to perform the proper oversight I mean think about parallel Dan of if the last time the National Defense Authorization Act had been passed was 1986 that would essentially mean Congress hadn't cared about what the Pentagon was doing since 1986 and that's exactly what you're dealing with here is basically a number of administrations conducting our foreign assistance without clear regular guidance from the U.S. Congress okay Ed so why you were you were around for the last as a child prodigy you were around you were involved with the 1986 you were child prodigy at the time and you were you were at the State Department if I recall correctly in terms of when that last partial rewrite was done in 1986 talk about do we need one and talk about why is that hard to do and how it relates to this conversation yes as a matter of fact I was leading the effort from the State Department on that legislation I didn't realize that it would be the last time they would do a comprehensive authorization bill but it was and yes I think we need a reauthorization we probably need an entire rewrite because the whole fundamental basis of the Act in 1961 which is what we're working off of has little relevance to the world we have today but the problem isn't with the community I think everybody in the community would like to see that I don't know whether we can agree on what that is but the problem is the process and I'm very pessimistic about the process producing a good document or even being able to get very far just because of things that have nothing to do with foreign assistance but have to do with the fundamental challenges that are going on on the Hill right now it ought to be noted that I think the defense authorization bill is the only authorization bill that has continuously been made through this because there constituency there once again I mentioned that fact and that constituency has been very tough to to keep that going we are making some progress outside we're finding other ways the QDDR of couple of years ago was a big step in that direction we're beginning to reevaluate internally how those things happen the defense department had to do that started with the defense authorization act in 47 or something like that which created the defense department and then Goldwater Nichols a little later in the 80s after they figured out that things weren't working well well we haven't had that it's not only a foreign assistance act which governs the programs but we also need a state department reauthorization act let's not forget that U.S. AID was founded by John Kennedy because there was a proliferation of parts of the U.S. government doing all kinds of things uncoordinated coming out of World War II all of the Marshall plan and all the other stuff was going on and he pulled it all together and said we needed to have a coordinated vision for going forward and that's U.S. AID so almost every day since U.S. AID was created we've now seen a proliferation of everybody who wants to play in the pool and if I recall Craig there were four agencies at the time and he thought that was too many I think there's now 21 yeah it's something like that it's it's it's maybe 60 utterly ridiculous I remember when MCC was being demated and we had even before that we had poor secretary Rice had to go to the hill and somebody asked her how much money do you have in your democracy programs and she couldn't answer the question because she didn't own all the democracy programs they were democracy programs going on here there and everywhere and that's not unique sadly it has gotten to the point where we don't have fundamental vision and guidance at the top and we don't have coordination that allows these things and I think that terribly affects effectiveness and I know it affects the Congress's view of whether this is a worthwhile program that's why it's so easy and matter of fact to slam foreign aid because it doesn't have a constituency it doesn't really affect as many people in the United States and therefore when I started in this there were members of Congress who said you know I don't even have a passport and they were proud of that or they said I've never voted for a foreign aid bill in my life and I never will I would get defeated well fortunately I think we've moved a little bit from there whether it's the global economy that has come home to roost or whether it's other factors but we have to find a way to do it I'm just not encouraged that it's going to be on the higher list of this administration or any administration I'm afraid the Congress is going to first have to figure out a way for it to reform itself a little bit not foreign aid but just in general the way that it approaches authorizations in general all right I want to open it up you've all been very patient thank you very much and I've got I want to take some questions so I see this woman here we're going to do this World Bank so I'm going to put the two or three questions together this woman here and let's see anybody else and this gentleman here we'll start and this woman here so these three this woman this woman and this gentleman these three okay and we'll get them all as a bunch and then we'll give the panels a chance to so name where you're from short question or comment great all right I'm Sally Paxton I'm the U.S. Representative to publish what you fund and want to thank you for putting this panel together and I'm glad I called on you obviously want to echo Congressman Poe's call for more transparency and to know where the money goes Sheila in her comments discussed both the effort and the reason that M.C.C. put such a premium on quality data publishing data and earned a very well deserved number one ranking from from us one of the questions that we hear very frequently and it's often from people who are charged with coming up with the data that needs to be published is is there really a demand for this information for this kind of detailed quality data is there a demand for it who is using this data and so I would I would be interested in hearing Sheila and others perspectives on the demand for quality information is there a demand at the country level is there a demand by the private sector who else is demanding this information and how do we go about both identifying the demand and making sure that we increase the demand so that we can all have better decision making great and this this woman here with the blue sweater or blue jacket hi I'm Julia Marvin from the U.S. Global Leadership Coalition I heard a mention of the QDDR and I was just wondering if you could speak a little bit more on that in terms of the future role if there would be any in the effort to you know increase transparency and evaluation efforts and the gentleman behind her hi I'm Steven Donaghy born in Northern Ireland has been working on the ground in Africa on democracy and human rights projects for a while my experience is that in very politically conflicted and post-conflict situations it effectiveness is really hard to to establish and to understand you know I think it comes down to some of this idea about the political will behind what you're going to do if you wrote a plan for the Northern Irish peace process that took 15 years and five presidential visits it wouldn't get anywhere but that's what it took to get done to do the stuff on the ground and I think Sheila's point is really good about evaluation being about what you learn to do but if we publish that that puts if we were accountable about what happened the people on the ground would be in danger they they would allow the government to contract what we're trying to do and this is in the human rights and democracy building and so I think you need to be very careful about the political context in which you publish publish information because it's one stage what you're going to do is give your opponents just simply sticks to beat your to break your back with you know if you publish if you publish what's happened to what hasn't what hasn't worked somebody and I I will say it was common sense that that wouldn't work it's not common sense in another area and to the context of the information in which we publish is as important as the information that we publish thank you I want to come back to I think it's a very interesting and nuanced point I think it's an interesting one I think that we we should address in this conversation so let me so is there a demand for this data I would like Sheila, Greg and Porter to answer that question the QDDR and its future all I'm hoping both Ed and John could take that on and then I want to take on this question of this issue of okay data and transparency is good in a lot of context but how about when we're given money to Iranian dissidents and I hope we are or given money to you know undermine the bad guys in other parts of the world and so that's a great idea to put that data out there but then you know if we're given some money to the good guys and they get you know they get disappeared in the middle of the night because of that is that such a good thing so the sort of like is there too can there be too much transparency in some context not all but in some right I think so I'm going to make that an open question for the end but let's start first with is there a demand and who's using the data Sheila Greg and Porter start with you Sheila so thank you and thank you Sally for your hard work and everything that you do I love I love your index not just because we were worried number one I loved it before then that's right is there a demand for the data there is certainly a demand for the data within the MCC it was an incredible inspiration for us to organize our own data so at your comment about Secretary Rice not being able to answer how much do we spend on democracy it was still even hard for us actually to pull that information together and so and we started with this right so so it was when you're building something and flying it at the same time these are always the things you don't you don't focus on first we were young enough to be able to group it in and increase the quality of our data and put dedicate resources to to an organizational structure of data that we thought made sense and so there's certainly an internal very internal demand for the data there's also an interagency demand for the data and so you'll see that through the foreign dashboard you don't see a lot of this but in through the foreign dashboard exercise there is a lot of learning that is going on on how to do this what it requires to do this and how to improve the quality of your data and we are helping others get there just as State Department is and so there is certainly a demand within the interagency for the data there's also been an interesting demand from the private sector for the data particularly groups like KPMG and others who do country risk assessments for their clients they have their own indices they were looking to us for how we do our country score card which is in some respects an integrity screen or a risk measurement screen and so they were looking to our data on how can we use it if you make it public we're going to grab it and if you make it machine readable in particular we're really going to grab it and so there was a lot of demand from the private sector which we keep getting and then from the country from the country I mean to be honest this is something that I sort of giggling that Sally asked me because I'm always asking her for me the biggest client that I want for this data is the countries themselves and to be quite honest there's not enough of it and it needs that demand has got to be there to keep agencies like ours and others focusing resources there and so we have some good examples Honduras for example is a is a great it's an interesting country that has a real open government approach right now and so they've done a lot of open budgeting they are publishing a lot of a lot of information in the government and they actually have been partnering with us on how to use the data and how to visualize the data so if it's machine readable you can you do a lot with visualization that just makes it more accessible I mean so they have been a standout partner for for me in this sense but to be quite honest it's not huge and it needs to be okay Greg just push the button sorry just picking up on on where Sheila left off and and you know we we also have been watching the Honduras example is is is is a great one but I don't I think we need to be patient that supply of data does not immediately create its own demand there is definitely demand out there but this is not magically going to going to transform development in the in the time it takes to to give a handshake or download an Excel spreadsheet the data is most useful in context and so until there's a certain critical mass of data out there so that a lot of the partners that we work with can actually use it to actually influence changes in policy and demand accountability we're we're going to see slow uptake we think on this we see examples where we've got partners and allies around the world who are already using the data they have to try to engage in accountability efforts but as long as that data continues to be as sparse as it currently is we're we're we're going to be looking at a slow build on this so I think we need to we need to keep doing what we're doing we need to keep talking and listening about how the data is being used but I don't I think the transparency movement is coming of age in that we are getting over the magical idea that transparency will automatically and immediately lead to accountability you first need people to be able to use that data to demand accountability they've got to have the capacity not just to understand it but to parse it for their own use and to actually employ it as a tool and that's going to take a little while longer in a lot of context to really develop on the question of safety of and is there is there such a thing as too much transparency absolutely we've heard in particular I remember somebody telling me an anecdote from Columbia where you had certain certain private sector voices who are demanding more transparency about some union efforts U.S. supported union efforts in Columbia they were basically trying to target union organizers using that information so there is definitely a risk at the far end of the spectrum that you could provide too much data that said in most contexts we are so far away from that at this point that there's there's a lot that we can do to provide additional useful data while still I think steering clear of those danger points we do absolutely need to take care and it comes again I think from building this policy around the idea of who is the end user and how do we give them what they need if that is your north star I think we're a lot safer and we've got a check on running the risk of disclosing information that could actually put a citizen or an activist actually in danger on the receiving end and just a quick word on the QDDR because I think that last process was a disappointment in many ways or two ways specifically the first was it was so overly focused on moving the boxes around on the org chart Washington loves an org chart and if there had been I think more energy on strategy and priority setting within that process it could have yielded a more useful product the other the other part of that is that Congress was not effectively involved in that that could have been an opportunity to get closer to this political grand bargain that could really build a consensus about what we were trying to achieve with our with our diplomacy and development programs but it was all done in-house and I think there's a chance with this process to take a different approach it's still not too late and I hope that much like the QDR which it was modeled on which is which has a direct line of connection to defense authorizations and defense appropriations there's a chance to to mesh the teeth on this and really make those gears work Thanks Greg Porter This is very briefly in terms of the need for information except a lot of different consumers and customers of that I think going back to where you started your event today with Congressman Poe and what Congress's needs are as it relates to data and information it's probably a sort of data that's far less technical in many respects but if you consider the what we discussed about the budget environment a flat budget environment any increases in one foreign assistance account are going to come at the expense of another and this is when Congress more than ever needs real-time effective data on performance and so I know that looks different across different types of programs and there may be examples there's a question on conflict zones and how do you evaluate performance in the near term but the practical reality is that Congress budgets every year it has to make these decisions whether or not the information is perfect and if there can be more readily available and constructive data to them and I just make one last point on the piggyback on the QDDR point I mean the QDDR remember this goes back to our authorization issue of foreign assistance and the State Department said the QDDR was created by Congress it was authorized through National Defense Authorization Act Congress exerts great will over the QDDR in terms of mandating what it includes the regularity of it you know the QDDR to the accredited administration was created by the executive branch as Greg said without that connection back to statutory authority and oversight over it its use is limited in my view okay John and then Ed yeah well first the question the QDDR I actually take a somewhat different view and if you take what Ed said about the likelihood of a foreign aid authorization bill and likelihood of anything in Congress I think the onus shifts to the administration to heal itself and to start to set a clear coherent strategy in place and as Greg said earlier not to lie to itself and be as clear as possible and I think a QDDR process is one of the ways that you could potentially do that now the ultimate product at its deficiencies but I think if you sort of read through the bureaucrates you do find some sense of priority sense setting some you know you have to read closely it's like you know Kremlin watchers who have to you know read in but you realize that some words are chosen and some words weren't I mean it's the same thing you do with a national security strategy national security strategy has to be read you know with a sort of translation thing right by and say ah that means that and oh let's look at the last one and see that they change this word to that word and so that means that I mean it's not the best way to be to get the clarity we want but it's a start and I do think over time if you start this process it will put pressure on the appropriators to react and to respond and say you laid out a coherent plan or a you you said these things did you actually and this is where pose bill you know kind of some pose bill really comes into into into play you said you'd do this this is what our evaluations show what you did why the differential what happened there so I do think it's it's a it's a good first step and I think it's a very much of a baby step and certainly there's a lot with the ultimate product to to uh to be unhappy with but I think it starts to the point about um you use the information that can ultimately redown to the to the detriment of people in the field I think there are two different questions here there's a question of do you collect and analyze the data and then do you disclose and um classification is it now a subject that's not in vogue and there's movements afoot that says we should be declassifying everything and I think this is a class example why that's not the case the government does classify a lot of things a lot obviously it shouldn't classify but I think you know we can make a reasonable judgment that once we have the data does are there negative effects if we disclose this or not and if there are you know there are people empowered within government to to to not do that I think but I think the important part about this is we don't want to get be in that situation I mean Greg I think you had it exactly right we cannot be lying to ourselves and the only way you don't lie to yourselves is if you you you look at that what's really happening and foot it with what you what you were hoping to happen so I do think it's a real concern I think there are lots of situations where you have to be careful about disclosure but that doesn't mean you don't get the data to begin with but if I could on that point it's about I mean there's the disclosure point but then there's also a whole process for anonymizing data right and so for example we have a disclosure review board which will take all of the data and there's so much data from baselines midline and end line surveys and anonymize it so you are protecting the identity most certainly of your human subjects before you release it you still release it and the data can still be hugely important for others outside to independently verify your results but you are protecting individuals who could most certainly be at harm for or just in you know just in the way of governments wanting to get more taxes right or something like that so not harm harm but unduly targeted and so there's a process for doing that which is one step better than not disclosing Ed I'm gonna ask you to comment on the QDR and then I want Sheila you're gonna have the last word so Ed thank you all three questions I think actually come together in a way that I want to make my comment about the QDR and that is the question of is there a demand for the data and what's the QDDR and what the last question of the gentleman back there how difficult it is I think we have to constantly remind ourselves and remind others that this thing is made up of a whole bunch of separate parts which are different from each other so that what you do in the humanitarian area is so much different than what you do in the development area what you do in the political area is different so that data sharing may make sense to people in the field or it may make sense to other people who wish to use it in some way or a form but the reason you're gonna do it is because the Congress wants you to provide this information so they can justify what you're doing and sometimes we get lost I think when we get involved in one of these avenues of the programs and believe that it's our mission to save the world it is not our mission to save the world the mission of all of this is to support the United States foreign policy and national security interests John Kennedy said that helping other countries develop is in our national security interests because if they don't do that then we have wars and then we have man-made disasters and famines so it is in our interest but let's not lose sight of the fact that the American public does four or five times more in transferring wealth to the developing world outside of government than we do in government so the limited amount of resources we have in government have to be viewed in the context of what they're designed for remittances colleges universities foundations private giving is way way more important 20 30 years ago it used to be that 80% of the aid flow or the dollar flows to the to the developing world came from official sources today only 20% come from official sources or even less so let's keep in mind what we're looking at and why and I do think that QDDR is a great first step it didn't accomplish everything they're not even implementing everything that they thought ought to be done but at least you got them for the first time to start this discussion what kind of an apparatus do we need and what is its purposes and what are its goals and you cannot leave the Congress out of that that is their job they're supposed to tell the State Department and AID what they want achieved and then state will go and do it not the other way around and I think this balance needs to be readjusted Sheila you have the last word I guess if I could just summarize a few things from this great panel Dan thanks for putting together such a good group and thank you guys for staying so long you know I guess the first is to make sure that you have a vision and I and I hope that this administration has proven that there is a vision in this development space and in particularly in the transparency and evaluation space and so look at the president's policy directive on development look at the QDDR for all of its awards I do align myself a lot with what Ed said on it's a start it was a first it's quadrennial for a reason we're in year four so you know again remember just like with the defense department this hopefully is something that is repeated and that there are lessons learned from the first time look at the open government partnership again a big down payment on that space look at the executive orders on open data and evaluation these are all things that yes the executive branch is doing hopefully there will be a time when there is greater partnership with congress I agree it would be ideal to get there the second is for whatever program you're doing make sure you have a definition for impact it doesn't have to be the same MCC's is household income it takes a long time to get there it doesn't have to be everybody's definition of impact but know what your definition of impact is and set out to monitor it so create very careful measurement tools to define your inputs to get to your outputs to get to your outcomes to get to your impact that is what I meant earlier when I said to Ed it's not different it's a discipline to get there you can have different definitions of impact but the model to evaluate it is a model that people know so assign the measures something John said make sure you measure what matters just measure what matters not 150 things that take up a lot of time to measure that actually are never used measure what matters and publish it so get it out in the public domain anonymize the data so you're protecting human human individuals but get it out there and have a aggressive outreach strategy for learning for yourself but learning for others and we hopefully just continuously leapfrog and enhance the space please join me in thanking the panel