 So let me start off by introducing the panel. As I say, I'll be very brief. Clay Lowry has been in any number of positions. He was at the Treasury Department. He was the, I guess midwife would be a word for the Millennium Challenge Corporation. He worked at the Millennium Challenge Corporation. He worked at the NSC. He's seen government inside and out for a number of years. Don Steinberg was ambassador to Angola. He and the chairman went to the same high school, which I did not know. Don has had a long, and a long distinguished career at AID, at the NSC, at the State Department. I would go on, but I promised myself I'd be brief. Howard Berman, congressman from California. He was chairman. He was known as one of the most thoughtful advocates of foreign aid reform over the last couple of decades, and I'm sure he's got a few ideas about that he'd like to share with us. Thelma Aske was at the House Ways and Means Committee. She worked at the International Trade Commission. I knew her, frankly, when she was the head of the U.S. Trade and Development Agency. So with that, I'm going to start. I thought, in deference to the Congress, because as a former appropriation staffer, I always believe you pay deference to chairman. I thought I'd start with the chairman and then to the ambassador, and then to the assistant secretary, and then Madam President Thelma will do cleanup, and then we'll go into the questions. So, Mr. Chairman. Well, only a former staffer in Congress would keep calling somebody, Mr. Chairman, years after they've cheered anything, but I appreciate it. It's good to be with you, Mr. Ambassador. Mr. Secretary. Well, the issue of foreign aid reform, basically, well, I'll tell you my own story in terms of involvement with it. Obviously, I'd been on the Foreign Affairs Committee in the House since I came to Congress in 1982, and I watched a lot of it get eviscerated during the 90s, and now we're standing the efforts of the administration. And also, I sat there and watched the tendency, and I probably to some extent was part of that tendency for members of Congress and any appropriation staff who were seen and noticed that if there's a dollar there, we should target it for the program we want. And so, a foreign aid act that had been passed in 1961 became loaded down with all kinds of language and all kinds of earmarking and restrictions, and at the same time, we were watching the primary agency responsible for delivering this. One, lose some level of its independence during the reforms of the 1990s, and secondly, and maybe most importantly, in terms of its own functioning, sort of get just, what's the word really, eviscerated in terms of many of the functions with everything being delegated out and in terms of staffing and expertise within really being hurt. And a few folks came to me when I became chairman in early 2008, right at the beginning with Tom Lantos had passed away and I became the acting chairman and then chairman. And sort of, in addition to everything else you're gonna be doing on that committee, you ought to think about seriously getting into a significant congressional led effort to reform the foreign assistance program. And there are many different arguments, and but we, the problem, of course, in Congress is getting anybody to think about something that doesn't, is even either a direct response to an immediate crisis, or that has some level of rewards in a very short timeframe. And so by and large, it's definitely a project for somebody with a relatively safe district. And, but we took it on. And George Ingram, who many of you know is one of the people first sort of persuaded me this was something worth doing and by the beginning of 2009 we decided to really get serious about it and I was blessed with having someone introduce me to Diana O'Bombe who came over to work and sort of led that project and we spent a great deal of time going through different aspects of the issues and where was, how could foreign assistance be improved? How could you increase transparency? How can you delegate to the level of expertise at the country, at the mission level, the notion of the priorities rather than everything being directed from Washington and to some extent from a Congress that really wasn't that aware of the facts on the ground in any particular region and really didn't have a basis for making all those determinations. And of course, we spent about two years getting that together and then proceeded to my party to lose control of the Congress and thereby we lost, by and large you need somebody to champion this effort and my replacement, a very nice woman who I worked on many issues with but she had absolutely no interest in that legislative effort or continuing it. And while there are some in Congress who have wanted to pick it up but what we got to see in terms of what was going on at USAID and with its new leadership was a decision to start rebuilding the capacity at the agency to embrace a lot of their forms and we had been talking about as well, concepts of country ownership, transparency, accountability, a bit of some decentralization and some focus and some initiatives that, and also building in sort of a policy planning and budget function within USAID which made it a much more credible agency without having to decide to what extent it has to, the administrator reports to the secretary of state or acts on its own. A lot of things have started to happen, I think, in the development process that is starting to get this reform going and moving. There are all kinds of tensions and conflicts. I've had a chance to witness some of them myself in terms of the contractors and the USAID and different issues. But legislatively, in terms of broad foreign aid reform, things have really, I mean, I can't predict any likelihood that there is going to be some serious effort underway soon to do that. But what I've seen is within the executive branch a real interest and then for certain aspects of reform like food assistance, for example, people starting to grapple with some of the absurdity of and waste dealt because of the way we have provided foreign assistance reform. Some of that is, most of that, maybe a huge percentage of it is as a result of congressional decisions made for the goals that had nothing to do with the goal of food assistance or development assistance generally but rather much more local and parochial kinds of interests. But in those areas and some other areas, the creation of the Millennium Challenge Corporation was a wonderful example where almost because it had an opportunity to be selective because USAID was the larger development assistance agency, they ended up incorporating standards that made tremendous sense and developed a lot of credibility and by and large, I can't say I have anywhere near the knowledge or the ability now to know exactly what's going on but before I left Congress, we had a sense there that this was a program that was working in the countries that it was operating in with the compats, with the requirements to get sort of a sense of what the people of the country felt were their highest priorities and the way it was structured with a great amount of country ownership, those programs were doing well. I could go on a great deal of time at this point but I don't think, I think I'll, we'll get more into some of these later on. Absolutely, thank you. Don. It will sound as if we actually planned this panel, even though I confess to you that we didn't all that much but I wanna pick up on what the congressman said regarding how it looked from the administration standpoint. I think you're aware that I was the deputy administrator from USAID for the first three years of the Obama administration and we did indeed find an agency that had been eviscerated and it's a perfect word for it. It was an agency that did not have, as you said, a policy planning bureau. It did not have a budget office that had been transferred over to F. It had seen its staff decrease by 40% over the course of the last 15 years even as budgets were going up and so what that meant is that you couldn't do the active programming in the field, the monitoring and evaluation, the project development that most of us who look at USAID think that's why we went into the organization. We also, as the congressman said, had lost a lot of the initiatives to MCC and PEPFAR and other institutions that had been created and I arrived just as the QDDR, that famous document was being concluded and I remember talking with some members of Congress who said, well this is great because the QDDR is finally gonna bring AID under the State Department and then I talked with others who said, this is great because this is finally gonna be the Declaration of Independence for AID and Raj Shah refers to me as the Mariana Rivera of the QDDR process because I was the closer and what we recognized was that it was not possible to do either of those things but what was possible to do is to reassert the importance of the agency in a wide variety of places and let me say that this wasn't some philosophic decision, this was a reflection of what the world had become in the development arena. It was a recognition, for example, that US government assistants per se just wasn't as important as it used to be as other donors came online as I used to say the United States government provided about $30 billion worth of development assistance when I was there, still less than 1% of our national budget as you all know but private Americans gave $40 billion through charitable contributions, through churches, through foundations, $100 billion came from remittances that American residents sent to their countries. A trillion dollars came in private investment in those countries and seven trillion dollars came in domestic resource mobilization, the taxes that were generated in those countries themselves and so the notion that AID was driving the development process was simply not valid. It had to identify a new role and that role was a partner, a facilitator setting the agenda, the capacity to take some risks that the private sector wasn't going to take or that host countries weren't gonna take. Capacity building, creation of local ownership, all of those concepts and it was so clear that you could not do that with an eviscerated agency and I think Secretary Clinton, Cheryl Mills, the whole team over at AID at the State Department got it, I think the power of our friends on the hill was very helpful in that regard and I think what that has resulted in is a variety of changes and I wanna go through just very quickly some of those changes and I apologize for taking some time here. The first is that we recognize that we couldn't be all things to all people, that we had to focus, concentrate and apply selectivity to what we were doing and what that led to was an investment in depth and scale in areas of food security under the Feed the Future program, the Global Health Initiative, Power Africa and a few other programs and this was sensitive because you had constituencies for other groups who were saying why aren't we special and you had to go back and say we're gonna continue to invest in those areas but the bottom line is if we're gonna have depth and scale and impact we have to focus and concentrate. A key part of that was having the president announce in January of 2013 a single organizing principle for all of this and that was to eliminate extreme poverty around the world within 20 years and if you go back and look at the language in his State of the Union address, it is remarkable. It's also remarkable because Jim Kim subsequently bought onto it, Ban Ki-moon subsequently bought onto it and I would argue that the whole post-2015 SDG argument has bought onto it and that's an exciting principle. The third thing that happened in that period was without anybody noticing it a dramatic expansion of assistance to the poorest of the poor. From the year 2000 to the year basically now we've seen a 10-fold increase in assistance from the United States to the poorest of the poor countries those LLDCs and that's been a recognition that you go where the poverty is and yes there is poverty in middle income countries around the world we recognize that but you had to start addressing those diseases and those maladies and those other factors that relate to extreme poverty. A fourth point which the Congressman referred to is that we started to apply effective development principles aid effectiveness was now the name of the game. If you didn't have that many resources you did have to look at accountability and transparency and sustainability. You had to look at procurement or reform, country ownership you had to put programs on budget in developing countries and you sure had to expand your efforts at monitoring and evaluation to be able to show results and to be able to demonstrate to American taxpayers that this isn't a fool's errand that we actually are achieving results. I think it was important that Millennium Challenge Corporation and PEPFAR truly got their feet on the ground and helped change the model of how we do development assistance through accountability and results and multi-year compacts. And the final element which I really do wanna stress because this is the place where I've spent most of my career is in the notion that development has to be inclusive. Development does not mean six and eight and 10% growth rates over a period of time. What it means is a sustainability to development it means incorporation of previously marginalized groups not just as recipients or beneficiaries of development but using their full talents. It means a new focus on gender and women's empowerment it needs a new focus on people with disabilities the LGBT community, ethnic and religious minorities indigenous populations and anyone who says oh those groups why are you specializing or focusing on them? The truth is groups I just mentioned make up 75% of the populations in the country that we're talking about and unless you're fully using their talents, abilities, ground truth and resources you're blowing the development process and I think there was a recognition at AID as throughout the entire US government and I would indeed give great credit to our friends on the hill in this regard as well that they allowed us the space to expand all of our programming in that area and I'd love to talk about that later but I think I'll conclude there. Great, thank you. Clay. Thank you very much for having me. So my expertise is a little different. I actually come much more from international finance and economics background not from a development assistance background. So I worked a lot on the multilateral development banks a lot on debt relief through the 90s as well as 2000s and then on the Millennium Challenge Corporation which is actually sort of the unusual part for me. When you look at the 150 account those things add up to less than 10% of the 150 account proposal from the president. So why am I even here? But, and so I thought about this for a bit and like what could I do that would be helpful to you all who probably know a lot more about development type of issues than I do. And I thought about what are I think some of the big dilemmas that are out there. And in the end I think I'm gonna end up in a slightly more negative place than I think my fellow panelists. So the dilemmas of development that I remember hearing arguments about were should we be thinking about the selectivity of projects or in the selectivity of countries, projects I mean like should we be doing more in infrastructure or agriculture or versus should we be doing much more of a needs-based approach or should we be looking at basic human needs type of issues. Another one was how important really are results in evaluation. Obviously I worked at FCC that was a big, big deal. And I think the multilateral development banks have sometimes done a good job on this and sometimes haven't. But does it hinder you from doing good sound experimentation and innovation in development. And I think that that's an important argument that should continue in the development community. Should we be focused on bilateral assistance obviously USAID, MCC and so forth or should we also be thinking about multilateral assistance. Multilateral assistance has a positive which is you get to leverage a lot of resources from other people around the world. You get to also leverage expertise that may not be American. There may be non-Americans. But there's a downside and it's not, we're not shining the US flag nearly as clearly. Today I actually think we have a different dilemma and I wanna kind of highlight something that Congressman Berman I was never a staffer so I'm not sure I'm supposed to call him chairman or congressman said which was to look at why we had foreign assistance anyway. What were the drivers? The geopolitical drivers. So in the 70s and 80s probably the geopolitical driver was the Cold War. And then you saw the big fall off in the 90s even though we had a growing economy. We had a president Clinton who cared about these issues. And then it came back again unfortunately because of 9-11. And we got another expansion on foreign assistance. And that has fallen off again. And I think that that's fallen off partially to get our fiscal house in order. We had a financial crisis in this country which expanded our debt dramatically. But where are we now? And so the dilemma I see is the desire for the United States to be a leader in this world. At the same time we wanna bring in new countries to this including China, countries that are on the rise. We wanna make them to use Bob's Alex words responsible stakeholders. Versus our fiscal, get our fiscal house in order and boy the easiest thing to cut is foreign assistance. And then frankly we don't trust this. We don't trust either the multilateral development type of institutions or the Chinese or something else, right? And so I think that that is going to be the fundamental argument that we're gonna have to deal with going forward. To me, I mean, look, I'm a supporter of the IMF. I'm a Republican which makes me probably rare that I'm a supporter of the IMF, but the, and the fact that we basically are not funding that is providing, is basically telling the Chinese, hey, we want you to put more money in this. We'll give you a little bit more of a leadership role. And by the way, not just the Chinese, the Mexicans, the Koreans and countries we do a lot of business with. And at the same time, we can't deal with it. Or, and so that's mainly been a congressional problem although the administration's not totally without blame. Or the Chinese decide we're gonna set up an Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and then the administration basically says over our dead body, which I still have no idea what they were thinking, but again, what is it that we, what is a signal that we are sending to these other countries? And for me, when I think about foreign assistance, it just suggests to me that we need to worry about how to prioritize better. And this is something where now I'm gonna be Mr. Negative. So it is hard to prioritize the 150 account. It's not a lot of money and there are lots of good things that are inside of it. But it's very hard to do. Let me give in a few examples. One, this is a fairly personal example. My wife was a political appointee in the development space for President Obama. I was a political appointee for President George Bush. I doubt we agree on what the priorities would be in the 150 account. If you expand that out to where all the different constituencies are and so forth, I was reading through the President's budget for the 150 account and then from the USGLC's report on that and I kept thinking to myself, this is fantasy land. And not because there aren't some really great things in there, but because then I saw the 403B that are, 302B, sorry, he's actually, he knows stuff like this. That came out yesterday or two days ago from the House of Representatives and it's a $7 billion cut off of the President's request. That actually didn't surprise me all that much. And so I was thinking better try to figure out a way to prioritize that or you can try to get the house up a little bit, but it's gonna be tough. And I don't think the executive branch is all that good at it and no offense to Rodney. OMB is probably the right place to try to sort these things out. But OMB can't do it very well. It has been, I used to get into big arguments, I remember Rodney and I literally screaming at each other on the phone one day about these type of things. And it was because we're like, is the priority, hey, MCC is really doing well, we should be funding more MCC. Well, that's right, well, Don Steinberg's over there telling me we need to do some more stuff on AID and Don Steinberg is a pretty knowledgeable guy. And so you're trying to figure out how do you sort all this stuff out and then send it forward to the legislative branch. And when the legislative branch says we're not gonna fund you by as much, okay, what in the executive branch action, which ones do you prioritize? And you know what the executive branch says? Everything, we prioritize everything. And the reason is, is cause it's so hard to throw something under the bus. On the legislative side, it's even worse. I mean, as hard as that is to imagine, is that because they, you have different committees who have different responsibilities. Food aid usually comes under agriculture. MDBs and IMF actually comes under on the house side, the House Financial Services Committee on the Senate side, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. And then development assistance, more U.S. direct development assistance comes under, I believe it's HVAC and SFRC. And that doesn't even get into the Darth vaders of the world, the appropriators. And so trying to get them to do what we all would think of is let's do cost-benefit analysis. What are the best programs that are out there? Which ones are delivering the best bang for their buck, et cetera? We all know that's a hard exercise to do. The executive branch is not very good at it. Legislative branch is even worse at it. And so that gives me pause, is can we solve the dilemma that I'm worried about in the overall sense? Why don't I stop on that negative note? Thank you. Thank you for the humorous, if negative part of things. Felma. Thank you. I'll also say that my background isn't totally in development, I have more of a trade background that has been kind of the last several years of my career in the development space, which has been a challenging but interesting space to be in. As the speakers have already noted, we do have a budget, or FY16 budget, that the Senate kept the budget at current levels basically, and the House cut it by 22%. And that I think is the reflection of the institution that this morning, I think it was a good deal of discussion about how you defend foreign assistance and how you convince members of Congress and others in leadership positions who are gonna decide how this money is spent, the value of foreign assistance, and try not to focus so much on a zero sum game. Congressman Bill Frenzel used to always remind me that there were certain elements that you just had to pay for, because as Congressman Dashel said this this morning, it either is the right thing to do, or it's a necessary thing to do, and you don't necessarily look at a zero sum game. You have to fund the Defense Department, for example, and you can spend a lot of time saying how much money that takes away from X, Y, and Z, but in effect you have a bigger issue to deal with, and I think that that argument can be made for foreign assistance. I'm also a person who thinks there's plenty of money in the foreign assistance field, so I don't think it needs to be cut anymore, but I think our job is to make it more effective, and of course because of the changes in the world and because of the changes in policy over the years, it's I think moving in the right direction, and from my experience at USTDA and also at the OECDE, I'll talk a little bit more about the private sector participation in this process. This morning, we outlined the three or four big umbrella ideas, the democracy, defense, diplomacy, and development, and I think in this panel today, we're talking about making that an actuality through, I couldn't think of any more Ds, but I just went to the basic investment, and I don't mean investment of, like foreign investment in countries, I mean the investment of the US in a particular effort and the investment of the host country in that effort, that there's a lot more focus on the US not just handing out money, but creating a partnership with the host countries and creating a way to where they're very strongly invested in the project and the outcome and the reason the project is there. The second thing is sustainability as we talked about before. Both the private sector and the public sector looked around and said, we funded a lot of schools, we funded a lot of hospitals, we've built a lot of roads to nowhere, or to somewhere, but we've sent a lot of teachers, but we have to keep doing that because the countries have not reached a point where they could basically teach their own teachers or set up a structure to maintain their roads and continue to expand their roads. So sustainability has become much more of a byword and I think an important one, and then we've already referred to this this morning and today and that's accountability. We need to start out from the beginning saying and the host country agreeing and being committed to taking over a project, taking over a sector and not expecting, just year after year after year, the first road, the second road, the first hospital, the second hospital and the private sector did the same thing. I'm sure Chevron has its name on lots of hospitals, but they were smart enough to look around and say, our workers have to get to work. Chevron, GE, Koch, two of them get killed every morning when they come to work. So we have to start looking at a system of transportation that works better. Our workforce is dying of AIDS, our workforce is dying of Ebola, so we've got to look at something different than just building that hospital. So I think both the private sector and the public sector have evolved not so much because the budget is so restricted, it's because there's more of a call for accountability, both from the private sector and from taxpayers who want to know why this money is being spent. And of course it's a very different world. We've referred to particularly the bricks and others who are now donors and have their own kind of interest in why they provide money and development and have their own agenda for doing it. And the US needs to make sure it's on top of its game with respect to why it's providing the development assistance it is and how to respond to some of these. The most negative kind of situation we have now, I think it's China, and you referred to the Development Bank that they want to kind of set up in competition with the Asian Development Bank. And I think the US is struggling a bit harder than it should as to how to respond because countries, I think countries are very knowledgeable about China and why they want to come to their country. It's hard to turn down a lot of money to build a power plant or to build a road. But they are much more interested in having the expertise of the US and Europe in Canada and Australia and others so that they can build their economy. So they know the dangers of China's interest in development and we need to build on that and make sure that we know how to respond. I think some of our development agencies, it's been difficult to respond. They get bogged down in how they've always done things or just, you know, you have a series of contracts that you've had year after year after year. And I think Rodney was very good at kind of helping to create that flexibility in the development space and disciplining agencies, including TDA who almost had to be disciplined by default because it had so little money. But if you're, for example, if you're looking at something US TDA is doing today on procurement, I think this global procurement initiative is an excellent example of why countries like US foreign assistance and the fact that it doesn't cost a lot of money. And basically what they're doing is providing technical assistance to countries to allow them to have the expertise to evaluate procurement contracts so that they know what best value is rather than lowest cost. And that's always gonna work out to the advantage of the Western, well, not just the Western countries, but the countries that are built on WTO fundamentals that has apparently been noticed by Congress and by the administration and they're gonna up their budget for that particular project. But all of the development agencies need to kind of have that flexibility to respond to policy objectives as they are created and to respond to needs of the host countries. I think this morning we were talking a little bit about General Kelly was saying that he had called the Central Americans and to talk about how they could best follow, do follow up from a meeting that they had with President Obama and Vice President, sorry, Vice President Biden, excuse me. And the first thing they asked General Kelly when they came back to see him is that, well, what do we do next? They're offering us money. You know, they're gonna support us. But often they don't know how to proceed in a way that's gonna solidify the development objectives for them. And so the U.S. has a lot of expertise both in the government and particularly in the private sector to help countries do this and they want it. We also have to deal with the BRICS on the positive side. Many have become donors and they have their own kind of political, I mean they have their own foreign policy objectives that color that a bit, but not all of them are like China. They do want to see growth in the lesser developed countries. Now they don't wanna give up their own development status. That's a whole other discussion, but I think the U.S. needs to find ways to work with those countries so that we're maximizing the impact and not see them all as competitors. I mean, we do have some balancing acts to do with China and a little bit with Brazil, but Brazil and others also have very positive objectives that the U.S. would be perfectly comfortable with. So I do think the way that these emerging economies, South Africa, Brazil, India, India is a poor country with rich people in it, some rich people in it, but they still are projecting their wealth somewhat and they wanna be donors also, so we need to find ways to work with them. And I wanna make just two other quick points. I don't know what we do about the crisis situation that we have today because our development, the development, the specter of where we need to do work is now so colored by these crisis areas where it's very difficult to go in. General Kelly talked a lot this morning about how the military has to do a lot of development and they very focused on that and they look at very seriously what they need to do to build these economies, but often they have to do that because others can't come in. The security situation is such that it's very hard to select the right development objectives and the quick response that's necessary in those crisis environments. And finally, I should never leave out trade the Senate Finance Committee did a lot of nice work yesterday on TPP, on TPA, is that what it's called now? Fast Track, I've had too many wars on Fast Track, so but this one, they did a GOA, a 10 year extension of a GOA, they extended GSP and then they worked on Haitian GSP and a couple of other like small things and referred again and again to the agreement they had with Ryan. So this has been discussed and is moving down the track. So trade capacity building is something that every development agency should really be focused on. The Prime Minister of Japan is coming next week, I believe, and we have a bilateral going on with them and of course that's a partnership we should really exploit a little bit better to kind of up our presence in Asia and Southeast Asia where the Chinese particularly are flexing their muscles. So I do think that we need to focus on trade capacity building. CSIS has just put out an excellent report, Dan, do you want to say what the name of it is? But it has trade capacity in the name, I forgot your CSIS trade capacity building, an excellent report if I do say so myself. So trade capacity is a real focus, I think we need to have in the development space, particularly at this time. Thank you, I think I heard four or five common themes. One among frankly a group that probably wouldn't agree on a lot of things, but the importance of country ownership, transparency, accountability, which can be effectiveness aid results. I do want to give time for the audience to ask questions, but I'm going to go off script a little bit and ask each of you in turn starting with Clay. What's, sorry Clay, what's the one thing you would recommend to the next administration that it do in the foreign aid world? And it doesn't, you can decide which administration you think it'll be, but based on what. I think if I would ask them to do something that will probably be very hard for any presidential campaign to do because they're trying to get elected, but maybe from a good governance standpoint. Study. It's going to be a totally quiet conversation. You don't have to make them embrace it or endorse it. No, no, no, it's all right. I would actually study what do they think has actually been working in the development assistance space and double down, and that means find the things that haven't been working that well and don't be ideological about it, but haven't been working that well and cut them. And so I would be, I would actually ask my people to be brutal about it, the ones that, I mean, I know I have a few in my head that probably aren't worth the saying, but I think I would do that because I don't think the financing is going to be there for doing everything. So I think I'd be pretty brutally frank about stuff on prioritization. Amazingly, this may be the one thing that Clay and I actually do agree on, which is to recognize that the start of a new administration doesn't mean the start of a new world. What happens on, what comes after January 20th, the year that Barack Obama leaves office, January 21st. And to be very honest with you, a lot of what we did at USAID was building on what the Bush administration had done, especially in the latter years. We were very proud of what had been done in terms of doubling assistance to Africa. PEPFAR was a success, MCC was a success, and we wanted to build on those principles. We did recognize that their outreach to partnerships in the private sector was very important. We put together the New Alliance for Food Security, which brought in $4 billion worth of private sector investment into our development priorities. We had the call to action for child survival, which built on a number of the initiatives of the Bush administration. And I think there's a tendency to want to believe no matter which, even if it's the same party that you, the PEPFAR was Bush's initiative. And so we had to come up with something exciting and new and different, which would be the hallmark and the trademark of the new administration. And I think we largely resisted that. And the only other thing I would add is we haven't talked at all about technology so far. And technology is changing everything we do in this space. The fact that you've got 6.5 billion cell phones in the world and you can do diagnosis from malaria and tuberculosis over a cell phone. The fact that we've got the capacity now to build and send into space a satellite for how much money? $67,000. If you don't want your Lexus, you can have a satellite in space. And what does that mean for distance learning? What does that mean for capacity building on the ground? We've got kids all around this country who are in even high schools, but more especially in colleges and grad schools who are excited about this area. And they are using their tech savvy to bring us into the world of data poluses and hackathon and open data and big data. And this is the world that we're all gonna be in. I used to think hackers were bad people and we at world learning are now working with an organization that calls itself random hacks of kindness. And it's a great organization. And this is the world that we're living in. We can eliminate extreme poverty within the next 20 years. If we continue to get young people excited about this and we've got to resist the negativity. We've got to, just one last point, I speak a lot at high schools because one of the programs that we do at world learning sends American high school kids abroad under something called the experiment in international living. And every time I speak to a high school, I begin the presentation by saying, do you think the world is a better place today than when your parents were in high school? And almost unilaterally, you'll get a 90% no, it's a worse place today. And then you say, hey, in the last 15 years we've moved a billion people across the poverty line. We've reduced infant mortality by two thirds. Yes, 200,000 people die of measles each year. But when I started in the development world, it was 2 million people. We have more democracies around the world. We haven't had a global confrontation since 1945. It's 70 years without a world war. And yet they see ISIS and they see Charlie Hebdo and they see Ebola and they see universities blowing up in Kenya and that's the image. And if we turn this generation off and we don't speak to them with the positivity of being able to make change in the world, we're gonna waste an incredible resource of people who would just say, hey, it's too tough a place out there. I'm not gonna engage, I'll focus on my local community. And that would be a shame. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I'm curious, cause I don't know the answer, but to me, PEPFAR and what flowed from that, I wonder what today's analysis is. It was enacted with great support, leadership from the Bush administration to deal with a terrible, terrible crisis and went about getting drugs and distribution systems and saving lots of lives. In the reauthorization, also in the last year of the Bush administration, we also, in addition to committing significant resources, we hope to create a process which would do something that you talked about, which is to sort of increase capacity for countries' health systems to take on something more sustaining than just specifically providing the medicines to save a life, but to create a system where that would get institutionalized. And I'm wondering, I mean, it would be an interesting question in terms of the success of an assistance program, multilateral in many aspects, the global fund, a number of other countries helping. To what extent has that, particularly in the areas where AIDS was most prevalent and HIV children born, infants born with it, have health systems increase their capacity as a result of what we did and what the governments of those countries did? I mean, it's all part of a little bit what works and what doesn't work and did, I don't know the answer, but I'm wondering, did that work to some meaningful extent? And what about in the broader area of disease and health? Did, what was? Let me, I wanna make sure that was Patrick Fine speaking of FHI 360, former AID, former MCC. Mr. If I could just add on the HIV area with PEPFAR, the other exciting thing that it did was great platforms on the ground that were very useful in addressing other diseases. Yes, that's what I was understanding about as well. In the case of Haiti, a lot of the programs that you address cholera used the infrastructure that had been created in that space. And I'd say even in West Africa, and in malaria as well. The other interesting point, Don's point about, the ambassador's point about, Tom. Tom. Tom. Tom. Tom. Tom. Tom. Tom. Tom. The technology issue. If part of this country ownership is not what do the government leaders want, but what does civil society want and think is the priority, technology becomes a tremendous resource in finding that out. Not just at the leadership of civil society, but at the grassroots of it through, in ways that governments that want to can't even interfere that much with your ability to find that out. And so here's a case where you can, instead of guessing, get a little stronger sense of what are the priorities. The other problem, which I don't think goes away on January 21st of the next administration is the extent to which immediate crisis, crises drive something that keeps you from the kind of, to some extent, hurts the ability to institutionalize meaningful change in reform because you are so responding. These budgets go up, but a huge part of why budgets went up was because of what was going on in Iraq and what was going on in Afghanistan. And now my guess is the pressure on migration and refugee budgets is just enormous and that's all part of four and eight, but those who are to deal with immediate crises, they're not, they don't get into some of the more fundamental things that in the end institutionalize a focus on the poorest of the poor and sustainability. Sorry, I gotta lead in. My priority I think is kind of forced on us and that's the banks and international organizations. I think the US is gonna have to decide what it wants to do there and that decision is gonna be a long-term, have long-term consequences, is my view. Let's go to the audience. We have Vanna White standing there, Pat Sajak back there. If you would, I'm gonna group three questions because I think that's probably what we have time for. So you're number one. Hi, thank you. My name is Tiaju Salaam-Blaitha with Congressional Research Service. My question is for Mr. Berman. When you were doing the four and eight reform work, could you talk about some of the solutions that you all developed in terms of improving the coordination particularly across agencies that fall under different authorizing committees? This question comes about because there are several staff on the hill looking at legislation related to health system strengthening and trying to get the agencies across the different committees to coordinate their work might be a challenge. Thank you. Okay, next question. I think I, is that 10 seconds or 10 minutes? 10 minutes. Come on, there gotta be more questions. Otherwise you're gonna have to rely on me and you really don't wanna do that. We just love to hear the panel's thoughts on the budgetary situation. As you mentioned with both houses of Congress now controlled by Republicans and the house going below the mark and the Senate at the mark. Are there enough champions left on the hill to pull the mark up? Right back there. I think any of you can address the problem I'm gonna raise which is the ever increasing number of priorities either by the administration or by Congress in any particular appropriation and the fact that the administration request goes up with a certain level of priorities and then the appropriation has a slightly different or a very different set of priorities and what is the solution to try to get at the kind of foreign assistance reform that you started Representative Berman but we don't have yet to have a conversation or some kind of a solution to this dilemma which ends up taking up an awful lot of time. All right, let me see if I can rephrase the questions and see who I'm directing them at. Different authorizations directed at Howard. Budgetary system but anybody can answer that. The third would be increasing priorities and how to handle them if I grotesquely misstated anybody's question. Mr. Chairman, oops, sorry. The first, just to respond to that comment, that my assumption is it was the House Budget Committee that recommended 302B allocations and the Senate Budget Committee that recommended 302B. And it is from those recommendations you're drawing the notion of the Senate High and the House Low but those are pieces of paper. And in the end of the day, the appropriators will decide the real allocations in both houses and there has been a history. As much as my partisan background and some of the rhetoric makes me want to think Republicans controlling the Congress is death. The irony is that the people who know the most about foreign assistance by and large are pretty supportive of foreign assistance. And in both the House and the Senate on the Republican side, people in very key places I think are quite committed to, I mean, Lindsey Graham is an advocate of foreign assistance. I got, there are a lot of, there are not many people I'd rather have on the Republican side as head of House foreign ops appropriations than Kay Granger. These are people who are committed to the process and what you're getting now is how do you structure your desire to balance the budget but give defense everything they want and in all these allocations. So for the rhetoric on the floor of each house when they take up the budget resolution, well, they had to somehow square the numbers and foreign aid became the victim. I would not view that as anywhere near the final decision and just keep charging away. I just had one other thing in this issue. The only way you will change the kinds of jurisdictional lines that would be helpful to change is if the House leaders and the Senate leaders, and this is particularly a problem I think in the House because in the Senate you do things on the floor, you have other opportunities that you don't have necessarily under limited rules in the House and with things having to be germane is a deep commitment of a House leadership to force, to force chairman who don't want to give up things they have to do so. And I'll give you one example, it's a different area. 9-11, Commission made a bunch of recommendations. The one recommendation that has been totally ignored and this is now what, 14 years ago, 13 and a half years ago, making sense of the jurisdiction over Homeland Security issues in the Congress of the United States because no serious leadership at the leadership level has been shown to try and force that so that you have Homeland Security responsive to so many different committees of Congress, many times with competing interests and competing demands and you don't get any rational action out of it. So this is a very, very tough thing to do and the Agriculture Committees are not gonna let go and the Coast Guard Committee is, and they're not gonna let go of things that are very important to them. They went on those committees for certain reasons. They view these jurisdictional shifts as taking away the reason why they're on that committee and they're gonna fight like mad and the only people who can make something happen are when the top leadership in the Congress wants to. Thank you, John. I just wanna add two cents to this and with the slightly different take on it, I think, and hugging back to my ways and means days and my discussions currently about the trade bills. I do think that House and Senate differences will probably err on the Senate side and the end of the House has a lot of political pressure which is just reflective of how the two bodies get elected and they have. But it does indicate that there is work to be done by the community in the development space as we discussed a lot this morning to convince House members how they're gonna tell as a dance on here as Congressman Crenshaw said this morning, how do you tell your constituents that it's logical to send this money to obscure countries when they see problems in their own towns and cities? But that argument can be made and it just needs to be made a little bit more effectively. On the jurisdictional thing, I think it's a bit like reorganizing trade functions, every administration does it every four to eight years and they spend a lot of time on it and it makes no difference. I think you'd be spending a lot of unnecessary time if you want a successful outcome and trying to change jurisdictions in the committees on the Hill. But I do think you should reflect on the fact that a lot of changes got made in AID without Congress. I mean, they were the ones that moved to expertise in-house to contracting everything out and they're moving back and Congress doesn't have to tell them. It takes leadership in the agencies and leadership in the administration through an interagency process or what did I know when I was at USTDA and we were responding to tsunamis and this and that and the other. It basically would not have happened without Bobselics, just, you know, like, and some people at OMB basically say it and Rodney and others saying make it happen. So I don't think we will be successful in spending a lot of time reorganizing committees but there's a lot of flexibility there to do the right thing. Could I just have one thing to add? I could name 10, to your question initially, I can name 10 things we had in our legislation that have occurred for the, Don made reference to a number of them by executive branch action. Oops, sorry. Please, please. Well, what I was gonna say is notwithstanding OMB and finance and the 150 dialogue that we're having, it's not all about the money and I wanted to reflect just very briefly, you know, we at USAID prioritize gender issues in the Obama administration and the truth was we didn't have a whole lot of money to do it with and so we adopted what was, we described as a four pillar approach. First of all, you did do specific programs for gender equality and women's empowerment. You worked with organizations on the ground, you addressed girls' education and other challenges, but secondly, you mainstreamed and integrated those principles and so one of the first things we did at AID was to say that any project proposal needed to have a gender impact statement and you only had two requirements. There one was an environmental and the other was a gender impact statement and you might think that that was, you know, a pro-former exercise and indeed the very first proposal that came back was about a bridge that was going over a river and the gender impact statement, I swear to you, said 50% of the people using that bridge are going to be women, that was the complete statement and we sent it back and we said we won't accept this and then from then on, the analysis became more sophisticated and it became understood that you needed to incorporate gender into the provisions. We prioritized as a third pillar, serving as a thought leader and a spokesperson for the administration on these issues and finally, we said we have to walk the walk in house, we have to provide training, we need time-bound measurable goals, we need promotion practices that empower women and I'm telling you, it did work and it helped that we had President Obama and a certain secretary of state who did wake up in the morning thinking women's rights are human rights and vice versa but it has continued under the current administration and it was achieved largely and again, we're not in a nirvana state right now and I would be the first to acknowledge some real tragedies in the gender quality and women's empowerment space but we made tremendous progress there and it didn't require money. Clay, last word. All right, I only have two points. The one is me, to turn that off. All right, one is, I think the question you asked was almost exactly what I was trying to talk about and so I just wanted to say that this is what worries me because the executive branch is very divided up and it's hard to sometimes bring it all together even though there's a budgetary process and so forth. The legislative branch is all divided up and it's hard to bring it together and you do hearings and it's on digging into an AID problem or digging into an MCC problem or digging into an OPIC problem and sometimes bringing all that together is very difficult to do on either branch and then bringing the branches together. So that's my pessimism. So here's my second point. I think Ambassador Steinberg and I actually probably agree on a lot more things than we think and including his optimism about a lot of other things and I'm just pessimistic on the 150 account process. I'm optimistic on a lot of other processes and by the way, I hope we would agree on this. The leadership that Ambassador Steinberg and Raj Shah have shown at AID over this administration is totally commendable and they should be applauded for. I'm going to assume that another round of applause for this totally commendable panel is also in order.