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President Obama tapped Rajiv Shah, a 36-year old undersecretary of the Department of Agriculture and medical doctor with extensive experience in food security and public heath, to head the agency.

It’s not really a statement of support for nominee Rajiv Shah, who’s already got strong and eager support from Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. But here’s what the chairman and ranking member of the committee that he’ll appear before for his confirmation hearing have to say:
Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry (D-MA) and [...]

Just released from the Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton:
Dr. Raj Shah is a leader in the development community, an innovative and results-oriented manager, and someone who understands the importance of providing people around the world with the tools they need to lift themselves out of poverty and chart their own destinies. By nominating Raj [...]

Laura Rozen breaks the news: Rajiv Shah, the Department of Agriculture’s undersecretary for Research, Education and Economics, is going to head the U.S. Agency for International Development, which has gone leaderless since the start of the Obama administration. They’ve got to move fast to get Shah in the post. My understanding is that the acting administrator, [...]

The planning process is expected to result in significant policy changes.

Rep. Robert Wexler (D-Fla.), the self-described “fire breathing liberal” congressman, is going to announce his resignation from Congress tomorrow morning, according to the Sun-Sentinel. And the paper adds:
A Democratic source with knowledge of Wexler’s plans said he is likely to take a public policy job that deals with the Middle East.
Oh? Like, perhaps, as one [...]

Politico’s Laura Rozen obtained a formal dissent filed by a senior USAID development economist, C. Stuart Callison, against the development approach for Afghanistan and (mostly) Pakistan imposed by the Obama administration’s special representative, Richard Holbrooke. Holbrooke pledged in August that he would be phasing out costly U.S. contractors in favor of working through both local [...]

We are now eight months into the Obama administration and the U.S. Agency for International Development still doesn’t have an administrator. The vetting process is apparently so out of control that Paul Farmer, a longtime luminary in the development community and the administration’s leading candidate for the job, dropped out. New York Times columnist Nick [...]

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s going to be giving her first major speech on the Obama administration’s foreign policy to a domestic audience this afternoon at the Council on Foreign Relations. I, for one, am not going to be writing much about the policy substance of the speech. That’s because I want to focus [...]

Record another data point for the Obama administration’s military-civilian resource shift. In a speech yesterday to the still-leaderless USAID, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton explained that she’ll be launching an effort, run by Deputy Secretary Jack Lew, to study the mission, posture and resourcing of the State Department and USAID every four years, called [...]