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 More…
Anne-Marie Slaughter was attending a private lunch on Tuesday at the International Finance Corporation in Washington when she saw the gap between what U.S. foreign policy is and what it needs to be. Discussed around the table: the myriad changes to the development landscape now that commercial banks and investment More…
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
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 More…
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 More…
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 More…
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 More…
So after I wrote this post, I checked in with State Department contacts to see what’s on the horizon for resourcing the Marine offensive in the Helmand River Valley. The biggest piece of news I can report: lots of diplomats are anticipating a relaxing Fourth of July. But there’s More…
rss