The QDDR: The Gift of the State and USAID Magi

The State Department bestowed an early Christmas present on the international development community last week when it unwrapped the long-awaited Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review (QDDR). And like those slipper-socks from Aunt Minnie, the QDDR isn’t exactly what was hoped for, but contained some necessities.

Insourcing Implementation So Far Proves Not Smart Contracting

First, Defense Secretary Gates questioned insourcing at the Defense Department after he found that this initiative had not achieved the intended savings. Now a second administration official is questioning agency insourcing actions.

According to the Dec. 13 edition of Capital Business (the Washington Post’s business weekly), OFPP Administrator Dan Gordon indicated that agencies misunderstood OMB’s guidance and brought work in house to meet quotas, regardless of whether doing so saved money, increased efficiencies or improved internal management capabilities.

“We do not view insourcing as a goal,” Gordon said, according to the Post account of his Dec. 10 speech. “What we’re doing is rebalancing our relationship with contractors.” In this rebalancing effort, the administration wants to convert “targeted, limited numbers of positions” to public sector performance, the Post reported.

The Post quotes Gordon as saying:

“No corporation would agree to have somebody else running their entire operations…There are far too many situations where we have yielded control of our own missions…to contractors. That needs to be fixed, but it doesn’t require massive insourcing.”

Quadrennial Questions

Lost in all the coverage of the State Department cable leaks is the leak of another document that could have a far greater impact on the effectiveness of future U.S. diplomacy: a set of State Department briefing slides for Congress on the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review.

Although this little reported document hints at some answers to critical questions about the long-awaited strategy for how State and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) will partner to support development assistance missions around the world, it also raises new questions. Perhaps most critical: why the briefing repeats tired rhetoric about the role of for-profit and non-profit development organizations assisting the government in its mission.