GOP remodels foggy bottom

0 Comments | Insight on the News, June 12, 1995 | by Michael Rust

What rough beast slouches towards Foggy Bottom - home of the State Department - waiting to be born? Throughout the Cold War, foreign policy took center stage in U.S. politics, resulting in a proliferation of federal agencies addressing foreign affairs. With rumors of budget cuts fining the air on Capitol Hill, however, the agency "alphabet soup" has come under congressional scrutiny. In the House, the American Overseas Interests Act, a bill crafted by Republican Benjamin Gilman of New York, chairman of the House International Relations Committee, would cut $1.8 billion from the president's request for foreign-policy operations and consolidate the U.S. Information Agency, or USIA, the Agency for International Development, or AID, and the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, or ACDA, within the State Department. Specifically, the House bill, which was expected to pass by Memorial Day, cuts requests for development assistance from $2.1 billion to $1.4 billion, contributions to international organizations by $116 billion and foreign economic assistance by $198 million.

At first glance, this "reinventing" of government would seem to be the sort of reform the Clinton White House would embrace. But the administration has opposed the consolidation vigorously, deriding it as an isolationist Republican ploy to curtail American involvement in world affairs.

Certainly, the Republican effort is more redolent of House Speaker Newt Gingrich's conservative revolution than Clinton's program to reinvent government. While budgetary concerns - the 1,000-pound gorilla of the 104th Congress - often are cited as the primary rationale for consolidation, ideology plays a role. Much more is at stake than a few titles and offices. Even though consolidation is supported by many Democrats, the Gilman bill can be regarded as part of the GOP post-Reagan foreign-policy vision, one in which foreign aid is increasingly privatized and the arms-control process - long eyed suspiciously by defense hardliners - is downgraded.

In March, Former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger and former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft issued a joint statement to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee - where Chairman Jesse Helms of North Carolina is sponsoring a parallel bill that proposes slashing foreign-aid outlays - that "there has been a proliferation of foreign-affairs agencies and functions over the years" that has led to waste. The Bush administration officials said that USIA, which broadcasts Voice of America programs in dozens of languages, was intended to counter Soviet propaganda. AID was created during the Truman administration to stem the tide of communism.

"We ask ourselves if these institutions - born of the Cold War - still make sense today," they said in their statement. Helms also introduced letters of support for the consolidation plan from James A. Baker III and George Shultz, both former secretaries of state.

While consolidation would impair his agency's mission, says ACDA director John Holum, the "impropriety" of the legislative branch "trying to micromanage the executive branch - saying this is how we want you to organize yourself, to conduct your policy" - is far more dangerous. Holum tells Insight that if the legislation passes, it "would be the first time in history that an executive branch [agency] has ever been reorganized by the Congress over the objection of the executive branch."

Some maintain this would be a good thing. Holum's agency was part of an "imperial management system"' says Michael Vlahos, a former State Department official now with the Progress & Freedom Foundation, a Washington think tank founded by Gingrich. This system is "still going strong institutionally, but it's not supported by the American people," Vlahos tells Insight. "I think in many ways this international bureaucracy we created existed solely for itself. And as such, we need to take a real hard look at it. Those are code words for `cut out all of those things that are really unnecessary.'"

Vlahos argues that "there should be no reason why you need to have these Cold War institutions like ACDA and AID and others at all." The real trouble with the Gilman proposal, he suggests, is that it simply would fold those offices into the State Department. "I wouldn't just, transfer people, which is what is going to happen anyway; I'd just cut them out," Vlahos declares. "You have too many people doing too many things. You've got endless parallel and competing efforts going on basically to do the same thing."

Significantly, ACDA's Holum also believes consolidation would create a "megabureaucracy ... much less nimble and much less responsive" than ACDA currently is. Kimberly Marteau, a USIA public-affairs officer, says that being outside the State Department gives the agency credibility and "a sense of objectivity that would not exist were we inside. It allows us to move and talk to the left, right and center of every society, and it allows us to send out overseas people from the left, right and center of American society." Marteau also points out that USIA is "under the direct policy guidance of the State Department, but we are never a chip on the bargaining table when the secretary of state or an ambassador is in negotiation with another country. If we were part of the State Department, we would lose that distance and we would become part of the negotiation."