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Dashboard for a Dashboard? Sarah Jane Staats on CGD’s New Foreign Assistance Dashboard Tracker
00:22:12
The US government gives about $30 billion in aid each year—less than one percent of the US budget and less than 0.2 percent of the US GDP. Even so, the US United States remains the world’s largest donor, providing nearly a quarter of the...
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Foreign.
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Welcome to the Global Prosperity wonkast. I'm Lawrence MacDonald. I'm delighted to have with me in the studio today Sarah Jane Statt. She is the director of our Rethinking US Foreign Assistance Initiative and here at the center for Global Development. Sarah Jane, welcome to the show.
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Thank you, Lawrence.
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You have been busy recently, among other things, keeping track of the US Foreign Assistance Dashboard. What is the dashboard and why should we care?
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So the US Foreign Assistance Dashboard was launched by the Obama administration in 2010. It is meant to be the one stop shop for all US foreign assistance, but budget, financial planning data. This is in part because U.S. foreign assistance is spread across more than 20 different U.S. executive branch agencies. And it's rather difficult to get a comprehensive and complete picture of where aid dollars are going, what they're being spent on, which countries they go to, how much, how many different agencies are operating in one country at a given time. And the dashboard was launched as a big attempt to try and get all of this information reported in a common format in one place.
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B
You and I were chatting before the show and I was thinking how the push for transparency in disclosing these numbers is sort of coming from two directions. Within the United States, there is this big push to make information about US Government broadly of which US Foreign assistance is a tiny piece, more readily available. But then internationally, we've had this whole series of conferences in Paris, Accra, Busan, in which the donors are trying to hold their own feet to the fire and saying we're going to be better. And big part of that is to say we're going to at least let people know how we're disbursing our money. Do you see those two things coming together in any kind of way?
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A
Absolutely. I think there's a really nice confluence of events and interests here. So, you know, day one of Obama administration's presidential term, he issued an executive memorandum on transparency and Open government. Very much thinking through this in the US Context. Meanwhile, you have a number of other efforts as you've described, around an international aid transparency initiative, for example, and other efforts really focused on the development side of things. So trying to understand where development dollars are going and how both taxpayers and beneficiaries can hold governments accountable for what's happening in terms of results, they come together really nicely. In this case, the dashboard is maybe the central home for both of those pieces. So trying to understand where US Government activities are and policy making decisions are taking place, but also this broader global push to understand how development resources are being allocated.
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So when they post information to the dashboard, I want to come to the tracker that you have created specifically to monitor the dashboard, a kind of a dashboard for dashboards. But when they post it to the foreign assistance dashboard, to begin with, they're looking at a number of dimensions. One of them is time. Is that right? Talk to me about the time dimension, because it's a little complex. If we can lay out the various levels here, I think then we come to the tracker, it'll make more sense.
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Yeah. So maybe just backing up a little bit. The dashboard itself aims to get a lot of different information, and it's taking a very incremental approach. So rather than the US Government trying to get all of the information together and then launching it online, they launch the tracker and they are slowly getting agencies to report, which is a good thing, because I suspect the alternative would mean that it wouldn't have ever happened. So. So the dashboard, as it stands now, has a couple of different categories of information. There's planning information. So this is sort of what you usually would find in a Congressional budget justification, for example, of sort of what the expectations are.
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This is where we plan to spend our money in the future.
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Exactly. But also where we planned to spend it when we first came up with the budget. Then there's obligation data, which is where the money has actually been obligated to and for what purpose. And then the spent category, which would show where it was actually spent. So those will be a little bit different in each case. There's also a category for implementation data, which will be more on programmatic results. That's a little bit further down.
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B
What do you mean, programmatic results? Unpack that for me a little bit.
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So it's more of the area where you would have data on what was evaluated in a program. So you spent X amount of dollars. You were hoping to achieve these objectives. And do you have any evaluation documents that would show that that happened? So that's.
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But we're looking both at country allocations and also sector allocation. So it's not enough to know that there was X billion for Pakistan. You also want to say some of this was for water, some was for power, some was for education.
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Right. And in the implementation side, you would get much more granularity on the programmatic level information. But in terms of. Your original question was about time. And so the time varies. The agencies right now are setting their own baseline year. So some start reporting in 2006, some start reporting in 2010. So this is part of the benefit and the challenge of an incremental approach. So ideally the dashboard will have some backlog over a number of years to have some historical information, but have current data that is published on quarterly terms so that you will be able to see very quickly on a quarterly basis where the information stands, which is a big improvement over where the information currently is, which usually has at least a one year time lag.
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We're going to take a quick break. When we come back, I want to ask you to before we get into the details of the Tracker to put U.S. foreign assistance into a global context for me, this is the Global Prosperity Wonkcast from the center for Global Development. My guest today is Sarah Jane Staats, the director of the Rethinking US Foreign Assistance Program at the center for Global Development. Welcome back to the Global Prosperity wonkcast. I'm Lawrence McDonald. My guest today, Sarah Jane Staats, director of the Rethinking US Foreign Assistance Initiative here at the center for Global Development. Sarah Jane, I told you I was going to ask you about the size of US Foreign assistance. Let's put it first in the US Budget context, there's some classic figures out there. If you ask Americans should the United States spend less on foreign assistance, they say, yes, yes, yes, we should spend much less. And then you tell them what we spend, which is in terms of the.
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Share, roughly 30 billion in official development assistance.
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Well, that's way too much. We should spend less. Right? But what if I say how about the percentage?
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It's around 1%. So the classic example that I think you're remembering is if you ask Americans what should we cut in our federal budget, they say foreign aid, we must spend too much on it. They usually think we spend about 26% of the federal budget on foreign assistance. We spend around 1%. They usually think we should spend around 10. Some interesting perspectives.
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Okay. And then in the global context, total Official Development Assistance ODA as is tracked by the OEC Development Assistance Committee is about 130 billion. Again, it goes up and down, of which the US is providing $30 billion.
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In official development assistance. So the total request in the US Budget will be larger than that. But in terms of official development assistance, it's about 30 billion.
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So while as a share of our economy and a share of our budget, it's tiny, in terms of global assistance, we are still the largest donor. So what we do matters. The work that you are tracking accounts for about 1 in 4 development dollars in the world.
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Correct.
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Therefore, this tracker is important. So now we're back to the tracker. I Just wanted to.
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The dashboard is important. Our tracker is merely a tool to try and encourage more data to be reported to the dashboard.
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I want to establish why we care about this dashboard, which, you know, done well. U.S. assistance could be a major force for good. I was struck in the pie chart on the blog post that you put up on Friday. Although you say there are 22 agencies that are providing foreign assistance, there are two huge slices in this pie chart. And the biggest slice is not, to my surprise, usaid. I would have thought USAID is the lead US Development agency, would have the largest slice of the pie. But the bigger slice there, 40%, is coming straight out of the State Department.
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That's correct. So the pie chart that you're looking at is from 2011, so there's a little bit of a time lag here, but the Department of state had roughly 40% of the foreign aid share from the U.S. and USAID had only 35%. I think often we hear a lot about the Millennium Challenge Corporation, and it's talked about as equal to USAID. In contrast, it's only 2% of the budget. It's very small in comparison. But interesting to see the numbers.
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I'm really struck by the State Department's 40%. So for $30 billion a year, then that's sort of ballpark math, like 11 billion or something coming out of the State Department. Has State come to the top of the league tables in terms of disclosing the information on what it's doing with this $11 billion?
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So State is at the top of the list in terms of its leadership and coordination role with the dashboard. So it's the F office is currently in charge of coordinating all the information and actually reporting it to the dashboard. Unfortunately, they have not yet provided a lot of their own data. So if you look at the CGD US Foreign Assistance Dashboard Tracker, you can dig in in a little bit more detail to the types of data and how much data each of the agencies has reported. So right now, the Millennium Challenge Corporation is in the lead. They've reported the most data over the most number of years and actually have quarterly data for 2013.
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And the MCC accounts for about 2% of your foreign assistance. Maybe it's easier if you've got a small program to get your dads in a row.
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It's newer and it was f founded on the same principles of transparency and sharing the information. So it might be a little bit easier for them to comply with these things because they were already doing lots of them and they have Newer systems, but they are also very much pushing the bounds on this. So they've launched their own MCC open data portal with all kinds of machine readable information, lots of good things. So they are certainly at the forefront.
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The number two is a bit of a surprise.
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Treasury that.
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The US Treasury. I thought the US treasury just collected our taxes.
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Not at all.
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US treasury is involved in foreign assistance. What are they doing?
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They are largely responsible for the multilateral US Role in the multilateral development.
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So this is the American money that's going to the World bank and the imf.
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Correct.
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I see.
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As well as some technical assistance to developing country ministries, these kinds of things. So the Treasury Department and Department of Defense interestingly just reported their data the week before last, I believe.
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And Treasury I'm seeing here is about 6% of US assistance going into the multilaterals, mostly Department of Defense. Just three, I thought they would be a bigger chunk than that.
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So just 3% in 2011, I think it was much higher maybe 10 years ago, but it has come down quite a bit. And so, you know, again, looking at our tracker, you can see that MCC and Treasury are the two agencies in the lead right now. USAID has a decent amount of data, but could provide some more. State Department has just planning data. So this is just top line information about the basically budget requests from 2006 to 2013, but no information on obligations, spent data, things like that. And DoD has complete planning obligation and spent data for 2011 and 2012, but it's just in those two years. So you're starting to get a sense of the incremental approach and how agencies have reported. But to say five agencies have their data on the dashboard is a little bit miss.
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It's time for our second break. When we come back, Sarah Jane, I want you to explain to me what's on the dashboard and the value added of your tracker. This is the Global Prosperity Wonkast from the center for Global Development. We'll be back in a heartbeat. Welcome back to the Global Prosperity Wonkcast. This is Lawrence McDonald. My guest is Sarah Jane Statt. She's the director of our Rethinking US Foreign Assistance Initiative here at the center for Global Development. As we were chatting, Sarah Jane, I realized I was confused between the US Foreign Assistance Dashboard, which is organized by the State Department, is a US Government product, if you will, and the CGD tracker that you created. Is the tracker just telling us what's on the dashboard in a way that's easier to understand? Is that what it does?
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A
So The US Foreign Assistance Dashboard, correctly stated, is housed by the State Department and is the US Government initiative. We were a little bit concerned on the outside that, you know, this is a fantastic effort to get all the information in one place, but progress was, was maybe not happening very quickly and that one of the things we could do from the outside was show people care. People are paying attention to this. It's valuable for US Policymakers, watchers like those of us at CGD and also beneficiaries in developing countries and to try and compel the agencies to maybe have a little bit of competition and extra incentive to start reporting and getting that data on board. My own view is that the next year or two is, is really going to be the make it or break it point for the dashboard. My hope is that they will have enough complete information that people will be using it and finding useful things about it, being able to extract the right kinds of answers for questions to inform policy decisions. My worry is that after a certain amount of time, if the information is not complete, it risks either not being used or giving a skewed vision of what's going on, both of which are problematic.
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So it's a little bit like running report card. Yes, it's information about the information that's available or not available. Whereas opposed, if I go to the dashboard itself, I'm going to find a whole lot of numbers, but it won't be so immediately obvious that State Department, for example, is a bit of a laggard even though it's the largest single source of U.S. foreign assistance.
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That's right. And I think you know from our conversations that we debated whether to make it a report card. And one of the reasons we didn't opt for letter grades attached to the agencies was to recognize and appreciate that it's an ongoing process and it's not easy to get all this information in one place. There are a lot of difficulties that the agencies are having that are real and we want to give recognition to the fact that they are trying to move in the right direction. But it's not something that you can just click a button and suddenly have all the data in one place. Some of the examples, you have different systems for tracking financial and programmatic data within the agencies. The systems at USAID are not the same as the systems at MCC or the US Treasury Department or dod. They're very different. And so trying to get them to all report to a new set of standards in a new way is not an immediate fix. You know, having the staff to do this Right now, it's a bit of an unfunded mandate, and we have sequestration, we have fewer staff, we have less time. So making this a priority has been a challenge for the agencies. But also the technical piece is. Is not an easy one.
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I imagine there's also some differences in institutional culture. This information has never been made public. I could imagine, especially perhaps in the State Department, that the latitude to allocate this in response to a variety of things, some of which may have to do more with U.S. strategic or diplomatic interest than with development, is something that people are reluctant to have held up to the light of day.
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I think there's always going to be a tension between bureaucracy and openness and open data. I think you can hear Beth Novak, who was in the White House in the early Obama administration days, speak a lot about that, but also of some of the surprise benefits you get from releasing the information that you might not have found otherwise. The OMB guidance that came out in October of 2012 was a big.
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Office of Management and Budget.
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Correct. Thank you.
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For those outside the Beltway, thank you.
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They released some guidance in October 2012, which was really a big deal. We talked about it as the kind of unsexy government document that actually changes things. And part of what it did was set out very clear parameters for what those 22/ agencies would be reporting, but also where there would be some exceptions for national security concerns, things like that. But it's very clear where there are areas for waivers or not reporting that information to meet some of the concerns that you mentioned.
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B
I learned from Beth Schwanke today that there's some legislation underway that would sort of lock in this commitment to disclose. Can you talk to me about that legislation? Are you a big fan of that? I guess you would be.
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So the legislation was part of the last Congress. So to my knowledge, there's not new legislation that has been introduced just yet. I think there's an appetite to do so. But Congressman Poe from Texas was the lead sponsor of a bill in the last Congress that would sort of codify some of the transparency efforts, but also some issues around monitoring and evaluation. You know, my own personal view is that if all of the agencies are reporting the data to the dashboard and people are using it, it will be something that's very hard to walk away from. But I absolutely sympathize with the idea that it would be useful to have something codified and maybe through legislation to make sure that this effort doesn't leave with the change of administration or even the changing cast of a couple of important characters in the administration that have really been pushing it. So the effort and interest from the Hill to make sure that that happens hugely welcomed. I have some more reservations sometimes on specifically detailing what metrics should be used on monitoring and evaluation, for example, across all development initiatives in a piece of legislation that kind of adds to a bit of the mess that we already have. But codifying the transparency, I think would be great.
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Final question put you on the spot here. Do you have any sense that creating this tracker has been helpful to those inside the administration who are pushing for greater disclosure?
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My sense is yes, I think we've, you know, we've absolutely been in touch with folks in the administration and outside those who are often lobbying the administration. And so the Oxfams, the publish what you funds that have been paying a lot of really good attention to this as well. But we've certainly heard from folks inside the administration that the attention is welcome and helping to drive some attention and keep it on the agenda. We've also, as we were developing the tractor and in touch with our State Department colleagues, we were on the phone call and heard, you know, we're thinking about doing a tracker too, which we were really pleased to see and I think we've been able so they have updated some of their information. We've caught little data blips here and there that we've asked them to verify. Are we missing something? Did we get this wrong? They've been hugely responsive and fixed them. They're up. So I'm really pleased that that's happening and I hope that other people will use the dashboard primarily. But to the extent that it's helpful that our tracker as well to use the information, play with it, figure out what they can do and be in touch with the government colleagues that are working really hard to try and get.
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B
This up, be in touch with the government colleagues for sure. And I suspect I can safely speak for you that if people have suggestions on the tracker that you're delighted to hear them.
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Absolutely.
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And there's a space on the blog to provide that comment.
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Yes.
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Thanks very much, Sarah Jane.
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Thanks, Lawrence.
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B
This has been the Global Prosperity wonkcast from the center for Global Development. My guest today, Sarah Jane Stadson. We've been talking about the US Foreign Assistance Dashboard and the center for Global Development's Dashboard tracker. You can find the tracker on the center for Global Development website and you can find the wonk cast online on itunes and on stitcher. Just search for wonkcast or CGD and sign up to hear a new interview every week. Until next time, I'm Lawrence MacDonald. Thank you for listening.