U.S. House Pushes Through Deep Aid Cuts

WASHINGTON, Feb 19, 2011 (IPS) - With a 2015 deadline fast approaching to meet a collective global promise to tackle poverty and improve education, health and environmental sustainability around the world, development and humanitarian advocates are up in arms over conservative lawmakers' proposals to slash and burn entire chunks of the United States' foreign aid budget.

After days of heated floor debate and some 600 amendments, the U.S. Republican- controlled House of Representatives passed what is called a "Continuing Resolution" (CR) Friday that allocates government funding from the first week of March until the end of the fiscal year, which ends on Sep. 30, 2011. The final vote was 235 to 189, with just three Republicans joining Democrats in opposition.

The CR makes over 61 billion dollars worth of cuts – including about 19 percent to international affairs accounts, according to calculations by the U.S. Global Leadership Coalition, and 41 percent to humanitarian aid, according the State Department, compared to FY 2010 enacted funds. Spread over six months, these reductions would be "devastating" critics say.

As the CR now moves to the Democrat-led Senate, where it is likely to get watered down some, and with President Barack Obama's threat to veto the House's proposal if it lands on his desk, the massive purges in their current form are unlikely. Still, observers worry that deep slashes will remain and predict an equally contentious battle over the administration's FY 2012 budget proposal released Monday.

"Let me be clear, the United States of America has been, and will remain, the global leader in providing assistance," U.S. President Barack Obama said in his speech at the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) summit at the United Nations last fall. "We will not abandon those who depend on us for life- saving help. We keep our promises, and honour our commitments."

But critics say that the CR threatens these very promises and commitments, and worry that important global development gains could be threatened. (See the sidebar for how these cuts could impact the eight goals).

While certain countries and indicators lag behind in the global MDG campaign, hundreds of millions of people have been lifted above the 1.25 dollars per day poverty line and universal enrolment in primary school education has risen steadily in the past two decades.

Most promising are advances made in global health. According to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, deaths due to malaria could be eradicated and a new generation born without HIV by 2015. If achieved, these successes would represent two of the greatest health triumphs of our lifetime.

The U.S. is one of the world's top donors. "Because of U.S. aid, over the last 60 years, maternal and child mortality have dropped sharply, literacy rates have increased and economic opportunities have expanded in the developing world," said CARE president and CEO Dr. Helene D. Gayle in a statement Wednesday.

"These funds produce real change in the lives of women and children and their families living in extreme poverty, changing entire communities and nations for the better," she argued.

If colossal cuts are made to Washington's foreign aid budget, observers are concerned about the impact this could have on global health and development and also fear a potential ripple effect to other donor countries' provision of aid if the U.S. reneges on its commitments as a result of these budget cuts.

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Self Delusion at State on U.N. Reform

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AUTHOR:Brett Schaefer

Last week, the House of Representatives’ Committee on Foreign Affairs held a hearing titled “The United Nations: Urgent Problems that Need Congressional Action.” At that hearing, Chairman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R–FL) made a statement:

Ambassador Susan Rice says that the U.S. approach to the U.N. is, “We pay our bills. We push for real reform.” Instead, we should be conditioning our contributions on “reform first, pay later.”

In the past, Congress has gone along by willingly paying what successive Administrations asked for—without enough oversight. This is one of the first true U.N. reform hearings held by this Committee in almost 4 years, but it won’t be the last.

Right now, the vast majority of countries at the U.N. General Assembly pay next to nothing in assessed contributions, creating a perverse incentive because those who make decisions don’t have to pay the bills. So I am going to reintroduce legislation that conditions our contributions—our strongest leverage—on real, sweeping reform, including moving the U.N. regular budget to a voluntary funding basis. That way, U.S. taxpayers can pay for the U.N. programs and activities that advance our interests and values, and if other countries want different things to be funded, they can pay for it themselves.

Assistant Secretary of State Esther Brimmer yesterday directly challenged Ros-Lehtinen:

Now, let me be clear: this Administration takes seriously our obligation to guard taxpayer dollars. We are second to none in pushing for a more efficient and effective UN. But gutting our assessments isn’t “UN reform.” It’s just paying less. And trying to avoid paying our bills hurts our ability to deliver results at the UN that the American people want, and that the United States needs. The United States must be a responsible global leader, and that means paying our bills and working for real renewal at the UN.

How could we have won tough Security Council sanctions on North Korea and Iran if we were continuing to incur arrears? How could we have championed any of our management and reform achievements just over the past two years if we had failed to keep current on our assessments? How can we work with other leading contributors to maintain UN budget discipline and hold down costs if we do not meet our own obligations?

No longer can our adversaries at the UN change the subject to our arrears when we press them on an important policy matter, as they did for so long. The President’s decision to pay our UN assessments in full means that we have had more political capital to galvanize support from allies, partners, and others for achieving our goals at the United Nations.

Seldom has so much nonsense been packed into so few words.

As I detailed in my testimony before the Committee on Foreign Affairs, U.N. reform has stagnated since 2006. Some key reforms have actually been reversed and weakened: The U.N.’s quasi-inspector general—the Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS)—has been directly undermined by the U.N. Secretary-General. The U.N. Procurement Task Force was eliminated for doing its job and uncovering mismanagement and fraud. The U.N. Ethics Office is weak, and its authority has been refuted by other U.N. organizations. Financial disclosure is a farce. The effort to review U.N. activities for relevance, effectiveness, and redundancy has been killed. The U.N. Human Rights Council is just as bad as the body it was created to replace. U.N. peacekeepers continue to go unpunished for criminality and sexual abuse.

Brimmer provided few details about the Administration’s “management and reform achievements” because they are embarrassingly meager. Of the reforms mentioned, all have significant questions. Contrary to Brimmer’s claim, the U.N. Ethics Office was established well before President Obama was elected. But its authority was challenged early and remains under assault. The OIOS has been hindered repeatedly, according to former OIOS Under-Secretary-General Inga-Britt Ahlenius, with little objection raised by the Obama Administration. Transparency at U.N. funds and programs is woeful—the U.N. Development Program and other U.N. organizations steadfastly refuse to provide the U.S. unfettered access to their audits or other internal documents.

The U.N. General Assembly has taken no action to address these problems or adopt other reforms despite the decision by the Administration to unconditionally pay our arrears to the U.N. It has, however, increased its budget and increased the amount it charges America for U.N. peacekeeping. The Obama Administration did not even bother to demand a vote on these decisions.

This is hardly surprising. Notable U.N. reform successes typically share one thing in common: congressional involvement backed by the threat of financial withholding.

As I detail in my testimony, congressional intervention led to U.N. budgetary restraint in the 1980s and 1990s. It led the U.N. to create the OIOS—the first inspector general equivalent in the history of the U.N. It led the U.N. to reduce U.S. assessments earlier this decade.

Fear of congressional action helped to spur the U.N. to adopt new rules for U.N. peacekeepers and to establish the Volcker Commission to investigate the Iraqi Oil-for-Food program.

In fact, the U.S. has used financial withholding to press for U.N. reform fairly frequently since the 1980s. Despite this practice, the U.S. was able to advance its agenda in the U.N. and in other U.N. bodies and organizations. For instance, it was able to get Security Council sanctions on Iraq, Libya, Iran, and North Korea and other countries while the U.S. was capping its contributions to U.N. peacekeeping at 25 percent or in arrears for other financial withholding.

Brimmer’s suggestion that the Obama Administration achieved sanctions on Iran and North Korea only because we were paying our bills to the U.N. reveals a shocking lack of confidence in the Administration’s diplomatic skill.

Perhaps the most outrageous part of Brimmer’s speech was her insisting that Ros-Lehtinen and other Members of Congress were insincere in their desire for U.N. reform.

If Congress simply wished to pay less to the U.N., there would be no need to link it to reform. It simply has to pass legislation reducing U.S. funding to the U.N. The U.S. has a responsibility to pay its bills, but the obligation to pay U.N. assessments has not prevented Congress from withholding in the past and will not in the future. Congress rightly understands that it has an even greater responsibility to make sure that U.S. taxpayer dollars are not wasted. It is too bad that the State Department does not share this sentiment.

But clearly, it is not only about reducing U.S. contributions to the U.N. Representative Ros-Lehtinen and other Members of Congress are proposing U.N. reform legislation backed by financial withholding because they recognize the value of many U.N. activities and are angered that they are undermined by ineffectiveness, corruption, and lack of prioritization.

History is littered with examples of failed U.N. reforms. The unfortunate reality is that few countries are interested in making sure that the U.N. has adequate oversight and accountability or uses its resources effectively. Most pay the U.N. a pittance and, therefore, have nothing at stake. Diplomacy alone is rarely sufficient to overcome this inertia. Congress has been instrumental in pressing for U.N. reform in the past and will continue to be indispensable in the future

The Deepening Mysteries of U.N. Financial Disclosure

By Claudia Rosett @ Forbes

Nov. 15 2010 - 10:54 am | 583 views | 1 recommendation | 0 comments

When the new U.S. Congress convenes in January, there may be revived interest in oversight of a runaway United Nations. The U.N. system is fueled by billions every year in U.S. tax dollars, but has been operating these past two years without such speed bumps as even the occasional congressional oversight hearing into those busy back corridors of the U.N., in which the U.S. administration places so much trust, and through which so much money flows.

Many areas want looking into. These range from assorted fiascos of U.N. peacekeeping and sanctions regimes, to such questions as who’s actually benefiting from U.S. money given to the U.N. (now more than $6 billion per year) and from the credibility that U.S. support lends to the institution (priceless).

But a common theme running through all of this is the U.N.’s continuing failure to provide transparency and accountability. On that score, there’s a certain sorry entertainment value — as well as serious questions — to be found in browsing the U.N.’s current version of financial disclosure, as practiced by senior U.N. officials. This system was supposed to be one of the important reforms brought in by former Secretary-General Kofi Annan, as he tried during his final stretch in office, in 2006, to wipe the sludge of Oil-for-Food from his Brioni suits.

When Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon arrived in office, in 2007, he promised that his “first priority” at the U.N. would be to “restore trust.” He advertised that as part of this effort, he would follow through on Annan’s pledges of disclosure of personal finances by senior U.N. officials. That was a great idea, the urgent need for it underscored that same year by the indictment in New York’s Southern District of the former head of the U.N. Oil-for-Food program, Benon Sevan, on charges of bribery and conspiracy to defraud the U.N. relief program he had run (Sevan, who left the U.S. and has not returned to face the charges, has denied any wrong-doing); and the conviction in New York federal court of a former head of the U.N. General Assembly’s budget oversight committee, Vladimir Kuznetsov. He was found guilty in 2007 of conspiring to launder hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of kickbacks on U.N. procurement deals, while serving as the highest-ranking Russian official at the U.N.

But the “reform” that Annan bequeathed, and Ban has run with, is a system in which what is mainly disclosed by U.N. management is that almost nothing is disclosed (yes, you read that right). Top U.N. officials are supposed to render up information in-house about their finances. This is done in ways so confidential that even the U.N.’s Ethics Office, which administers the program, is not privy to the details. Senior staffers are then allowed to choose for themselves whether any information at all about their finances will be released to the public. This has resulted in some officials, such as Annan’s former chief of staff, Iqbal Riza (who has lingered at the U.N. in New York as a “special adviser” to Ban Ki-Moon) filing a public disclosure form in which he does nothing more than check a box, confirming that he has chosen “to maintain the confidentiality of the information disclosed by me.”

Some of the more forthcoming officials do choose to disclose slightly more than merely a refusal to disclose. Even then, it’s done in a format so abbreviated and generic that it provides almost no information. The U.N.’s entire public disclosure form runs to a single page, with no actual dollar amounts listed. Ban himself, for instance, filled out a form for 2009 which says his assets consist of an apartment and two lots of land in South Korea. What are these worth? There’s no clue.

Under the heading of “Ethical Standards,” such farcical “disclosures,” from dozens of senior U.N. officials worldwide, are posted on Ban Ki-moon’s official U.N. web site. Until now, I thought the Riza-style approach of utterly non-disclosing disclosure took the cake.

But in revisiting the site recently, I came across an entry that is in some ways even more tantalizing. That would be the form filed for 2009 by the director-general of the U.N. Office at Geneva, Sergei Ordzhonikidze. A former Soviet and then Russian diplomat, Ordzhonikidze was appointed in 2002 by Kofi Annan to head the U.N.’s palatial spread in Geneva, where last year alone he managed a budget of $227 million. (The U.N. Office at Geneva is home to the lavishly maintained Human Rights Council, among other U.N exotica).

Ordzhonikidze accounts directly to the U.N. Secretary-General, and serves as Ban’s representative in Geneva. When Ban Ki-moon’s web pages began featuring the “disclosure” forms, Ordzhonikidze for 2007 and 2008 was among the U.N. officials willing to list his assets. But he said they consisted solely of “Bank Savings accounts.” He listed nothing else. How much was in those savings accounts? Where in the world were they held? That’s a level of detail which UN public “disclosure” doesn’t bother with.

But here’s the intriguing bit. For the most recent filing, for 2009, Ordzhonikidze’s assets have apparently changed. He no longer lists even “Bank Savings accounts.” Under assets, he lists “Nil.” Likewise, under the other five categories, he also lists “Nil.” Apparently, he has gone from having assets that consisted solely of savings accounts to having no assets at all — or at least nothing worth more than $10,000, which is the minimum bar for disclosure. No house, no substantial possessions, no profits from the sale of personal property, no assets whatsoever. For that matter, no liabilities, either. No nothin’, just “Nil, Nil, Nil, Nil, Nil, Nil.”

What’s going on? After years of service pulling in a U.N. salary well into six-figures and loaded with perks, while running a U.N. complex that features a nine-figure budget and peacocks on the manicured lawns, has the director-general of the U.N. Office at Geneva been somehow abruptly left with no finances of his own to report? (Queried by email about this, a spokesperson for the U.N. in Geneva said Ordzhonikidze was traveling and could not be reached in time for this article.)

Or has Ban’s promise of U.N. transparency devolved to where he and his top team members, under the label of ”public disclosure,” routinely disclose either next-to-nothing or “Nil”? If U.S. law makers are ready to try again, can they get the candor the U.N. has repeatedly promised and failed to deliver? It would be worth finding out.