On Wednesday’s broadcast of the Fox Business Network’s “The Bottom Line,” former Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction John Sopko stated that USAID is “a broken agency” and that for USAID, the Defense Department, and the State Department in Afghanistan, “the whole objective was spend the money. … The test wasn’t what the outcome was, the test was, did you spend your appropriated funds? And if you didn’t, you lost money. If you didn’t, you weren’t promoted.”
Co-host Dagen McDowell asked, “Is a lot of the waste and fraud and abuse happening because the people who are actually spending the money, it’s really just focused on how much money you get out the door? There was a quote I read, if you don’t ask about results, you don’t fail and your budget doesn’t get cut.”
Sopko answered, “That’s absolutely correct. And the problem in Afghanistan — and, again, that’s what I spent the last twelve years looking at — but it’s a problem across the board. I was looking at USAID when I first came to Washington and working for Sam Nunn back in 1982. And it was a broken agency back then, and it’s continued to be a broken agency. So, it’s just a problem. And the problem isn’t just a bunch of individuals, because there [are] a lot of good people working on the ground for USAID, your contractors or employees, the worker bees. They’re doing a good job, and they actually helped us in our oversight work. Because they were out in Afghanistan, and they were saying you can’t believe what we’re being — what we’re doing. And we used that for a lot of our reports. But none of that got up to Washington. That’s where you heard all the happy talk, we’re winning the war, we’re helping the kids, we’re building schools, we’re doing all this. And it turned out they built schools, but they never looked if there were any teachers. They built hospitals, but they never looked if there was any water or drugs or even patients, and that was the problem of the USAID, it was all happy talk. It was delusion.”
He continued, “And you hit it on the head, the whole objective was spend the money. Now, it wasn’t just USAID, DOD did the same thing, [the] State Department did the same thing. The test wasn’t what the outcome was, the test was, did you spend your appropriated funds? And if you didn’t, you lost money. If you didn’t, you weren’t promoted. And that’s the whole delusion we had between the reality on the ground and what you, the American people, were being told by the aid administrators, the ambassadors, the generals, and everybody for the last 20 years.”
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