White House Seeks To Protect Aid Legacy

October 21, 2008

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October 21, 2008

President Bush is hosting a White House summit on international development. Administration officials are proud of their efforts to aid the world's poorest countries. But the global financial crisis is threatening aid levels and development work.

MELISSA BLOCK, host:

From NPR News, this is All Things Considered. I'm Melissa Block. The Bush administration says its commitment to helping poor nations won't be derailed by the global financial crisis. Today, here in Washington, President Bush held a development summit. As NPR's Michele Kelemen reports, it was meant to highlight his record of boosting foreign aid.

MICHELE KELEMEN: This was a day of slick presentations about the Bush administration's programs to fight HIV/AIDS and malaria, and help countries that are governed well. President Bush sounded like someone who wants to go down in history for his commitment to alleviating poverty. He said it would be a mistake to turn inward during this time of economic crisis.

President GEORGE W. BUSH: America is committed and America must stay committed to international development for reasons that remain true regardless of the ebb and flow of the markets. We believe that development is in America's security interests.

KELEMEN: He was praised by Liberia's president, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, who also took the stage earlier in the day calling for American leadership.

President ELLEN JOHNSON-SIRLEAF (Liberia): While some people claim that the industrialized countries cannot afford support for the world's poorest countries at this time, I believe that you cannot afford not to.

KELEMEN: Her West African nation, still emerging from a devastating civil war, is trying to get into one of the Bush administration's signature foreign aid programs, the Millennium Challenge Corporation. To get grants from that, countries have to go through a series of reforms. John Danilovich, who runs the program, calls it smart aid, and he's been reaching out to the Democratic and Republican presidential transition teams to ensure that this program lives on.

Ambassador JOHN DANILOVICH (CEO, Millennium Challenge Corporation): The new administration will change, I'm sure, the MCC, keeping at its core, however, those principles which are the absolute cornerstones of the organization's good policies, country ownership, and tangible results. Those are extremely important. They aren't just three little bullet points.

KELEMEN: Advocates of development aid see a mixed legacy in the Bush administration. The president gets a lot of credit for boosting aid, but he's done so by setting up programs like the MCC that are run outside the normal bureaucracy. Steve Radelet of the Center for Global Development says the next president will have to take a look at this.

Dr. STEVE RADELET (Senior Fellow, Center for Global Development): We have our aid spread over 20 different institutions within the U.S. government. And so there are steps that we can take to consolidate our aid programs and make them more effective in actually getting the benefits to women, to children, to poor communities around the world.

KELEMEN: That was a thought echoed by others in the audience at today's development summit, including Sam Worthington who runs InterAction, an umbrella organization that represents dozens of U.S. charities. He says the challenge for the next administration will be to convince Americans that development aid is not just for do-gooders, but also central to America's national interest.

Mr. SAM WORTHINGTON (President & CEO, InterAction): Ultimately, these programs and this legacy of this administration could only be transformed to an American legacy for the next president if the American people recognize that this is something that helps them both as moral individuals who give and provide support for individuals around the world, but also as U.S. citizens who want to have a safe and secure environment for their children when they grow up.

KELEMEN: Worthington argues that cutting development aid won't do much to help the U.S. budget deficit, and slight increases could go far to improve America's image in the world. Michele Kelemen, NPR News, Washington.

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