Center for Global Development’s “U.S. Development Policy”: Should the Trump Administration Cut USAID to Expand MCC?
Sarah Rose, senior policy analyst at CGD, examines a proposal by the Heritage Foundation that calls for scaling back or phasing out USAID and elevating the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) in order to make U.S. foreign assistance more effective. Rose discusses two major concerns with the proposal, writing, “First, the characteristics that make MCC so appealing also limit its scalability. Making the agency significantly larger would compromise much of what makes it work as well as it does. Second, scaling back or phasing out USAID would eliminate several important functions of U.S. foreign assistance that MCC is not designed nor well-suited to address.” Rose suggests different strategies that would “expand the reach of the MCC … expand the proportion of U.S. foreign assistance subject to aid effectiveness principles … and remove legal and policy obstacles that constrain USAID’s effectiveness” (2/1).