Welcoming a new hire from NASA 🚀
USAID’s newest Director for Acquisition and Assistance can hit the ground running to make immediate impact
Dear Unlock Aid Community,
This week, USAID brought on Jami Rodgers as the Agency’s newest Director for Acquisition and Assistance, where he’ll be responsible for overseeing how USAID spends more than $100 billion over the next four years. And we have some ideas about how we can hit the ground running to maximize impact during the final year of this term of the Biden-Harris Administration. 😎
As we’ve written over and over, too many federal agencies struggle to operate with the urgency, flexibility, and innovation required to meet the problems of our time:
One of the biggest culprits is excessively complicated procurement practices. Complexity favors the few and the powerful who know how to play the game. But it leaves out the innovation we desperately need to address food insecurity, the effects of almost 90 million displaced persons, and under-resourced health care systems.
At this crucial moment, we’re encouraged by the Agency’s decision to hire a senior official with years of experience in transforming how public institutions acquire solutions to hard problems.
Prior to USAID, Rodgers served as the Director of the Procurement Strategic Operations Division at NASA’s Headquarters for the Office of Procurement. He helped NASA become more innovative in its acquisition processes, instituting protocols in which contractors were paid by their performance, not effort. Last year, NASA structured approximately one-third of its contracts using milestone-based, pay-for-performance, fixed-price contracts.
Why does this matter: Last year, when U.S. senators asked NASA Administrator Bill Nelson what was the #1 threat to his agency achieving its goals, he said “cost-plus contracts” that reimburse for time and effort. Nelson added they were a “plague” at the space agency because they drove up costs, limited competition, and stifled results.
Rodgers has also led NASA initiatives to work with the private sector, for example, by acquiring commercially-available, off-the-shelf technology rather than paying expensive contractors to build new products from scratch. He has also pioneered other NASA initiatives to increase the use of other more innovative contracting tools to increase the space agency’s ability to work with other more innovative, non-traditional U.S. government partners.
Rodgers also previously served at the Department of Energy, Environmental Protection Agency, and USAID, including where he led work on some of the most innovative procurement work ever performed by the Agency, including for the Saving Lives at Birth Grand Challenge and other Grand Challenges, and some of the earliest work performed by the U.S. Global Development Lab.
This is weedy stuff, but it’s the little things that can add up to result in big changes to the way a big federal agency operates.
All of this experience puts him in an excellent position to make an immediate impact during this final year of the current term of the Biden-Harris Administration. Here are five things he should focus on once he gets his employee ID badge, computer, and his usaid.gov email up and running:
Normalize pay-for-results contracting. Last fiscal year, USAID structured just 1.4 percent of its grants using straightforward, milestone-based fixed-amount awards that pay for results. When we first set out to found Unlock Aid, any time a group told us they liked working with USAID we perked up and listened. We documented what we heard here. Time and again, groups told us that, when they did have a good experience working with the U.S. government, it was when USAID structured straightforward, milestone-based awards that significantly cut red tape but increased accountability because payment was structured against the delivery of pre-defined success metrics.
Crack down on bid candy. It’s an open secret in Washington, DC that too little foreign aid funding ever leaves the DC Beltway. Nearly 90 percent of USAID’s funding gets channeled through one of just a handful of the Agency’s largest U.S.-based contractors or international nonprofits, most of which are headquartered in DC, or within just 30 miles of it. This means the only way for most local organizations and other entities to work with USAID is as a subcontractor. But too many of these contractors and international nonprofits keep the majority of this funding for themselves, despite often promising to act as intermediaries to get funding to groups on the front lines. Worse, as we’ve explained before, too often, too many of them promise to work with local organizations and social innovators in order to win a government award, only to cut those same organizations out of promised work later on. This practice breaks trust in the very communities this funding is designed to serve, which both reduces impact and harms USAID’s partnerships around the globe. Administrator Power has talked about this problem, too. In March, we joined more than 100 other organizations to call on USAID to finally crack down on bid candy by embracing more contracting transparency. Congress wants action, too. Now we’re waiting for USAID to act.
Restructuring at least 3-5% of USAID’s $17 billion NextGen supply chain awards to show that new global development models are possible. Last month, Devex and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism published an in-depth investigation into USAID’s largest ever, $9.5 billion foreign aid contract, documenting how an old-world, top-down model was rife with problems from the start and out of step with the times. Now the Agency has put up for public tender a renewal to the $9.5 billion contract, but this time with an even bigger price tag – $17 billion – as part of a package of nine separate, 10-year contracts referred to by industry insiders as the “NextGen” awards. Rather than doubling-down on a status quo model that is not working, USAID can instead use these contracts to show that a new way to invest in global development is possible.
Scaling proven innovations. USAID wields immense resources that could help social innovators in low- and middle-income countries scale proven innovations for the hardest challenges in global development. Earlier this year, we wrote about organizations struggling to navigate global development’s “missing middle,” also known as the entrepreneurial “Valley of Death.” While global development is awash in philanthropic and private dollars that fund innovators at the $100,000 or $250,000 levels, there are virtually no funders that systematically provide social innovators with larger levels of funding to scale their impact. We need a public funder like USAID to step up and fill this void. Every year, NASA effectively manages a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program that takes new innovations from concept to scale, using innovation pots of funding to pilot and de-risk early-stage ideas that is then linked with the space agency’s larger general budget to bring the most effective solutions to scale. We need to see a similar model deployed at USAID. And it appears that Administrator Power also agrees.
Fostering a culture of innovation at USAID. Finally, USAID should do more to promote a culture of innovation, investing in new partnerships, research and development, and unleashing the power and potential of the private sector to solve the planet’s hardest problems. Congress has also urged the Agency to make innovation “more central” to the way that USAID does business. We’re sure that Mr. Rodgers has some ideas on ways to do this based on his stewardship of NASA’s Acquisition Innovation Launchpad. We’ve compiled a number of other ideas he can refer to here.
Earlier this year, USAID published a bold new acquisition and assistance strategy that promises to reshape how the Agency does business, including to diversify the Agency’s partner base, shift more resources to local partners, and increase the use of pay for results. The White House also announced its own plans to “fundamentally transform” its federal grantmaking rules. Now we need extraordinary leaders to implement this vision.
Welcome to USAID, Jami Rodgers! We are excited to have you on board.
To Progress,
Unlock Aid
P.S. Looking for other ways that USAID to drive faster and more sustainable impact? Check out this list of Three Things USAID Can Do Today, or visit our 2023 Policy Platform, which includes recommendations both for the Biden-Harris Administration as well as for Congress.