Climate Change: Considerations for Geographic Combatant Commands PKSOI Paper | Page 28

engineers including professional construction quality assurance personnel from the U.S. Army Corps of
Engineers or the Naval Facilities Engineering Command to provide the transparency and accountability
increasingly demanded by the development interests
prior to their contribution of funds.68 In concert with
or in lieu of USAID quality assurance professionals,
these DoD personnel could work on a specific “pilot
model” project to demonstrate to-standard monitoring and evaluation practices—transitioning from
serving as the lead quality assurance representatives
to an advisory role for a host nation’s military or public works professionals. This approach would leverage DoD’s unique water resources technical expertise
and particularly their training capabilities in the near
term with a long-term objective of building the partner nation’s internal capacity to provide the “rigorous and high-quality impact evaluations” directed
by the President’s Development Policy and included
as a critical component of USAID’s and prospective
donor’s climate change project selection criteria.69 For
DoD to execute these efforts funded by a development
bank such as the World Bank or the Inter-American
Development Bank, the two parties would need to
develop a unique legal framework enabling that funding mechanism.70 USAID could fund DoD directly
through the “Economy Act” (31 U.S. Code §1535) that
facilitates transfer of appropriated dollars between
federal agencies when the interagency action “is in the
best interest of the USG.”71 USAID would make the
“best interest of the USG” determination guided by
very specific criteria including authorized and appropriated funding being on-hand for the express project
purpose, and USAID determining that the technical
services “cannot be provided by contract as conve-

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