The Fate of the Civilian Surge in a Changing Environment | Page 13

planning capabilities. However, its leaders questioned
the need for S/CRS to design and implement foreign
assistance programs in the R&S sector, which became
part of the office’s ambitions after NSPD-44.19 After all,
USAID already had two existing offices with significant capabilities to respond to specific R&S challenges. The Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance (OFDA),
created in 1964, is the lead federal agency for the U.S.
government’s humanitarian assistance and disaster
relief (HADR) responses abroad: even the much larger
DOD follows OFDA’s direction in those circumstances.20 The Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI), created
in 1994, works alongside OFDA to provide rapidresponse support to countries experiencing political
transitions.21 OFDA and OTI each receive a modest,
dedicated annual appropriation from the Congress
to address their specific lines of effort. At the time S/
CRS was created, OFDA and OTI already possessed
many of the capabilities described in NSPD-44, albeit
on smaller scales. These included personnel surge
mechanisms, program design and implementation
protocols, working relationships with other agency
partners including the DOD (especially in the case of
OFDA), and robust monitoring and evaluation tools.
USAID argued that these existing capabilities should
be expanded or replicated within the agency as operational counterparts to the enhanced S/CRS policy and
planning role.22
These bureaucratic tussles resonated among skeptics in Congress, particularly on the appropriations
committees, who were less convinced than their counterparts on the authorizing committees about the need
for new funding and personnel support mechanisms
to accomplish the difficult and politically unpopular
work of R&S abroad. As a result, it took almost three

6