Clinton Heartbroken Over Wasteful Afghan Aid

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told the Washington Post that the over $5 billion in USAID money sent to Afghanistan since 2006 was mostly wasted:

"For those of you who have been on the ground in Afghanistan, you have seen with your own eyes that a lot of these aid programs don't work," she said. "There are so many problems with them. There are problems of design, there are problems of staffing, there are problems of implementation, there are problems of accountability. You just go down the line."

Now, Secretary Clinton presumably has a somewhat partisan take on the previous administration's aid efforts, and is laudably committed to "scrubbing every civilian program... looking at every single dollar as to how it's spent and where it's going and trying to track outcomes."

FatCratz wants to know why every acceptable discussion of government waste in Washington involves the other party. Maybe, just maybe, "waste" is such a convenient partisan cudgel because it is everywhere in government, and can therefore be deployed at whomever you want, whenever you want.

Simple question: Which USAID programs are a success? Where are the reports indicating minimal problems in design, staffing, implementation, and accountability? Or, heaven forbid, are we wasting the entire foreign assistance budget (north of $36 billion in FY2008).

FatCratz isn't only about secrets. If Secretary Clinton wants to tell us about any other heartbreakingly wasteful programs in State's budget, we're all ears.