USAID Director Rajiv Shah is ticking off the Washington contractors who have been feeding at the USAID trough for years

Good for him.    Hattip marginalrevolution.com

Dr. Shah, who will face tough questions about his $20 billion budget in testimony to Congress on Tuesday, has set off a fierce debate over the way the agency operates and the usefulness of traditional foreign aid. Rather than pouring billions of public dollars into programs to fight poverty, the agency is increasingly using loan guarantees to get local banks to finance big projects, giving its money directly to foreign development groups and embracing projects like the “Cuban Twitter” account, which deliberately hid American involvement and shut down in failure in 2012.

To Dr. Shah, a former officer of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation who believes that technology and private business should be marshalled to fight poverty and encourage democracy abroad, the changes are crucial to the future of the agency. The Cuban social media project, which started in 2008, nearly two years before he arrived, was similar to U.S.A.I.D. programs, he said, which help nonprofit groups monitor elections using text messages in Senegal and Kenya.

“It’s part of our mandate to support civil society groups with modern communications and access to the Internet,” Dr. Shah said in an interview.
And he's supported by a strange coalition: from Tony Blair to Jim Inhofe. Which aside from the retention of Bush SecDef Robert Gates, makes him the first Obama appointment that I can enthusiastically approve of. He's trying to change the aid game for the better.

But Dr. Shah has influential defenders.

“Rajiv is a visionary, but deeply practical,” said Tony Blair, the former British prime minister and the founder of the Africa Governance Initiative, a foundation that works with African governments. “He realizes that the purpose of aid is for long-term development, not short-term projects that you can point to as successes.”

Senator James M. Inhofe, a conservative Oklahoma Republican who has traveled with Dr. Shah to Ethiopia, is another supporter. “I’m a huge fan of Rajiv Shah,” Mr. Inhofe said. “I’m not a fan of U.S.A.I.D., which has all these contractors waiting around at the trough. I love this guy because he is willing to take on these contractors. ”

Dr. Shah, a Detroit native and the son of Indian immigrants — his father was an engineer at Ford — held a number of jobs at the powerful Gates Foundation, including director of agricultural programs and director of financial services for the poor. He has a medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania and served only briefly in government, as an undersecretary at the Agriculture Department, before moving to U.S.A.I.D. Colleagues think that he will run for Congress someday and that his criticism of big contractors, pleasing to Democrats as well as Republicans, is at the very least politically shrewd.