President Obama has finally nominated an administrator to USAID ten months after taking office. The White House announced last week that it endorsed Rajiv Shah, the Under Secretary for Research, Education and Economics at the Department of Agriculture and former Gates Foundation executive, to lead the development agency. Shah's appointment is subject to the approval of the Senate, who will be processing the nomination and holding hearings on the matter soon, according to a spokesperson from the Committee on Foreign Relations.

The announcement comes extremely late for Obama ,who has endured harsh criticism for the delay even from his own quarters. At a meeting with USAID employees in July, Hillary Clinton blasted the President's notoriously demanding vetting process. “It's frustrating beyond words,” the Secretary of State said before contradicting herself by calling the protocol “a nightmare” and “ridiculous.”

Senators John Kerry (D-MA) and Richard Lugar (R-IN), the chairman and a ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, also questioned the indecision. The pair, who passed a bill through committee this week that seeks to reform foreign aid, sent a letter to the White House two months ago imploring the President to pick someone already (pdf). “We recommend,” the two recommended, “that you give strong consideration to selecting a candidate who has already gone through the vetting process,” adding that “experience in global development” would be nice, too.

By nominating Shah, who had to be approved by the Senate to take the job at the USDA, the President at least appears to have heeded this advice.

Those who were discouraged by the vetting process include Dr. Paul Farmer, a man widely lauded for his sustainable community based approach to economic development. Although he was believed to be the President's top choice – and a rock star to development nerds - his auditors seemed to disagree. Were they perhaps concerned that his past criticisms of US foreign policy would' be an unwelcome controversy for the White House during Senate confirmation hearings, or was Farmer simply fed up with the process? Either way, it didn't work out.

Can he develop development?

As someone who has been through the Senate Confirmation Process once already this year, Shah's nomination may not rock the entirety of the establishment, but it hasn't been entirely endearing to the development community.  The Washington Independent claims that many insiders are afraid that his appointment means the end of nation building and governance work for USAID. Conversely, he has experience managing large budgets, ones that dwarfed the entire $1.25 billion USAID budget, and his work researching agriculture and public health issues has earned the President praise for selecting Shah from Dr. Orin Levine. Meanwhile, Politico's Lauren Rozen said that USAID staffers don't know enough about Shah and are taking a wait-and-see approach to making an assessment about his nomination.

Outside of the loop, the appointment may not be met with approval either; Shah's work at the Gates Foundation included the promotion and development of a controversial biotechnology, transgenic agriculture. Supporters of the practice not only insists that it is safe and increases agricultural yields, they also claim a consensus exists in the scientific community regarding its safety and benefits.  Dissenting studies - including one done by the IAASTD, a group supported by those radical environmentalist neo-luddites at the World Bank - have questioned the safety, productivity and necessity of genetically modifying food, which requires farmers to buy copyright-protected seeds every year. Whatever the truth is, without a stronger consensus on the issue, Shah will most likely encounter the controversy if he pushes the technology in his development work with the same enthusiasm of his former boss. 

Afghan idle

Rajiv Shah's most pressing concern may not be the ethics of certain biotechnology, unfortunately, but economic development in Afghanistan. Although the President has claimed that an increase in civilian assistance is vital to his strategy in Afghanistan, public debate has been focused on additional troops. This debate may be utterly pointless if there is no palpable economic improvement. A recent Oxfam poll shows that 70% of Afghans believe that the main cause of the violence is poverty and unemployment.

That Obama has waited so long to name a USAID administrator has not helped alleviate the situation. By its own admission, the organization performed poorly in Afghanistan under the Bush administration, but, with a swift appointment, at least a new leader at USAID could have had an entire bureaucracy hard at work trying to crack economic problems in the Graveyard of Empires. While security problems and concerns about corruption are legitimate, there is no reason that USAID shouldn't have been primed by the White House to make a bold contribution towards an economic development strategy, which is of paramount concern. Instead, the President put off naming a leader to a potentially useful institution for almost a quarter of his first term. In this time, American military casualties have doubled and the rate of Afghan civilian casualties has increased significantly.

Development aid has been sent to Afghanistan by the Obama administration through other channels and it remains to be seen whether or not USAID can help bring the war to an end, though some analysts believe that Shah should be given more of a chance; they have called for the USAID administrator to join the President's  National Security Council. Shah's nomination may have come too late to make a difference though — development strategy in Afghanistan, like most other things, has been outsourced to Asians with Japan pledging $5 billion towards civic society development.

The President, at least, has finally decided to consider the role that USAID will play in his foreign policy by nominating someone to lead it.