Super-delegation: Anti-bureaucratic Governance and the Hollowing-out of the United States Agency for International Development

• In Event: Bureaucratic Politics and the Organizational State

Abstract

By the time of its dismantling in 2025, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) was often criticized as a “hollowed out” agency, having delegated not only most of its operational functions but also an increasing scope of managerial functions and authority. This article asks why USAID’s extreme level of outsourcing, which we refer to as super-delegation, attracted controversy and how it emerged in the first place. We argue that super-delegation was politically contentious because it challenged taken-for-granted perceptions of the boundaries of the state (Mayrl and Quinn 2016). At USAID, it was the unintended product of a snowball effect generated by the interrelation between three drivers of American anti-bureaucratic governance: the historically-grown model of delegated statebuilding (Balogh 2015; Clemens 2006, 2017; Morgan and Orloff 2017; Skocpol and Finegold 1982), anti-statist attacks (Block and Somers 2014; Friedberg 2000) and, crucially, accreting accountability burdens (Power 1994, 1997). Particularly since the end of the Cold War, the agency was charged with an increasingly complex portfolio, while it found its administrative budget proportionately reduced. While so far underemphasized in the literature, the onerous layers of accountability requirements imposed on USAID over time compounded this discrepancy as they further depleted its administrative capacity. In response, USAID moved beyond its traditional reliance on non-state actors for implementation and began to tap their administrative capacity more deeply through super-delegation.

Authors

• Lisa Eitinger, Boston College

• Sarah Louise Babb, Boston College