Improving foreign aid accountability, especially through transparency, monitoring and evaluation, has been the hallmark of The Lugar Center’s (TLC) work in Foreign Aid Effectiveness and in partnership with the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network (MFAN). Knowing--and publicizing--just how much assistance is going where, and gaining honest measurements of its impact are vital to making foreign aid more effective.... Read More

Last May the Lugar Center and the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University released our initial Bipartisan Index covering the 113th Congress.  As part of this launch, we also shared charts that showed the 112th and 113th Congresses as the most partisan since 1993, when judged according to our bill sponsorship and co-sponsorship metrics. ... Read More

The USAID-led Feed the Future (FfF) initiative is a signature Obama administration program supporting food security and poverty reduction in a number of developing countries. Now in its 5^th year, USAID reports that it has reached about 14 million farmers and made improvements on nearly 10 million hectares of farm land in its 19 focus countries. Its progress reports (2012, 2013, 2014, and 2015) are glowing, although there has been no independent evaluation of its impact. (The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has done a report on coordination issues but not on whether Feed the Future is accomplishing its objectives.)... Read More

Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, in an insightful op-ed in the Washington Post, “The kind of president we need,” called for a chief executive who can compromise, solve problems and, most importantly, “be a true unifier of Americans.”  In my view, this is particularly important in foreign policy.... Read More