Create an FP account to save articles to read later and in the FP mobile app.

Sign Up

ALREADY AN FP SUBSCRIBER? LOGIN

The Cable

The Cable goes inside the foreign policy machine, from Foggy Bottom to Turtle Bay, the White House to Embassy Row.

Two USAID senior officials confirmed

On Thursday, the Senate confirmed two top officials to the U.S. Agency for International Development, making them the first senior USAID leadership positions to be filled other than Administrator Rajiv Shah. The officials who were confirmed are Mark Feierstein as assistant administrator for Latin America and the Caribbean, and Nisha Desai Biswal as assistant administrator ...

By Josh Rogin

September 17, 2010, 1:37 PM

On Thursday, the Senate confirmed two top officials to the U.S. Agency for International Development, making them the first senior USAID leadership positions to be filled other than Administrator Rajiv Shah.

The officials who were confirmed are Mark Feierstein as assistant administrator for Latin America and the Caribbean, and Nisha Desai Biswal as assistant administrator for Asia. They were two of the 28 presidential nominations officially confirmed by the Senate Thursday.

Of the top 12 leadership slots at USAID, only two more officials have even been nominated and nine more slots are currently vacant or being staffed by "acting" officials: Nancy Lindborg, for assistant administrator of USAID’s Democracy, Conflict, and Humanitarian Affairs Bureau and Donald K. Steinberg as deputy administrator of USAID. One notable vacancy at USAID is the slot for director of the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance (OFDA).

Feierstein had previously worked as a principal at the polling firm Greenberg Quinlan Rosner, and before that served as director of USAID’s global elections office. He previously worked in the State Department as special assistant to the U.S. ambassador to the Organization of American States and before that was director for Latin America and the Caribbean at the National Democratic Institute.

Biswal most recently worked as the majority clerk for the House Appropriations Subcommittee on the State Department and Foreign Operations. Before that, she was director of policy and advocacy at InterAction, the largest alliance of U.S.-based international humanitarian and development non-governmental organizations. She has also worked on the professional staff of the House International Relations Committee and has held numerous past positions at USAID, including in the management bureau, the Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance, and the Office of Transition Initiatives.

Josh Rogin covers national security and foreign policy and writes the daily Web column The Cable. His column appears bi-weekly in the print edition of The Washington Post. He can be reached for comments or tips at josh.rogin@foreignpolicy.com.

Previously, Josh covered defense and foreign policy as a staff writer for Congressional Quarterly, writing extensively on Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantánamo Bay, U.S.-Asia relations, defense budgeting and appropriations, and the defense lobbying and contracting industries. Prior to that, he covered military modernization, cyber warfare, space, and missile defense for Federal Computer Week Magazine. He has also served as Pentagon Staff Reporter for the Asahi Shimbun, Japan's leading daily newspaper, in its Washington, D.C., bureau, where he reported on U.S.-Japan relations, Chinese military modernization, the North Korean nuclear crisis, and more.

A graduate of George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs, Josh lived in Yokohama, Japan, and studied at Tokyo's Sophia University. He speaks conversational Japanese and has reported from the region. He has also worked at the House International Relations Committee, the Embassy of Japan, and the Brookings Institution.

Josh's reporting has been featured on CNN, MSNBC, C-Span, CBS, ABC, NPR, WTOP, and several other outlets. He was a 2008-2009 National Press Foundation's Paul Miller Washington Reporting Fellow, 2009 military reporting fellow with the Knight Center for Specialized Journalism and the 2011 recipient of the InterAction Award for Excellence in International Reporting. He hails from Philadelphia and lives in Washington, D.C. Twitter: @joshrogin

Tags: Barack Obama, Democracy, East Asia, Economic Development, Foreign & Public Diplomacy, Natural Disasters, South America, U.S. Congress, U.S. Foreign Policy, U.S. State Department

NEW FOR SUBSCRIBERS: Want to read more on this topic or region? Click + to receive email alerts when new stories are published on U.S. Foreign Policy U.S. Foreign Policy, Foreign & Public Diplomacy Foreign & Public Diplomacy, U.S. State Department U.S. State Department, South America South America, East Asia East Asia