The Cable
Names: Radelet from State to USAID
Steve Radelet, who joined the State Department last January to be Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s top advisor on development, is moving over to USAID to be their first Chief Economist since the 1990s. Radelet left his post as a senior fellow the Center for Global Development to help Clinton during the development of the ...
Steve Radelet, who joined the State Department last January to be Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s top advisor on development, is moving over to USAID to be their first Chief Economist since the 1990s.
Radelet left his post as a senior fellow the Center for Global Development to help Clinton during the development of the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review, which was unveiled earlier this month. While at State he co-led the QDDR task force on aid effectiveness and helped stand up the Feed the Future Initiative, a huge program that will be transferred to USAID as part of the QDDR implementation. The Chief Economist job at USAID is new.
"The new position of Chief Economist (CE) will help establish USAID as a global leader for innovative policy analysis, research, and implementation," read an internal USAID email about Radelet’s move, obtained by The Cable. Radelet will be part of the senior management team and report director to USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah.
According to the email, the job will have four functions:
1. Building USAID’s capacity to conduct rigorous economic analysis, especially macroeconomic analysis,
2. Developing a network of leading economic researchers and development economists,
3. Cultivating a new generation of economists and research analysts at the Agency, and
4. Providing strategic and analytical support to USAID’s work in priority countries, and implementation of Presidential Initiatives and the Presidential Policy Directive.
Before working at CGD, Radelet was a founding co-chair of the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network. He was Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Africa, the Middle East, and Asia from 2000 to 2002.
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