Departing aid chief scolds US on its global role By John Donnelly, Globe Staff, 07/09/99 WASHINGTON - From J. Brian Atwood's perspective, two numbers out of Washington are combining to send a dangerous message to the world: The Clinton administration's forecast of a $1 trillion budget surplus and Congress's refusal to repay $1 billion in UN dues. Atwood, the Wareham, Mass., native who leaves his job today as US foreign aid chief, said in an interview yesterday that the world's disfranchised increasingly are looking at ever-richer America as "arrogant" for hoarding its bounty. After overseeing the Agency for International Development during a six-year decline of funding for foreign assistance, Atwood will head international development programs at Boston's Citizens Energy Corp. beginning in August. But Atwood, 56, has been using the last days of his government pulpit to speak with a degree of candor rarely heard in official Washington. He called the government's foreign affairs budget a "joke," blaming Congress for whittling foreign assistance in the AID budget from $7.5 billion in 1993 to $6.9 billion last year and for cutting agency staff by a third. He has said no one is speaking out about the troubling global trend of a widening gap between rich and poor. Further US aid cuts could hinder the push for emerging democracies because fewer people are reaping democracy's fruits, he said. Atwood took the job at Citizens Energy, which was founded by former US representative Joseph P. Kennedy II, after realizing that his nomination as US ambassador to Brazil never would come up for a vote before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Senator Jesse Helms, the North Carolina Republican who is chairman of the panel, and Atwood had long feuded over the senator's plan to merge AID into the State Department. In his spacious office in the Ronald Reagan Building, which still had pictures on the walls yesterday, Atwood said he hoped his words would inspire development professionals and perhaps a presidential candidate or two to raise the issue of helping the less fortunate. "When someone leaves a job like this, they all of a sudden have a platform. It is important to try to provoke people into thinking about what is right and what is wrong. ... It just seems to me that I have almost an obligation to speak out. There are probably no other voices in this town that are going to speak out on behalf of the poor around the world." The United States, he said, "needs to be shaken out of our lethargy" and begin helping the world's poorest. "We'll be lost if we don't, and the resentment toward the US will only grow." He urged the United States to immediately pay back its UN debt without conditions. The Senate has passed a bill that would earmark $800 million for the United Nations as long as the body reduced the US contribution to 20 percent from 25 percent of the UN's budget. With the predicted $1 trillion US surplus, Atwood recommended putting $10 billion a year for five years toward development in the neediest parts of the world. Atwood, a career diplomat long connected to the Democratic Party, said he wasn't upset about leaving Washington this way. His new job, he said, would keep him doing the work he enjoys most. This month, Kennedy and Atwood plan to travel to Angola and Nigeria to help steer corporations toward development projects. People want to portray him as angry, "but I really don't feel that way," Atwood said. "It was just fate. It wasn't meant for me to go to Brazil at this time. I was prepared to go. I was excited about going. But what I'm going to be doing in Boston is, I think, going to be more important. ... If I went to Brazil, no one would hear my voice on these issues." This story ran on page A02 of the Boston Globe on 07/09/99.
