Former President Bill Clinton played coy earlier this week when asked whether Paul Farmer would be tapped to lead the U.S. Agency for International Development.
"Clinton laughed and said that that wasn't his announcement to make," according to Lindsay Beyerstein, who asked the question at a meeting of Clinton with 20 progressive bloggers. When prodded, Clinton added that "he didn't know whether Farmer was in line for the job, but he praised Farmer lavishly calling him a ‘magnificent man' and holding up his work as an example to NGOs worldwide," according to Beyerstein.
Clinton suggested that public-private partnerships like the ones Farmer and his nonprofit Partners in Health helped to set up in Haiti "are a model for transforming" U.S. development assistance, the blogger recounts. Clinton, incidentally, happens to be United Nations special envoy to Haiti.
Rumors flared last month about Farmer being considered for USAID chief or an even more powerful position of development "czar," with oversight of the U.S. government's entire international development portfolio.
Six months into office, Obama has not taken any major steps, besides offering a 2010 budget proposal, to reform USAID, the Millennium Challenge Corp., the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief or any other programs that dole out foreign aid. This lack of action has prompted the ever-churning rumor mill to spit out several names as potential USAID chiefs. A few weeks ago, Washington insiders suggested that Wendy Sherman was Obama's pick to head the agency. More recently, however, one development source with close ties to the State Department told me that once the Farmer rumors began to circulate, Sherman began to look for other work.
If Farmer joined the Obama administration, he would have to abandon much of the work he does with Partners in Health, and give up his post as head of Harvard Medical School's Department of Global Health and Social Medicine - a job he accepted just weeks ago.
