U.S. Foreign Economic Policy Needs a Quarterback

Since the end of World War II, the United States and its allies have dominated the foreign aid and global trade landscape. This is no longer the case. The People’s Republic of China and its allies—through initiatives such as the Belt and Road Initiative, the Digital Silk Road, and, most recently the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization—increasingly play a major role. This is especially true in countries and regions critical to the supply chains on which the modern world depends, including critical minerals in Africa, agricultural inputs in Latin America, and digital infrastructure in Southeast Asia. As a result, developing countries now have a wider range of partners to choose from than in the past.

At the same time, the U.S. government bureaucracy that enables economic growth and investments abroad seems frozen in time, as if the United States remained the only game in town. Even after the restructuring of the U.S. government in 2025, the United States has yet to modernize its approach. A country or project owner looking to do business with the United States must navigate a Byzantine set of government agencies with overlapping—and at times contradictory—sets of investment and lending criteria and processes. To strengthen the U.S. offer to developing nations, this architecture must be streamlined and modernized.

One critical step the U.S. government could take is to empower the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) to be a more effective agency to lead on economic growth abroad. The three recommendations outlined below do not require dismantling any structure or process that works or adding expensive overhead, and they would make the United States a more competitive partner.

Overall, the United States does not lack tools for economic engagement overseas; it lacks a quarterback to call plays and coordinate action. This should be the MCC’s role.

Utilizing the MCC’s Missions as Deal Originators and On-the-Ground Coordinators

It is hard to call plays if you are not on the field. Of the U.S. government personnel remaining after the 2025 reorganization and streamlining, the MCC has the most significant and relevant in-country expertise necessary to become the on-the-ground play caller optimizing the value of remaining U.S. development personnel. Resident country mission (RCM) staff spend significant time in host countries, developing relationships that are vital to jointly design programs and ensure long-lasting development results.

The MCC’s evidence-based selection process and its reputation for credibility—cited in earlier CSIS analysis as a genuine competitive advantage against Beijing’s opaque lending—are wasted if they remain a Washington-only asset. An economic growth agency needs forward presence the same way a diplomatic corps needs embassies.

The Trump administration merged the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) into the State Department in part to better align foreign aid programs with U.S. foreign policy. But the reorganization did not consider that the State Department is built for diplomacy, not project origination, deal structuring, or performance-based financing. In contrast, the MCC has the two things an economic growth agency needs and USAID never fully built: (1) a transparent, replicable method for deciding where U.S. money should go, and (2) a legal form—the compact—that binds a foreign government to specific, auditable reforms in exchange for specific, auditable investment.

What the MCC lacks is sufficient widespread overseas presence to cover the full range of countries currently prioritized by this and future Administrations. Compacts are negotiated largely from Washington and through Millennium Challenge Account units embedded in partner governments. This is appropriate for compact implementation but only for compacts and compact countries. MCC lacks sufficient presence beyond the compact countries, leaving the United States without a standing, expert voice inside partner countries that can watch trends and represent the full range of U.S. economic tools.

Therefore, the authors propose equipping the MCC with actual field presence: small teams embedded in U.S. embassies or missions, staffed by economists, procurement specialists, and private sector liaisons. Ideally, these would be deployed as integrated teams with representatives from the other U.S. international development agencies. These units would not administer foreign aid line items. Instead, they would focus on three priorities:

1. Monitor and advise. MCC staff would track a partner country’s scorecard trajectory in real time rather than at the point of compact negotiation, giving Washington early warning when a country is sliding toward ineligibility.
2. Originate deals. MCC staff would serve as the on-the-ground eyes and ears for the Development Finance Corporation (DFC), Export-Import Bank of the United States (EXIM), and U.S. Trade and Development Agency (USTDA), surfacing bankable projects and connecting them to the right U.S. financing tool.
3. Represent U.S. economic policy coherently. MCC staff would give U.S. ambassadors and country teams a single, credible point of contact for the entirety of U.S. economic growth engagement, rather than forcing them to referee between MCC, DFC, USTDA, and Department of Commerce representatives.
    

Critics will object that this recommendation expands the MCC’s footprint and budget at a moment when the administration is looking to cut, not grow, government. However, this proposal reallocates resources and does not increase spending. It suggests cross-detailing DFC, USTDA, and Department of Commerce staff—including the economic officers and commercial attachés typically posted to an embassy—rather than hiring new personnel. Another avenue is to bring back some of the best assets that USAID had: the Foreign Service Nationals (FSNs). FSNs, local hires from partner countries, had the in-depth national, cultural, and private sector contacts desperately needed to make these programs work. FSNs also received locally competitive salaries, not the higher salaries of U.S. expatriates, and that money was spent in local economies. Moreover, embedding these teams in existing embassies or missions rather than standing up more RCMs saves on facilities costs as well.

What is clear is that the cost of doing nothing—ceding the field presence advantage to China—is higher than the cost of standing up lean, results-oriented MCC missions in a dozen strategically selected countries.

Making MCC’s Scorecard a Government-Wide Standard

A myriad of agencies and offices continue to set their own targets and scoring systems for how to spend taxpayer money. The U.S. government needs a common scorecard. The Interagency Country Risk Analysis System (ICRAS) offers a model and a way forward. ICRAS, a framework provided by the Office of Management and Budget and overseen by EXIM, produces sovereign and country risk ratings used across the export credit and development finance community, including EXIM and the DFC, to price the credit risks of loans, guarantees, and insurance products. Rather than every agency building its own country risk playbook from scratch, the government converged on one methodology that everyone could rely on, adjust for their own purposes, and defend to Congress and to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).

MCC’s scorecard can play the same role for economic readiness and reform. It already includes over 20 indicators covering economic freedom, human capital investment, and rule of law, using independent third-party data rather than self-reported government statistics. MCC updates the scoring and methodology annually, makes it publicly available, and has successfully used if for two decades, surviving congressional and OMB scrutiny across multiple presidential administrations. If anything, the scorecard has gained in credibility over the years. By building on this firm foundation, U.S. government agencies working on international economic development could create a definitive scorecard that would inform their own decisionmaking, provide transparency to congressional and OMB overseers, and build the case to the public for why the resulting deals provide real value to the taxpayer.

Currently, the U.S. government underutilizes the MCC scorecard: DFC develops its own country strategies, USTDA has its own commercial diplomacy calendar, EXIM applies its economic impact and content requirements, and the International Trade Administration (ITA) at the U.S. Department of Commerce has its own market intelligence process. That is, four different agencies have four different lenses through which to evaluate development success. Uniting around the MCC scorecard in an ICRAS-style convergence would not require any agency to cede statutory decisionmaking authority. ICRAS does not tell EXIM or the DFC what to approve; it gives them a common, defensible baseline onto which they layer their own judgment. The same model should apply here: An expanded MCC scorecard, to include indicators on critical minerals, digital infrastructure, and supply chain resilience, should become the baseline reference for the DFC, EXIM, USTDA, and Department of Commerce to consult.

The benefits compound quickly. A common scorecard means a country that improves its governance and economic openness sees that improvement register simultaneously across every U.S. agency’s radar. It means Congress gets one clear, consistent story about why the United States has chosen to engage or not engage with a given country. And it means the U.S. government can finally answer, in a single chart, the question competitors such as China cannot easily answer for themselves: which developing countries represent the best return on U.S. public capital, judged by a transparent and independent methodology rather than political favor or bureaucratic momentum.

A Coordinated, Not Just Adjacent, Economic Engagement

Prior CSIS analysis argued that the MCC could become the DFC’s “investment origination and project preparation arm.” While reasonable to consider, this need not be the only path forward. Moreover, it should not happen before a more urgent and more achievable reform is undertaken: establishing formal, structured coordination among all of the relevant agencies.

Currently, a company or foreign government looking to do business with the U.S. government faces a maze of agencies that it needs to navigate. The DFC provides loans, guarantees, political risk insurance, and equity. EXIM provides export credit financing to support U.S. exporters. USTDA funds feasibility studies, reverse trade missions, and early-stage project preparation designed to generate demand for U.S. equipment and services. The ITA runs the Commercial Service network and coordinates broader U.S. trade promotion policy. The MCC provides grant-based, compact-bound investment tied to policy reform. Each of these has a distinct legal authority, risk appetite, and constituency in Congress. That diversity of tools is a genuine U.S. strength when well-orchestrated and well understood by people both inside and outside government. When it is left uncoordinated and opaque, people and opportunities get lost—something China’s centralized economic diplomacy and bureaucratic apparatus does not face.

Coordination should happen at two levels simultaneously: (1) policy reform (compacts) and project identification and origination (scorecard and country analysis), and (2) field presence. The MCC is well positioned to anchor both because it touches every stage of the pipeline:

• In Washington, the MCC should coordinate a set of “deal teams” with team members from the DFC, USTDA, EXIM, and Department of Commerce meeting on a fixed cadence to review a shared pipeline of country opportunities. These deal teams need real decisionmaking authority grounded in a shared analytical baseline—the MCC scorecard—and a highly placed convener with credibility across the development and commercial finance communities alike (e.g., someone at the undersecretary level or higher).
• In-country, the MCC missions described above should function as the informal secretariat for U.S. economic engagement on the ground, ensuring that when the USTDA funds a feasibility study, the DFC and EXIM already know about the resulting project before it needs financing. This will also ensure that that Department of Commerce Commercial Service officers know which sectors an MCC compact is targeting so U.S. firms can be alerted early.
   

This kind of coordination costs little and yields an outsized return in coherence. It also directly answers a frequent congressional and OMB critique of U.S. international economic engagement: that it often becomes fragmented, duplicative, and difficult to evaluate as a portfolio. A coordinated, commonly scored pipeline gives Congress a single, auditable answer to the question of what the United States is doing, where, and why.

Conclusion

If the Foreign Assistance Review of 2025 was a brush fire that swept away decades of bureaucratic scope creep, then during the next Congress leaders have a chance to set the architecture of the future. Living up to the administration’s stated goals of uniting foreign policy and foreign assistance requires making subtle but important shifts in the culture, processes, and systems of the agencies that make up that architecture. The reforms presented here do not require substantial new investments, changes in legislation, or reorganizations. Instead, they make better use of existing assets, especially in the MCC’s existing in-country staff, and lay the foundation for ongoing and cohesive coordination. Together, these three reforms would take the tools and assets of a narrowly used agency and create an “air traffic control center” for U.S. developing-world economic engagement.

Global economic growth remains in the United States’ interest and is an area where the United States can make a difference if it adheres to sound development principles. The principles of the MCC—country ownership, transparency, and accountability for results—provide the foundation upon which the United States can build the infrastructure of prosperity at home and abroad.

Richard Crespin is a senior associate (non-resident) with the Project on Prosperity and Development at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C. John Simon is a senior adviser (non-resident) with the Project on Prosperity and Development at CSIS.