Incoming chairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla., said she is pushing to slash State Department and foreign aid budgets.

"I will work to restore fiscal discipline to foreign affairs, reform troubled programs and organizations and exercise vigorous oversight to identify waste," Ros-Lehtinen said last week.

Pre-empting them in the funding debate, the State Department raised the issue this week when it released its first-ever Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review, or QDDR — a plan to advance the US foreign policy mission abroad.

The review examines the roles of the State Department, Defense Department and the US Agency for International Development, and cites the need for more collaboration among agencies and an increased role for USAID.

“In Washington, interdepartmental turf wars start not with a bang but a paper,” Mother Jones magazine noted this week.  “For Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, there's a pivotal skirmish brewing over development and diplomacy policy. In Clinton's corner are the State Department and the US Agency for International Development. But across the ring lurks Bob Gates’ Defense Department, the undisputed heavyweight champ of intra-governmental cage fights.”

Clinton is selling the QDDR as a first step towards restoring balance in the defense/diplomacy relationship.

The QDDR is the controversial paper in question.  It offers a number of suggestions for cutting costs, and argues for increasing the authority of US diplomats and aid officers around the world. The end goal: to transform (or restore, depending on whom you talk to) USAID's position as the preeminent aid delivery organization in the world.

The document calls for hiring 5,500 new foreign and civil service officers and granting expanded authority to current officers.

“But the report also represents Clinton's steely determination to wrest control of civilian-driven projects back from a Pentagon that has absorbed the lion's share of the development-related burden over the past decade,” notes Mother Jones.

Clinton points out that the US spends twelve times as much on defense as it does on development, and that's not likely to change. And the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have forced American soldiers into moonlighting as ambassadors and development experts. Clinton pointed out that both the Bush and Obama administrations have, over time, ceded control of diplomacy and development to the Pentagon.

But before civilians can win back territory from the military, State and USAID probably need to improve their own operations with better coordination and smarter management—if only to overcome the skepticism of foreign aid critics on Capitol Hill, such as Ros-Lehtinen, who has called for cuts in foreign assistance overseen by the State Department.

Anthony Cordesman, of the DC-based Center for Strategic and International Studies and a national security analyst for ABC News, responded with a scathing new report about how State's QDDR “does not address the failures in the top leadership of USAID and State that left the US military without effective civilian partners for much of the Iraq and Afghan conflicts.”

Cordesman, the recipient of the Department of Defense Distinguished Service, writes:  “There are times to be polite about a dismal bureaucratic failure. Wartime is not one of them.”

“TThe QDDR ignores years of reporting on these problems by the Special Inspector General for Iraqi Reconstruction (SIGIR), and recent reporting by the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR). It equally ignores a wide range of reporting by the GAO and various departmental inspector generals, and years of reporting by Congressional Staffs,” writes Cordesman.

“The QDDR should have been a frank and critical effort that examined case studies in the failure to plan for effective civil and stability operations before each war, to execute effective civil operations during the initial invasions, and to develop and improve programs in the years that followed.  Instead it fails to address problems that have denied the military the civil partners they need to effectively support both wars,” he notes.

Foreign Policy Magazine is kinder, noting the report is “a year behind schedule,” says it is no surprise that it turns out to be more of a “public relations document than a disciplined strategic review. Yet if it doesn't score a bull-eye, the QDDR at least hits an outer ring by describing an ambitious and needed reform agenda.”

Addressing the workforce, it says the QDDR takes on perhaps the biggest weakness of  America’s foreign affairs establishment. “Foreign Service Officers (FSOs) may be the department’s elite, but they must suffer a dysfunctional personnel system and inadequate training. Many go to post with little more than an orientation course since there is no congressionally authorized training float. Acquiring languages and skills comes second. Treated as lesser cousins, civil servants can hardly fill in with no career track and limited opportunities to train or serve overseas,” notes Foreign Policy. Mid-level vacancies seldom open up to outside hires, limiting the acquisition of talent,” notes Foreign Policy. 

Despite all this, the State Department Director of Policy Planning, Anne-Marie Slaughter, said the review should get a good reception in Congress. "Many of the things the new members are calling for, we've been focusing on. How can we work better? How can we streamline?