Competing for Foreign Aid : The Congressional Roots of Bureaucratic Fragmentation

Every year, the United States authorizes dozens of bureaucracies to craft and implement foreign policy.This fragmentation of authority can result in chaos and infighting when agencies fail to communicate or outright undermine each other.Conventional wisdom considers the president to be the primary actor in US foreign policy, overlooking the extent of this bureaucratic turmoil.Why does the US government create a foreign policy apparatus that is so fragmented as to undermine its own leadership?In Competing for Foreign Aid, Shannon P.Carcelli argues that bureaucratic fragmentation is an unintended byproduct of the foreign policy-making process.To unpack the black box of foreign policy, Carcelli traces Congress's role in policy incoherence, infighting, and fragmentation in the realm of foreign aid policy.Rather than a centrally driven plan, she explains that foreign policy is better understood as an uneasy compromise between domestic interests that do not always align with ideological or e