From the article:
Merging the two offices, which often operate in the same crisis contexts, is an idea that has been floating around USAID for at least a year. In 2016, during the Obama administration, the agency hired the consulting firm McKinsey to conduct a study of what a potential merger might look like and what its implications would be.
Jeremy Konyndyk, now a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, directed USAID’s Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance at that time.
“It was starting out from a recognition that using food [versus] non-food as an organizing principle for humanitarian assistance within USAID didn’t make a lot of sense,” Konyndyk said.
The OFDA leads the U.S. government’s interagency response efforts for complex disasters. Past examples have included the Ebola virus outbreak in West Africa, the Nepal earthquake, and Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines. The Office of Food for Peace was created in 1948 and engages in development and emergency relief to improve food security and provide food assistance during and after disasters.
Konyndyk explained that USAID deals with an overlapping set of challenges in responding to complex emergencies. Programs focused on livelihoods, water and sanitation, health, food assistance and other kinds of support must intersect and mutually reinforce each other.
“Having two distinct entities running humanitarian assistance, whose missions often bumped into each other, didn’t seem optimal,” he said.
Under current budget levels, merging the two offices could create an entity within USAID that oversees close to $4 billion in disaster and food assistance programming, making it larger than all of the agency’s existing bureaus, other than global health.