40 years of DAI

to development policy, but no change in the
funding situation. The new USAID Administrator,
Brian Atwood, soon found himself mired in
a prolonged battle to salvage the agency when
adversaries on Capitol Hill, notably Senator
Jesse Helms, were emboldened by the Republican
victories in the 1994 elections. Calling foreign
assistance “money going down a rathole,”
they tried to fold USAID into the State Department.
The budget crunch got so severe that
Atwood’s management team had to implement
several “reductions in force” that further eroded
USAID’s in-house technical capacity. With its
main client struggling against the tide, DAI’s
management took a cautious view of the market.
Its 1994 strategic plan predicted that the
company would soon have to make do within “a
context of stable or even declining revenues,” a
discouraging message after revenues had more
than doubled (from $20 million to $45 million) in
the first four years of the decade.
In-depth evaluation of projects in the field had
long been one of DAI’s strengths, but now, as
the company examined its own systems and
culture, the results were unsettling. In the past,
management had been able to keep morale
high, weather minor variations in the business
cycle, and adapt the company’s structure to fit
the personal idiosyncrasies of staff. But these
informal processes no longer sufficed in a time
of heightened uncertainty, for a much larger
enterprise. After a subpar financial year in 1994,
DAI entered 1995 with a fairly austere budget.
Mickelwait, Barclay, and the Board were all
concerned about the imbalance between bill-
Photo by Joanne Kent, DAI
Longtime DAIer
Bruce Spake headed
up the Bosnia
Reconstruction
Finance Facility,
which was profiled
for readers of
DAI’s newsletter
Developments in
1996.
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