Peter Marocco, a Trump political appointee hired in early July by the U.S. Agency for International Development to run its conflict prevention bureau, is seeking to ramp up funding for programs to defend Christian minorities while shortchanging initiatives designed to help countries such as Bosnia and Ukraine survive transitions to democracy.
The effort—if successful—would mark a dramatic shift in priorities for USAID’s new Bureau for Conflict Prevention and Stabilization, launched last year to promote peace building and conflict prevention in countries undergoing political transition. Marocco’s effort to rewrite the bureau’s mandate and slash its overall funding not only threatens to hamstring the new bureau’s operations, former officials say, but it could put USAID on a collision course with leading Democrats and Republicans in Congress who helped drive the creation of the conflict prevention bureau to nurture delicate political transitions.
