A hot seat for the World Bank's new president
In the 10 months that Paul Wolfowitz has been president of the World Bank, there's been a whole lot of sniping going on.
The bill of particulars drawn up against him by some career bank staffers, sometimes in passionate denunciation, goes something like this: too much reliance on a few crafty conservative Republicans he brought with him; too little use of the bank's brainy economists, senior managers, and technocrats; and too much emphasis on corruption-busting to the exclusion of development.
Wolfowitz, the former No. 2 official in the U.S. Department of Defense, is shaking things up at the World Bank, a pivotal player in the global war on poverty. Simply put, it's the entrenched bureaucracy, or the old guard, versus the reformers, or new guard, in this case Wolfowitz and his inner circle.
"This is the empire striking back," says Robert Holland, the U.S. representative on the 24-member bank executive board, in describing Wolfowitz's critics.
But to some old bank hands, it's not quite that simple. Top managers with years of development experience, they say, have lost influence and power on Wolfowitz's watch.
Jean-Louis Sarbib, a bank vice president, argues that the Wolfowitz team has unfairly tarred many staffers with the brush of corruption.
"The backlash is because people feel that there has been too much of an implication that corruption is rampant," Sarbib said in an interview, "and for a lot of staff this really does not jibe with their experience with the place."
However this conflict plays out, it is clear that Wolfowitz doesn't have confidence in some of the bank's top managers and that they, in turn, don't have much use for him and his inner circle. Not only that, but he's taking flak from some on the bank's executive board, which is composed of directors from various countries and oversees day-to-day operations. One reason: his decision to withhold funds from some borrowers that bank investigators have implicated in alleged corruption schemes.
The World Bank is the premier multilateral development institution in the world, one of five such organizations operating in developing countries. It provides more than $20 billion annually in loans and grants to needy countries.
Many bank-funded projects, operating in lands controlled by dictators, are riddled with corruption. Wolfowitz became the bank's president last June. Following in the steps of his immediate predecessor, James Wolfensohn, he launched an aggressive campaign against corruption.
Wolfowitz's heavy reliance on an inner circle of Republican advisers who have had no prior bank experience has generated controversy. These strategists include Kevin Kellems, who shadows Wolfowitz wherever he goes and tends to his image, and a policy aide named Robin Cleveland.
Both Kellems and Cleveland worked on Capitol Hill. Kellems also served as an adviser to Wolfowitz at the Defense Department and was a spokesman for Vice President Cheney.
Cleveland, who worked closely with Wolfowitz as a senior budget official under President Bush, takes the brunt of the criticism. Staffers who asked not to be identified say she is heavy-handed and does not listen to other viewpoints. "I can't see how he [Wolfowitz] makes a success of his presidency as long as Robin Cleveland is there," says a longtime bank staffer.
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