US Senator Jeanne Shaheen of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee has opposed the Department of Government Efficiency’s effort to dismantle the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC).
Issuing a press statement, he said that since its establishment under President George W Bush over 20 years ago, the MCC has a proven track record of delivering economically transformative, transparent and accountable returns on foreign assistance through its projects, helping partner countries such as Kosovo and Senegal strengthen their democratic institutions and reduce their dependency on aid in the long-term. “The Millennium Challenge Corporation is a bipartisan, independent government agency established in law by Congress to reduce global poverty through economic growth,” he said.
Just last year, Congress passed, and President Biden signed into law, a bipartisan bill that expands MCC’s pool of eligible candidate countries. MCC is a necessary tool to counter China’s Belt and Road Initiative and dismantling it will open the door for the PRC to further exploit and capitalize on America’s retreat, as it has with Nepal, he said. “This destructive dismantling of MCC does nothing to make America stronger; it only harms our economic and national security interests.”
Meanwhile, for the current fiscal year, MCA-Nepal has a budget of Rs 13.36bn. Of this amount,
Rs 9.9bn would be funded by the MCC and the remaining Rs 3.45bn would be borne from internal sources.
However, after MCA-Nepal did not spend the budget, about 58 percent of the budget has been returned to the Ministry of Finance. Not only in the current fiscal year but also in the last fiscal year, MCA-Nepal’s expenditure was unsatisfactory. MCA-Nepal had spent only about 30 percent of the total budget for the last fiscal year and returned the remaining 70 percent of the budget.
The government had allocated Rs 10.84bn for the last fiscal year to spend on projects under MCA-Nepal, out of which Rs 7.60bn was returned. The budget could not be spent as per the target as the compensation distribution and acquisition of land required for the construction of the power transmission line has slowed down.
MCA-Nepal is among the agencies returning the highest amounts under capital expenditures.
