What is left is 27 cents on each dollar to build roads and schools, prepare for elections, and repair decrepit water and electricity systems, the CSIS analysis concluded.
Administration officials called that breakdown "credible." Kolbe suggested that overhead and security costs swallowed half the $1.1 billion spent so far on reconstruction. As violence escalates, that percentage could get worse before it gets better.
"Little is being accomplished," said Rep. Nita M. Lowey (N.Y.), the ranking Democrat on the Appropriations foreign operations subcommittee. "The Iraqi people are not seeing much benefit."
Senior State Department officials are beginning to change course, Lowey acknowledged. Most of the $3.46 billion being shifted from large infrastructure programs will go toward training Iraqi security forces. But $380 million will be earmarked for economic reforms, private-sector development and agriculture programs. And $286 million will go to short-term "make-work" projects, enough to employ 800,000 Iraqis in short order, State Department officials say.
That would be a dramatic increase from the 74,770 Iraqis currently employed by the reconstruction effort, Mitchell said.
In the run-up to January's scheduled election in Iraq, U.S. authorities hope to inject $300 million to $400 million a month into Iraqi-identified projects and job-creation efforts. The success of that effort could have enormous consequences for pro-Western candidates as Iraqis go to the polls to elect the country's first democratic government.
But administration and congressional sources cautioned the shift may not work. A high-ranking official in the now-disbanded provisional government said occupation authorities set up a make-work program early on, aiming to hire 100,000 Iraqis to clean up canals, dig ditches and do other "messy, dirty" jobs as day laborers. At its height, 60,000 workers signed up.
"It's not like somebody slapped his forehead and said, 'Oh, short-term work creation is the way to do it,' " said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity at the request of his current employer. "We didn't do it as well as we wanted, but we did try."
In some cases, large U.S. contractors are employing Americans to do work that Iraqis could handle for a fraction of the cost, such as driving buses, the former occupation official said. But some reconstruction efforts will still have to stay in the hands of Western contractors, Kolbe said. "You can't do electrical distribution in little, decentralized projects," he said.
