Report Contents
Summary of Review
The Department of State’s (Department) Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) designs and implements international educational, professional, and cultural exchange programs for both Americans and foreigners. In early 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic became widespread, ECA was managing more than 100 active exchange programs involving approximately 4,500 Americans overseas and more than 7,500 foreign nationals in the United States.
OIG conducted this review to assess how ECA responded from March 2020 through January 2021 to the risk management challenges associated with the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on its exchange programs. Specifically, OIG reviewed ECA’s immediate crisis response, including the repatriation of thousands of exchange program participants; the effects of the crisis on ECA’s budget and grants administration; and the effects of the crisis on exchange program operations.
OIG found that ECA’s extensive experience in responding to previous country-specific emergencies, including the need to evacuate and repatriate exchange program participants, helped prepare it to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. The bureau responded early to the pandemic’s escalating spread, sharing information broadly with U.S. embassies, partners, and participants. ECA effectively used the experiences of the first program terminations and participant repatriations that began in late January 2020 in China to inform its crisis preparation posture globally. Although some initial ECA guidance to U.S. embassies on the status of overseas U.S. academic exchange program participants created confusion, the bureau addressed this issue in subsequent messaging.
ECA successfully repatriated thousands of exchange participants, both to and from the United States, in a timely manner. By March 20, 2020—just a week after ECA suspended all exchange programs globally—the bureau had assisted more than 2,500 Americans in returning to the United States. By summer 2020, final repatriation numbers included approximately 4,000 Americans returned to the United States and 5,000 foreign nationals returned to their home countries. ECA’s early decision to coordinate its pandemic response through a bureau-wide task force, established on January 27, 2020, was key to its success. ECA’s effort to repatriate American citizen exchange participants benefited from whole-of-government clarity about the existing authorities and available means for meeting this core Department consular function. However, OIG found that ECA’s responsibility to assist the thousands of foreign national exchange participants in the United States under its auspices was more challenging because it lacked that same clarity of authorities and means.
ECA canceled, postponed, or altered all FY 2020 in-person exchange programs not already completed by March 2020. As a result, ECA ended FY 2020 with an unprecedented $93.4 million in carryover and recovered funds. At a virtual offsite in December 2020, the bureau decided to repurpose these funds for evaluation, technology development, virtual programming, and alumni engagement. In addition, OIG found that ECA used the flexibility provided by the Office of Management and Budget’s March 2020 COVID-19 guidance on grants administration to help mitigate the pandemic’s effect on its grantees and partner organizations. ECA issued 89 pandemic-related amendments to awards from March 18 to December 29, 2020, mostly no-cost extensions to the period of performance or no-cost changes in scope as programs moved from in-person programming to virtual formats.
The move to virtual platforms allowed many programs to continue either fully or partially. OIG found that the bureau’s increased use of virtual technologies since 2013 left it well prepared to meet the soaring demand for virtual exchange programs during the pandemic. Ninety-five percent of respondents to an OIG survey sent to public diplomacy staff in U.S. embassies said the bureau assisted them in moving to virtual programs, including through training, while also assisting program participants who lacked viable internet access or had connectivity problems. The consensus of both ECA and embassy staff was that virtual programs cannot replace in-person programs, but the pandemic experience yielded lessons learned that will strengthen future programming.
This report does not contain any recommendations.1
1 Although this report does not contain any recommendations, OIG provided a draft of this report to Department stakeholders for their review and comment on the findings. The Department provided technical comments that were incorporated into the report, as appropriate.