November 13, 2024, Washington D.C. - The Truman Center is pleased to announce our new report: Room for Improvement: The Public-Private Sector Nexus in International Crisis Preparedness & Response. The report highlights how, when responding to large international crises, the federal government struggles to effectively engage and integrate offers of assistance from the private sector – and makes recommendations to address the breakdown.  In instances such as the evacuation of allies from Afghanistan and supporting Ukrainian refugees following Russia’s invasion, significant private sector resources that could have been used to bolster federal government objectives were left underutilized.

The report highlights lessons and makes recommendations for the incoming administration to consider. It is authored by Courtney Brown, a Visiting Senior Fellow with the Truman Center who has spent more than 20 years working on the frontlines of crises in dozens of countries worldwide, for the federal government and in the private sector. In the report, Brown identifies several reasons for the coordination gap, including the absence of a U.S. government lead agency with a mandate tied exclusively to private sector engagement in the midst of crises; limited engagement between public and private sectors to coordinate and actively prepare for international crises; and the federal government’s ad-hoc, task force approach to crisis management, which doesn’t allow for whole-of-government learning from one response to be systematically captured and applied to the next.

The report makes three recommendations to strengthen the public private interface in crisis preparation and response:

• Create a U.S.government entity focused exclusively on private sector engagement in crisis preparedness and response
• Address long-standing operational challenges that hamstring more constructive public-private engagement through a robust crisis preparedness approach
• Learn from other public-private crisis preparedness models globally, which showcase unique partnerships and approaches between public and private sector actors in especially disaster-prone countries

Room for Improvement is available for download here.