The FCDO was created in 2020 after Boris Johnson shut down the Department for International Development (DFID) and merged it with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.
The FCDO’s predecessor was closed amid intense parliamentary and auditor scrutiny, including reports of the agency's “difficulties” in assessing performance, impact and “value for money” stemming from:
lack of effective oversight, leading to scandals like the 2018 revelations of Oxfam staff using aid money to hire prostitutes in Haiti and Chad and trying to cover it up. The DFID had an array of partnerships with the semi-independent confederation of NGOs, and warned at the time that Oxfam's funding could be cut off if abuse and vetting claims were not accounted for.
waste from lack of planning on the “optimal uses of resources,” including millions spent on consultants and contractors engaged in profiteering (the 2017 Adam Smith International scandal serving as a prime example).
In its five years as a leviathan combined foreign ministry and aid office, the FCDO has racked up its own share of controversy, including:
sending aid to countries in Africa and Ukraine accused of rights abuses and the embezzlement of donor funds (Ukraine alone got £796 mln - $986 mln US, in ‘humanitarian’ and ‘governance’ aid from 2021-2023).
scrutiny of a government pledge to spend 0.5% of GDP on foreign aid despite funding crises facing services like the National Health Service.
the ballooning of Britain’s asylum aid budget from £500 mln ($620 mln) in 2019 to £4.3 bln ($5.33 bln) in 2023, which ex-administrator Mark Lowcock said late last year made it ripe for “scam and scandal” akin to the corrupt Covid-era PPE contracts doled out to Prime Minister Johnson's friends.
systemic underreporting of money lost to fraud (£2.2 mln ($2.7 mln), or 0.02%, in 2020-2021) despite evidence of misuse of far more than that (including £2 mln+ ($2.4 mln) lost in Sierra Leone alone in a diesel fuel purchasing scandal, or £3.5 bln ($4.33 bln) in wasted aid in Afghanistan from 2020-2020).
funding alongside USAID of partners like Relief International, which was accused in 2021 of making payments to a mystery “armed opposition group in a conflict zone” somewhere in the Middle East, giving rise to concerns about the integrity of Western aid agencies' partnerships and the risks of terror funding.