Materials in this section provide a bird's eye view of how millions of American taxpayer dollars were used to help the nations of Central and Eastern Europe promote democratic forms of planning at the national and local levels and to transition to market economies. They provides a wealth of information on how the U.S. Department of Labor and the U. S. Agency for International Development used Support for East European Democracy (SEED) Act funds passed by Congress to conceptualize, design and implement technical assistance and training programs in Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Macedonia, and Ukraine, and some World Bank funded projects in Romania and Serbia from 1993 - 2004.

Beginning in 1991, after the fall of the Iron Curtain and the demise of the Soviet Union, the USDOL was among the first U.S. federal agencies to use SEED Act funds to provide technical assistance to governments in the Central and Eastern European region transition from centrally-planned economies to market economies. The USDOL initiated projects to help the new governments create: western style employment services; learn about western style labor-management relations and dispute resolution practices and cooperative approaches to collective bargaining; assist the governments in dealing with the unemployment problems created by privatizing inefficient state-owned industries; help workers displaced in the process; and to assist national and community leaders in affected communities learn about and implement community planning and local economic development concepts and design and implement local economic development projects.

These materials also provide insights about how difficult it has been to provide technical assistance to CEE governments. They also illuminate some of the problems and issues related to the practice of federal government bureaucrats and politicians outsourcing technical assistance to the private sector in order to reduce the numbers of federal employees.