In 1947, he served in the President's Commission on Foreign Aid as Assistant Executive Secretary, and was consultant to the United States House of Representatives.
[3] In 1954, Millikan and Walt Whitman Rostow made important recommendations to President Dwight Eisenhower regarding US foreign aid for development.
In August 1954, Rostow and Millikan convinced Eisenhower to massively increase US foreign aid for development as part of a policy of spreading American-style capitalist economic growth in Asia and elsewhere, backed by the military.
In the weeks after the 1960 election, the study group at Colorado State University, released their feasibility a few days before Kennedy's Presidential Inauguration in January 1961.
The idea was popular among students, however, and Kennedy pursued it, asking respected academics such as Millikan and Chester Bowles to help him outline the organization and its goals.
In the 1960s, Millikan made some contribution the emerging theory of developmentalism, the attempts to codify the ways in which development is discussed on an international level.
This way, societies can be discussed comparatively without the impediments associated with placing developmental disparities across nations in completely different categories of speech and thought.
This school of thought produced such works as Talcott Parsons and Edward Shils's Toward A General Theory of Action; Clifford Geertz's Old Societies and New States; and Donald L.M.