Emblazoned on the front page of the January 14, 1945 issue of Ja'far Pishevari’s daily newspaper Azhir read an ominous warning: “Azerbaijanis! Gilanis! Shirazis! Isfahanis! And all the residents of Mazandaran and every other province of Iran! Be aware that all your parliamentary representatives with the exception of but a few are only thinking of filling their own pockets. Some, like Saqatoleslami and Sartip Zadeh have even reduced themselves to the base rank of dealers for Dr. Millspaugh!” Granted extraordinary powers over the financial levers of the Iranian state in 1942, Dr. Arthur C. Millspaugh would coordinate the work of several dozen American economic advisors in Iran until the ignominious termination of his mission in early 1945. In so doing, Millspaugh would land in the crosshairs of popular Iranian nationalist and leftist publications like Azhir due to ongoing food shortages and hyperinflation brought about by the joint British-Soviet-American occupation of the country. While much of the historiography on the Iranian experience of the Second World War has focused on parliamentary infighting in Tehran and rise of the Tudeh party in the wake of the Allied occupation, this paper turns to the overlooked provincial concerns alluded to in Pishevari’s editorial proclamation, illustrating how policy planning directives from Millspaugh and the Ministry of Finance in Tehran were received, acted upon, and contested on the ground. Employing a diverse range of sources – including the personal papers of Millspaugh’s team members, declassified records from the Censorship Branch of the U.S. Army’s Persian Gulf Command, as well as published debates in the Iranian press and Majlis – the paper demonstrates how American provincial agents under the auspices of the Millspaugh mission collaborated and clashed with local elites in orchestrating a range of policies aimed at developing the Iranian economy: from distributing millet seed to sharecropping farmers in Mazandaran to deregulating the trucking industry in Ahwaz. In examining these and other local instantiations of American development policy, the paper thereby brings to light the transnational dimensions of 20th century Iranian regional history while also helping to de-center an overweening emphasis on the central state in broader analyses of historical developmental processes.