News, information, and occasional comments about the U.S. Foreign Service are posted here, to keep readers of Career Diplomacy current on what has happened since the book went to press.
We redesigned and relaunched this website in October 2010. We added this section, which includes as archived material all the information posted the old “Updates” page. In the year since the last post to that page, the forces pushing for change in the foreign service have met obstacles that may or may not be overcome. Developments in three areas deserve close attention: the foreign service at war, the budget, and the State-USAID relationship.
The foreign service at war: At the end of 2005, when security in Iraq was deteriorating rapidly, the president directed the State Department to “coordinate and lead integrated United States Government efforts, involving all U.S. Department and Agencies with relevant capabilities, to prepare, plan for and conduct stabilization and reconstruction activities” in Iraq and around the world (NSPD-44).
The Department and the foreign service lacked the people and the skills for this assignment. The effort to correct the most obvious deficiencies began almost immediately and continues to this day.
The most obvious deficiency was a shortage of personnel. To fill the rapidly expanding number of positions in Iraq, and later Afghanistan and Pakistan, the Department stripped people from lower-priority assignments, leaving close to 20 percent of all foreign service positions vacant.
Work in Iraq and Afghanistan in provincial reconstruction teams (PRTs), which in most cases were joint civilian-military operations, also exposed a lack of foreign service skills in a number of areas. Few foreign service officers were fluent in Arabic, Pashto, or Dari. Although the foreign service had some recent experience in stabilization and reconstruction, notably in Bosnia, the scale and security issues were quite different. So too was the need for coordination among the many disparate elements—combat troops, reservists, contractors, civil servants, coalition partners, non-governmental organizations—involved in efforts to establish security, rebuild the local economy, and create new political institutions.
Training to fill these gaps is a difficult process that must be sustained for many years. Learning from failure and success, and applying those lessons on the ground, is slow, and what works in one situation may not work in another.
The State Department and the Congress established an office of the coordinator for reconstruction and stabilization (CRS, reporting directly to the Secretary of State and hence called S/CRS), in 2004. The president’s 2005 directive singled out the office for a leadership role in nation-building, but budgetary support from the Congress, and bureaucratic support from the Secretary, were sketchy at best. Even as the State Department takes full control of the stabilization and reconstruction effort in Iraq, closing most of the PRTs and converting others to consulates or embassy branch offices, the future of the office remains uncertain.
Budget: Driven by the exposure of deficiencies and continuing demand for a high level of performance in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, the State Department and USAID in late 2007 began to plan large increases in their staffs, especially in foreign service personnel.
The State Department hiring program, called Diplomacy 3.0 (after the foreign-policy trinity of diplomacy, development, and defense), calls for hiring about 3,500 foreign service officers and 2,200 foreign service specialists in fiscal years 2009 through 2014. After normal attrition, this hiring surge would increase State’s foreign service contingent by 25 percent, to about 15,000, from around 12,000 at the end of FY 2009. USAID for its part plans to double its foreign service officer corps from around 1,200 to around 2,400 by the end of fiscal year 2012. The increase in size would allow both agencies to eliminate vacancies—about 16 percent of State’s foreign service positions were unfilled at the end of FY 2008—and increase opportunities for in-service training and education.
Prospects for congressional approval of these hiring programs are cloudy. Appropriations bills for the Department of State and foreign operations (including USAID) for both FY 2010 and FY 2011 still await congressional action, even though FY 2010 ends September 30, 2010 and FY 2011 begins October 1. The Department operates under a continuing resolution, a parliamentary device that allows spending to continue according to terms enacted in appropriations measures covering periods that have expired.
Although Congress supported the hiring program in FY 2009, mounting pressures to reduce spending have increased the likelihood that Diplomacy 3.0 will be scaled back, stretched out, or abandoned. Secretary Clinton remains committed to the program, however, and she appears prepared to lend her considerable prestige to its passage. The move of her deputy for management, Jack Lew, to the position of Director of the Office of Management and Budget is likely to be helpful in sustaining White House support.
State and USAID: The relationship between the State Department and USAID remains in flux. Secretary Clinton in her confirmation hearings and on many other occasions defended the idea that diplomacy, development, and defense are three pillars of foreign policy that should be given equal care and attention. The administration’s first National Security Strategy paper picked up the same theme. Soon after taking office, Secretary Clinton launched the first Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review (QDDR), an exercise in strategic planning patterned after the Pentagon’s Quadrennial Defense Review, and it was widely expected that the QDDR would spell out the budgetary and bureaucratic implications of this three-D approach.
But after a year of work the QDDR is not complete and unlikely to produce striking new ideas. At the same time, the National Security Council is engaged in a complementary, or competing, study of the structure and effectiveness of U.S. foreign aid programs, and Senators Kerry and Lugar, the chairman and ranking member of the Foreign Relations Committee, have proposed to revise the basic legislation under which those programs operate, the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961.
Many months if not years of debate are likely before a consensus for change emerges.
