Slow Reform at State
Putting the Foreign back in Foreign Service
By streiff Posted in War — Comments (8) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
One of Colin Powell’s huge failings as Secretary of State was the way in which he allowed himself to become captured by an entrenched bureaucracy which fancied itself the maker of US foreign policy rather than the tool which executed the foreign policy established by the president and the congress.
In critical theaters of the GWOT the State Department has been virtually AWOL.
There are indications that this may be changing in some small way.
Read on.
The State Department plans to implement sweeping changes in the way foreign service officers bid for new assignments in an effort to more quickly fill vacancies in Iraq and the growing number of dangerous hardship posts in the Middle East.
The new rules were outlined in a cable sent last week by Foreign Service Director General George M. Staples to department personnel that cited "increasing international turmoil." They are intended to shake up the State Department culture so that overseas service becomes more frequent and more focused on global hot spots.
Parts of the article give disturbing insights into how our nation’s foreign policy is carried out.
Under the plan, which will take effect almost immediately, hardship posts will be filled before bidding can begin on more attractive assignments. Private side deals that lock up plum assignments will be discouraged, and the practice of allowing junior officers to take more senior slots that have gone unfilled will be minimized.
The State Department hopes that by eliminating handshake deals for posts in safer, more attractive cities, it can direct its top talent to places where their missions are more central to U.S. policy.
Moreover, employees headed for hardship posts will no longer be able to meet the requirement by bidding for the most attractive cities in the hardship category, such as Cape Town, Bangkok or Istanbul.
According to the GAO about 65% of all Foreign Service Officers from a cadre of approximately 11,000 serve overseas at any one time. The article notes that “[t]he State Department also wants to reduce the number of consecutive years a foreign service officer serves in the United States, from six years to five.”
For a service that is supposed to be “foreign” that seems like an imbalance in numbers and in tour length. Rice notes in her cable:
Since the bulk of Foreign Service work is overseas, logically the bulk of a Foreign Service career should be overseas. I am also committed to ensuring that our most difficult posts are adequately staffed. I will be looking at ways to ensure that we do better on both of these points, transparently, fairly and equitably. Realistically, as the number of positions at hardship posts grows, Foreign Service employees can expect to spend more time at these sometimes difficult, but frequently rewarding, posts.
The article goes on to say:
More than 200 foreign service officers are required each year in Iraq, and already 1,000 of the roughly 11,000 foreign service officers have voluntarily served there.
There probably aren’t very many more important places for the Foreign Service today than Afghanistan and Iraq. If the “soft power” the diplomatic community is so fond of holding up as counterpoint to military force is to have any impact whatsoever then we need “wingtips on the ground” to focus that soft power.
Assuming that all 200 billets were identified and staffed on May 1, 2003, this means the average tour length served by a Foreign Service Officer in Iraq is under eight months. Now eight months is admittedly a long time in a Third World pesthole, but it is less time than a soldier spends getting shot at there.
As General Barry McCaffrey noted
A handful of brilliant, courageous, and dedicated Foreign Service Officers have held together a large, constantly changing, marginally qualified, inadequately experienced U.S. mission. The U.S. influence on the Iraqi national and regional government has been extremely weak. U.S. consultants of the IRMO do not live and work with their Iraqi counterparts, are frequently absent on leave or home consultations, are often in-country for short tours of 90 days to six months, and are frequently gapped with no transfer of institutional knowledge.
In Iraq, nothing is possible without carefully managed relationships between the U.S. officials and their Iraqi interlocutors. Trust between people is the prerequisite and basis of progress for this deeply Arab culture…
The State Department actually cannot direct assignment of their officers to serve in Iraq. State frequently cannot staff essential assignments such as the new PRTs which have the potential to produce such huge impact in Iraq. The bottom line is that only the CIA and the U.S. Armed Forces are at war. This situation cries out for remedy.
This complaint seems very much in line with a recent GAO Report which says:
Mid-level positions at many posts are staffed by junior officers who lack experience, have minimal guidance, and are not as well equipped to handle crises as more seasoned officers. This experience gap can severely compromise the department's readiness to carry out foreign policy objectives and execute critical post-level duties.
Or as noted in the article:
Many foreign service officers tackle difficult assignments when they begin at the State Department but prefer to work in Washington later in their careers, especially if they have older children or need to care for elderly parents.
Already the wailing and gnashing of teeth has begun in Foggy Bottom:
The changes have stirred concern among foreign service officers. Some suggested that the pressure of Iraq -- where diplomats work under extremely difficult conditions -- is resulting in an imbalance of priorities, minimizing the value of diplomatic efforts in other parts of the world in the eyes of Rice and her top aides. Others are concerned that previous work in places such as Bosnia earlier in their careers seems to be worth little now.
It seems absurd on its face that a situation can be allowed to exist where a resource as valuable as experienced diplomats can be managed in a manner so detached from the mission of the organization. What we have described here is a combination of drive-by diplomacy by junior birdman diplomats in trouble spots which cry out for experienced staff and tourism diplomacy in really nice places for the more senior and experienced staff.
Kudos to Secretary Rice for at least trying to reverse the trend though one really has to scratch one’s head in wonderment that the situation is like this at all and given that it is like this we have no reason to be surprised that our diplomatic efforts are so ineffectual.
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Slow Reform at State 8 Comments (0 topical, 8 editorial, 0 hidden) Post a comment »
I want to be able to give you a Recommend once in a while, heh.
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If you're seeing shades of gray, it's because you're not looking close enough to see the black and white dots.
Entrenched beuracracies. You have a situation where its impossible to rebuild from scratch. The civil service laws make it very hard to institute a reign of terror by axing the troublemakers wholesale. Couple the above with a sense of entitlement and arrogance on the part of the functionaries there, it becomes a circumstance most people would just throw up their hands and walk away from.
Secretary Rice doesn't even have the luxury of shipping the problem children to outer mongolia or a consulate in siberia. Look at the description of the assignment process its owned lock stock and barrel by the troublemakers. You can't fault someone who came from a millitary that has an up or out policy, for not being able to deal with it.
like that, I can tell you that it is a long way from putting a "dent" in that or any other entrenched bureaucracy. The 'crats just snickered and remarked about how they're going to her going away party.
It is tedious but not particularly difficult to discipline or dismiss a federal employee, even a unionized one. The federal bargaining and civil service laws and regulations preserve far more management prerogatives than those of most states with collective bargaining for example.
The real problem is getting supervisors, managers, and even appointees to want to discipline or dismiss employees, especially high level ones because of the political implications. As soon as she tries to act on that memo and upsets the cozy applecart, it will begin to rain grievances, complaints, leaks, and for the unionized ones press releases and protests. She and her management team, to the extent that she really has one, will immediately be tarred as the worst managers in the world. It usually doesn't take much of that for appointed level management to lose their ardor for improving service and productivity.
Assuming she and her top management are willing to "stay the course" in the face of the howls, she begins to run into the real problem;the career 'crats and the congenital appointees, many of whom decidedly do not share her politics and view any high level appointee as merely a temporary inconvenience.
A top level manager can't be everywhere or know everything, so he or she is totally dependent on the mid level managers and supervisors to report and/or act on poor performance or bad conduct. There is little or no incentive to do so. The further down the organization and the farther from the Capital you go, the more likely it is that those supervisors and managers report to a career 'crat or long time appointee who doesn't share any more of the Administration's objectives than he or she absolutely has to to stay in the job. A supervisor jacking up employees and getting complaints and notoriety does not fit into the boss's career plans and the agressive supervisor's ratings and promotional potential suffers for it. 'Crats aren't going to willingly do things that set off their career indicator lights.
And in an organization like State or any other with lots of high level, well-connected employees the controlling dynamic is the fact that the employee that some supervisor or manager jacked up or fired may well be their boss in the next administration. This more than anything else is the reason that even very dedicated, hard-working public employee supervisors and managers jealously guard their merit system and other security prerogatives; doing one administration's bidding gets you fired by the next one, or at least gets you an office with no windows and a seat that flushes.
I can tell you from personal experience that it is no fun to contemplate making your mortgage payment when a new administration has very publicly put a price on your head. I can hear some of you saying, "why would you stay where you aren't wanted?" "Just get another job." The answer is that by the time employees are at that level they are usually in their forties or older and usually are in a career that you can only pursue in government; how many private sector Foreign Service Officers are there? Or social workers? Or Border Patrol Officers? And on and on for all the things that only a government does.
If you are going to reform a dysfunctional work unit be it the State Department or a state department, it must be a top down exercise with a special management team devoted to doing it. For the reasons I've set out, the career 'crats will never do it and all the memos and policy statements in the world won't make them; they'll just put their heads down and count days until the next election or their retirement. I'll bet you that some significant number of the supervisors and managers at State have one of those retirement clocks on their desk, and it's set for Inauguration Day 2009.
In Vino Veritas
Great post. It is kind of ironic that the Party that criticizes ineffective federal bureaucracies (validly, of course) has to try to get some of them to work better. Unfortunately, the current Regime's answer has often not been to shakeup the bureaucracy, but go outside of it, by contracting out as much as possible, with sometimes worse results (Katrina, Iraq, etc.).
Incidentally, A.C., I need to know more about the CA-type economic model that you mentioned. Remember...the one where you try to turn U.S. states or regions into Third World Countries.
You have to be relaxed and happy in Juneau (I think), and you aren't eating any squirrel either.
or at least saying they were trying to "clean up" State since at least the end of WWII. Nobody's done much towards that goal.
In over twenty years of public sector labor relations, I only worked for two administrations that would take any heat trying to reform dysfunctional agencies. By his second term, Knowles' Democrat administration had figured out that you couldn't give unions enough to keep them happy and would take out people who caused enough trouble to get bad press and early in Murkowski's administration we rather systematically cleaned up some work units, but he too, and especially the holdover managers he kept around, rapidly lost their ardor for any systematic reform.
There aren't a lot of politicians that can stand even a whiff of controversy and when the crying and lying starts, they move as fast as they can to distance themselves from it. Career 'crats know this and don't want to be left standing there as the bad guy when the elected or appointed official decides he has better things to do.
In Vino Veritas
tapes of Yes, Minister episodes in the labor relations office and watched them at lunch.
It is just the way bureaucracy works, and I blame political management. In the rare instances when the political management will back them up, the lower level managers and supervisors will do their job, but most have been around long enough to have been hung out to dry a few times, so they're going to be real sure before they move. And forget doing anything in the last year of an administration; your friendly local union rep calls on you if you even look crossways at an employee and tells you all about the list he's giving to the gubernatorial candidate they're backing and how you can keep your name off it.
I had two successive Democrat nominees stand before the AFL-CIO PAC and openly promise them my head on a platter if elected. The first didn't get elected, the second more or less kept the promise; I couldn't stand working for them and quit and went to work for the Republican controlled Legislature. And mind you, I wasn't an appointee. I was pretty high level but still in the supposedly free from politics merit system, and what they wanted my head for was doing what the political management of the prior administrations had told me to do.
In Vino Veritas
How soon do you think we'll start hearing the calls for her resignation from "senior career foreign service officers"?
"I'm kind of old-fashioned. I like to engage my brain before my mouth." Donald Rumsfeld