USAID Representative Voice
BY AUSTAN MOGHARABI
Fifteen years ago, I joined USAID. In the years that followed, the U.S. government invested in me in ways that are not easily quantified. I learned two foreign languages. I represented the United States at high-level international summits. I managed up to $600 million in U.S. government resources in a single year. I received specialized training in leadership, interagency coordination, and the intricate decision-making processes that make U.S. foreign policy function.
I am not unique in this. Thousands of Foreign Service officers at USAID carried similar—often greater—portfolios of government-built expertise.
That expertise is now largely out the door. When a government discards, in a matter of months, capacities it spent decades and tens of millions of dollars building, that is not just a personnel decision. It is a waste of taxpayer investment.
For most of AFSA’s history, representing the Foreign Service meant advocating for our members within the system: on hiring, firing, discipline, promotion, the terms and conditions of a career. That work is essential, and it has never been more contested than it is right now, with collective bargaining rights under direct challenge and the collegial coordination we relied on disrupted. That fight continues, and it matters.
But I don’t think it’s enough anymore.
Over the winter and spring, numerous discussions about foreign aid took place across Washington—at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and elsewhere—during which the administration’s vision for the future of foreign assistance was on full display and the perspectives of career professionals were largely absent.
In some of those forums, senior officials made unchallenged statements about how USAID operated that career Foreign Service officers would immediately have recognized as inaccurate.
When experienced voices are absent from the table, flawed assumptions harden into policy, and the institutional knowledge we spent careers building disappears. We need to build the muscle of putting our people forward. This direct form of member advocacy will require more resources, not less.
Other unions, such as those of steelworkers and autoworkers, have faced analogous pressures—industries told that their workforce is expendable, their expertise replaceable, their institutional knowledge not worth preserving.
The most effective among them made a public argument for why the work itself mattered, and they fought to protect and expand the opportunities available to their workforce. Steelworkers tied their survival to national security. Autoworkers argued that keeping plants open in America was a strategic and economic imperative.
AFSA has not traditionally operated this way—not because the argument wasn’t available to us, but because we never needed to make it. For most of our history, the Foreign Service enjoyed enough bipartisan support that we were protected from any attacks on public service.
Building public support in this way is a long-term project, and AFSA’s resources are limited. But making the case to the American public is one of the most important things we can do for our members.
The attacks on the Foreign Service did not happen in a vacuum. They were made possible, in part, by a public that had little sense of what the Foreign Service does or why it matters. Public support is the most durable protection we can offer our members against this kind of assault happening again.
AFSA has begun to move in this direction. Last December’s “At the Breaking Point” report—for which we surveyed more than 2,100 diplomats—received substantial coverage in mainstream, independent, and informal media, and has been cited in congressional hearings, demonstrating that we can make a compelling public case for the Foreign Service. And in May, AFSA endorsed the PATH to the Foreign Service Act, bicameral legislation that would create a formal pathway for former USAID officers to join the State Department’s Foreign Service.
These are exactly the kinds of efforts this moment calls for. The question is whether we treat them as isolated responses to immediate crises, or as the model for a permanent expansion of what representing the Foreign Service means.
The old world we knew and operated in is gone. What replaces it is still being determined—and those decisions will be much harder to revisit once they harden.
So, what should AFSA do differently? My proposal: We need to be present, loudly, consistently, and proactively, in every forum where the future of U.S. diplomacy and foreign assistance is being shaped.
We need to be honest with ourselves that this moment may require a different kind of ambition than we have exercised before.
I don’t think AFSA can—or should—work out alone what that ambition looks like in practice. So tell us: What do you think we should be fighting for?
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