22 JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2024 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL FSJ DIGITAL ARCHIVE The cover for the December 1924 American Foreign Service Journal, a photograph contributed by Under Secretary of State Ambassador J.C. Grew. In 1924 the American Consular Bulletin became The American Foreign Service Journal. confrontation with management. Their dissatisfaction erupted in a three-way contest for the presidency in 1975, narrowly won by John Hemenway, a civilian employee at the Department of Defense who had been dismissed from the Service under time-in-class rules in 1969. Hemenway was imperious and vindictive. He testified against promotions for a number of career officers he disliked and ignored the rebukes of a furious board. The board launched a recall movement, and a chastened membership removed him from office on Nov. 17, 1976, by a vote of 2,751 to 175. The desire for confrontation was strongest at USIA, where Hemenway had his best showing. Soon after Hemenway’s ouster, AFGE forced and won a new representation election at the agency, which it won by a vote of 853 to 504. AFGE remained the union for the Foreign Service in USIA from 1975 until 1992, when another representation election restored AFSA to that role. AFSA would never again lose a representation election. The Foreign Service Act of 1980. The administration of President Jimmy Carter (1977-1981) had a fascination with the machinery of government. Carter sought and won the creation of two new cabinet departments (Education and Energy) and shuffled boxes at State, USIA, Commerce, and USAID. He won passage of the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, which set the stage for the Foreign Service Act of 1980. AFSA negotiated with State management and directly with Congress on the act’s main provisions—clear separation of the Foreign Service and the Civil Service, with a separate Foreign Service retirement system; merger of the Foreign Service staff corps (whose members came to be known as specialists) with the officer corps on a single pay scale; and codification of procedures for resolving personnel grievances and labor-management disputes. As AFSA and the department had urged, the act made the Foreign Service system available to other agencies—the Departments of Agriculture and Commerce chose to use it for the Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS) and the new Foreign Commercial Service (FCS), both of which voted in 1994 to have AFSA as their union. For AFSA members, the act’s most popular feature was a substantial increase in pay and benefits; least popular were new time-inclass and time-in-service rules linked to the creation of the Senior Foreign Service, with mandatory retirement at age 65. In the months following passage, AFSA negotiated with management on implementation, a new process for both sides. Discussions covered the relationship of the Foreign Service and the Civil Service, protection of merit principles, the role of the chief of mission, performance evaluations and promotions, training, incentives, medical care, selection out, separation for cause, and retirement. As resources allowed, AFSA hired more staff to provide guidance to members on agency regulations. At the same time, the association remained a professional society, the defender of career and merit principles against political assault. Ambassadors. The 1980 act said that political contributions should not be a factor in appointments of chiefs of mission, which should “normally” go to career officers. AFSA in public testimony squeezed these provisions for all that they were worth, which turned out to be not much. In 2014 AFSA won legislation to force access to the statements of “demonstrated competence” the act requires the department to send to the Senate with respect to each nominee. Despite these and other efforts, political appointees continue to occupy around 40 percent of ambassadorial posts, and large donors continue to be rewarded with cushy embassies. Public attention to this has had little to no impact on the practice. 1983-2001: Austerity and Diversity In September 1987, Secretary of State George P. Shultz told a crowded open meeting in the Acheson auditorium: “We’re being brutalized in the budget process.” The brutality had just begun. The Foreign Service, which had numbered about 9,200 officers and specialists in 1988, shrank to about 7,700 10 years later. Over the same period, State’s Civil Service rolls rose by more than 6 percent, to almost 5,000. Cuts in the Foreign Service tested AFSA’s shaky commitment to diversity. The 1980 act called for a Service “representative of the American people,” operating on “merit principles” and employing “affirmative action programs” to promote “equal opportunity and fair and equitable treatment” without regard to “political affiliation, race, color, religion, national origin, sex, marital status, age, or handicapping condition.” Because the Service was disproportionately white and male, the dismissals in the 1990s fell largely (though by no means solely) on that group. AFSA went on record opposing “measures that would bestow special advantages not equally available to all members of the Foreign Service” on members of “an EEO [equal employment opportunity] category.” The head of the Merit Systems Protection Board in State’s Office of Policy
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