24 JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2024 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL amended, and passed again, this time with USAID spared the ax. In that form President Bill Clinton signed it into law in 1999. USIA was shuttered with AFSA absent from the fight. 2001-2009: AFSA at War By the time Colin Powell took office as Secretary of State (2001-2005), the Service had lost some of its attraction. More than 700 Foreign Service positions were vacant. Powell’s prestige as a former national security adviser, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the first Black Secretary of State helped him win the funding needed to repair some of the damage. A surge in candidacies after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, added 2,000 members to the Service by 2005. AFSA, too, grew stronger as the new century began. The membership approved a raise in dues sufficient to pay for capital improvements, higher staff salaries, and an increase in reserves, which were placed under professional management. Between 1997 and 2002, unrestricted reserves rose from $270,000 to more than $1 million. The 2001 election put John Naland at the head of a board that included four former AFSA presidents—Tom Boyatt, Tex Harris, Bill Harrop, and Ted Wilkinson. Naland, who had served as State vice president, continues to be a near-constant presence on the board. He saw AFSA’s union and professional sides as tightly linked: “If a future ‘reform’ ever eliminates the features that make us unique,” he said, “we will inevitably lose the benefits that flow from that uniqueness.” (Naland will be writing about some of AFSA’s many accomplishments and how they shaped the Service in the Journal during this centennial year.) On Sept. 11, 2001, Naland and many of his board were on Capitol Hill, urging Congress to fully fund the international affairs budget, when news arrived of the attacks in New York and at the Pentagon. The attacks reinforced AFSA’s message on the Hill, that the country needed a stronger, better-resourced, more professional Foreign Service; and Congress was briefly receptive. Then the scapegoating began. The U.S. embassy in Saudi Arabia had issued visas to 15 of the 20 hijackers; many in Congress sought to move the visa function from State to the new Department of Homeland Security, then under hasty construction. AFSA lobbied in defense of State’s traditional role and defended the consular bureau. Naland met with House staff, pointing out that intelligence agencies had withheld, and continued to withhold, information that could change a consular officer’s decision. But it was a hard case to make. The staffing cuts of the 1990s had left vacancies unevenly distributed, with larger gaps in hardship posts than in more comfortable places. Blame-seekers in the White House, Congress, and the media used that fact to support their claims that the Department of State was full of incompetents and the Foreign Service full of wimps. AFSA worked to change opinion in Congress and the public. AFSA speakers fanned out around the country. Tom Boyatt organized AFSA-PAC, a political action committee whose (quite modest) donations, equally distributed among Republicans and AFSA/DONNA AYERST Susan Johnson, in her role as AFSA president, addresses the crowd at the “Rally to Serve America” in April 2011 in Washington, D.C., a demonstration she led in support of the professional integrity of foreign affairs agency personnel.
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