In March 2019, Ambassador Barbara Stephenson, then AFSA’s president, spoke at The Foreign Service Journal centennial exhibit opening held in the U.S. Diplomacy Center (now the National Museum for American Diplomacy). This was also the launch of the FSJ Digital Archive, which houses 100-plus years of The Foreign Service Journal. 26 JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2024 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL The Foreign Service, which had numbered about 9,200 officers and specialists in 1988, shrank to about 7,700 10 years later. guys with families, unarmed civilians with no military training—that we have to serve in a live-fire zone is not something we should ever be doing. … That was the position of the AFSA board.” Ultimately, Secretary Rice wrote in her memoirs, “enough people volunteered. But I was prepared to face down the American Foreign Service Association—a kind of union for U.S. diplomats—before Congress and the American people.” That enough people volunteered was rarely acknowledged, and at the time the Secretary allowed attacks on the Service to go unanswered. The AFSA board came to see the administration as hostile, and not just the political appointees. John Naland, who returned to AFSA’s presidency in 2007, accused some career officers of failing to stand up for the Service, acting as toadies to gain a plum assignment or a performance-pay bonus. “Have some senior career officials ‘sold their souls’ over Iraq and other issues in order to advance their careers? I believe they have,” he wrote. 2009-2017: The Obama Years Soon after the administration of President Barack Obama took office, his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton (2009-2013), announced a program to increase the size of the Foreign Service at State by 25 percent by the end of Fiscal Year 2013, and at USAID by 100 percent by the end of FY 2012. Yet a high level of vacancies remained at mid-level positions overseas, and senior officers were losing job opportunities to political appointees, causing a logjam that blocked promotions and increased forced retirements for time in class and time in service. As it had in the 1940s and 1950s, AFSA fought against mid-level hiring, urging State and USAID to raise promotion rates, waive time-in-class limits, and take other measures to fill vacancies with Service members. AFSA President Susan Johnson (2009-2013) took the case for senior appointments public, in a Washington Post op-ed written with the American Academy of Diplomacy’s chairman and president, retired ambassadors Tom Pickering and Ron Neumann. In 1975, they wrote, FSOs occupied 12 of 18 positions at the level of assistant secretary of State or above. In 2013, there were 33 such positions, but FSOs held only eight. The proliferation of political appointees, they wrote, “spawns opportunism and political correctness … and emaciates institutional memory.” More controversially, they argued that the department’s Civil Service had grown “at the expense of the Foreign Service.” AFSA/JOAQUIN SOSA
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy ODIyMDU=