28 JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2025 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL Your leadership and your mandate are firmly established. In support, the American Foreign Service offers you a resource of people selected in a highly competitive process on the basis of merit, representative of all segments of our population, trained in foreign languages, customs and history and their impact on our national interests. Foreign Service numbers are small—they have not risen at all during the last 20 years as the American global role and the rest of the government burgeoned. We are ready to give your foreign affairs team honest advice and service which is both disciplined and efficient. A new Foreign Service Act, the first in 33 years, will take effect within a month after you take office. As you move to strengthen our national security apparatus you and the secretary will have this new charter for the Foreign Service, shaped in a bi-partisan effort which began under President Ford. It provides an extraordinary opportunity to perfect the institutional base for fielding the very best people our country has to offer in pursuit of our national objectives. In sum, as president you will have at your disposal both a highly skilled team of American professionals and a strengthened and enhanced structure for using them. We hope that in filling key foreign affairs positions both overseas and in Washington you will turn first to this powerful resource. The American Foreign Service Association stands ready to assist you in all possible ways during the transition and throughout your presidency. We will be glad to facilitate any communication you or your advisors may wish to establish with the 11,000 members of the Service whom we represent. As you said on election night, “Together, we will do what has to be done.” Sincerely, Kenneth W. Bleakley 1989: RONALD REAGAN TO GEORGE H.W. BUSH “Transition Time: The 1989 Changeover” by Robert G. Neumann, former ambassador and director of the Reagan administration’s State Department Transition Team (1980-1981) October 1988, Feature Last, but far from least, I want to discuss the Foreign Service. The president should realize that the professional Foreign Service is not an enemy and is not disloyal. On the contrary, it will be more than anxious to prove its loyalty to the president. However, it does have its own agenda, as do all departments. That agenda is not necessarily the president’s and could be highly parochial. Hence, it is important that the president appoint key officials who are sufficiently knowledgeable and experienced to hold their own and listen carefully to expert advice, but who can then chart the government’s course as the president’s views dictate and as he may have committed himself to the electorate. Occasionally the bureaucracy—in the State Department and elsewhere—may try to wait the president out. That must not be permitted. The president, his cabinet officers and their immediate subordinates must not only see to it that policy decisions are made promptly, but also follow up on them to make sure that they are speedily and effectively carried out. A hands-off administration does not work, least of all in foreign affairs where crises develop every week. “A Message to the Next President” November 1988, AFSA Editorial The next President of the United States will need a strong Foreign Service to implement his foreign policies and meet his strategic goals in the world at large. At no time since the end of World War II has there been a greater need for a properly staffed and funded Foreign Service. Yet the Foreign Service is in trouble. Budget cuts and forced early retirements of some of our most valued officers have taken their toll. Strengthening the Foreign Service and using it as an important element of national security will help the President maintain our country’s leadership and assure its prosperity in a multipolar As president you will have at your disposal both a highly skilled team of American professionals and a strengthened and enhanced structure for using them. We hope that in filling key foreign affairs positions both overseas and in Washington you will turn first to this powerful resource.
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