THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2025 39 officials responsible for the day-to-day activities of the department. We recommended the creation of an additional under secretary—for global affairs—and in general tried to strengthen the role of the under secretaries by having them frequently in touch with the Secretary, which would allow them to serve as conduits for his or her wishes to the department’s bureaucracy. That didn’t work out quite as well as we had hoped, but it was probably better than the Baker system. The problem was that some of the under secretaries did not connect well enough with the bureaus and the assistant secretaries often felt cut out. We recommended some other changes. The one which probably had the greatest impact on the bureaucracy was to radically cut the number of deputy assistant secretary (DAS) positions—about 40 percent. The idea was to try to reduce a topheavy bureaucratic structure and increase the responsibilities of office directors. We found that a number of deputy assistant secretaries were essentially glorified office directors. By reducing the number of DAS positions, we hoped to strengthen the role of the office directors. I think that worked; the number of DASes were cut substantially, although I have recently noticed that the number is creeping up again. I found my work on the transition team to be interesting and fruitful, with an immediate and visible payoff for our recommendations. Hans Binnendijk served on the transition team for incoming President Bill Clinton as a political appointee. He is currently a distinguished fellow at the Atlantic Council and an adjunct political scientist at the RAND Corporation. This interview was conducted by Thomas Stern in 1996. 2001 From Clinton to George W. Bush: Marc Grossman “What Is Your Plan?” In the fall of 2000, [Langhorne] Tony Motley—who had been ambassador to Brazil, an assistant secretary for Secretary [George] Shultz, and was a mentor of mine (he was always asking me if I was thinking about things in the right way)—called me up and said, “Marc, are you thinking about the next Secretary of State?” … He said: “You need to think about numbers. The next Secretary of State is going to sit down with you and he or she is going to say, ‘Where are all of my senior officers?’ You need to know, ‘Who are my senior officers? Where are all my junior officers?’” In other words, that person is going to want all this data sliced and diced in dozens of different ways. Also, he asked me: “What is your plan? What do you want? What do you need?” I got the “skunk works” folks in, and this effort was led by Bill Eaton. I said: “We have six weeks to figure this out, so go away and think about all the questions you would ask if you were the new Secretary of State and then let us get them answered, statistically and with lists; let us just really do this up. And then let us think up something to ask the new Secretary for.” So Bill and Maureen [E.] Quinn came back after a while, and they did a fantastic job on the numbers. I had been reading that military units have a 15 percent personnel float for training and transit, so that every military unit is only really staffed up if there is 15 percent on top of whatever they have in the unit. I said, “Why not us, why can’t we do that?” I asked everybody in personnel, and I said: “Think about this. What would 15 percent be? Could we recruit that many new people if we had the money? Over what period of time? Does FSI have room to train them?” We worked on this, and we came up with the numbers, and then President Bush 43 was elected, and Colin Powell was named Secretary of State. And I said: “Lucky us, here is the person who will understand this.” We put together a really good presentation about why we needed a 15 percent float, and 15 percent for us, total State Department, was just under 1,200 people. We made a budget, imagined a timeline. And so, thanks to Tony Motley’s call and some very creative work by the bureau, we were set. Just before Christmas of 2000, I was in the car with a bunch of kids in the back seat, and we were going through the Christmas light show at Bull Run Park. So all these kids are in the back seat and we are driving through the park, and the phone rings. It’s the Ops Center; it’s Colin Powell. I tell the kids to be quiet. He gets on the line, and he says: “I am coming to State tomorrow. Give me a few hours to get settled in my office, and then I will come call on you, because I would like the first person I call on to be the director of personnel. Are you ready?” I said: “Yes sir, I am ready. But I have something to say.” “What?” he asked. I said: “I will come call on you. … Because if you come to call on me there will be a riot on the Sixth Floor, and it would be disrespectful to Secretary Albright.” And he said, “Okay, come see me.” The next afternoon I went down to see then Secretary- Designate Powell in the transition suite. I introduced myself and he started to ask me questions. He asked me all the questions
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