The Foreign Service Journal, February 2013

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | FEBRUARY 2013 25 in the QDDR process was an important step toward crafting a more sustainable path for U.S. development policies. While the QDDR noted a need to close a gap in overseas mid-level staff- ing, apart from a general acknowledgement that the State Department had relied too much on contractors in some areas of its operations, it refrained from more specific recom- mendations on State’s side of the equation. Unlike the situation at USAID, there was no reform initiative already under way at State that the QDDR could highlight to better ensure its suc- cessful implementation. The Picture Today State and USAID have both made some progress on their civilian capacity issues. As Shawn Dorman reported in the October 2012 Foreign Service Journal (“The Hir- ing Pendulum”), the goal of the State Department’s Diplomacy 3.0 initiative was to increase the size of the department’s Foreign Service cohort by 25 per- cent (with a comparable increase in associated budget levels) and the size of the Civil Service component by 13 percent, both by 2013. USAID’s Development Leadership Initiative sought to double the size of the agency’s Foreign Service by adding 1,200 new FSOs to its ranks. Both agencies made substantial progress toward their respective goals: USAID had hired about a thousand FSOs, more than 80 percent of the goal, by the end of 2011. Mean- while, State managed to increase the size of its Foreign Service The unintended consequences of outsourcing will pose challenges for the civilian side of foreign policy long after the last soldier has come home.