THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | MARCH 2025 17 Set Clear Long-Term Goals After 15 years in government, both working at State and conducting oversight on State and USAID, I can attest to the immense skill, ability, and dedication of U.S. Foreign Service personnel. You are inheriting a workforce that can tackle the most complex and complicated problems in the world. However, I can also attest to the many ways that this skilled workforce has been squandered over time, to the detriment of our national interests and delight of our adversaries. If we define strategy as the alignment of ends (goals), ways (methods/plans), and means (resources), the issue that most often undercuts the State Department’s performance is overly expansive goals—being asked to do everything, everywhere, all at once. This is not mission creep. It is having goals and objectives so ill-defined or broad that any activity can be seen as advancing them. Without clear end-states, the very proactive Foreign Service will fill the strategic void with activity and plans—as well as ask for more resources to pursue these ever-proliferating activities. Sometimes decried as bureaucracy “doing its thing,” it is more aptly described as the absence of policy leadership. Similarly, without clear long-term goals, Foreign Service personnel often find themselves pushed to respond to urgent crises rather than more important but longer-term dilemmas. Unfortunately, this careening from crisis to crisis, and a performance system that rewards focus on crisis, has led to the atrophy of strategic planning culture in the Foreign Service, which could theoretically be expected to mitigate some lack of direction at the top. The resulting lack of coherent strategy does not just waste resources. It also leads the bureaus to work at cross-purposes with each other because they lack an overriding framework to prioritize between conflicting efforts. There is a school of thought that believes cutting resources to State and USAID will somehow result in improved effectiveness. But if we are given the same ambiguous goals that many previous administrations have provided us, it will only make us have to do everything, everywhere, all at once—with even less. Defining goals and prioritizing them, i.e., deciding which efforts trump others and ultimately deserve more resources, is essential to making State and USAID more effective. Ultimately, even if you do not provide this direction, the workforce is so talented that it will muddle through and rack up some good successes. However, for the Foreign Service to truly shine and accomplish great things, it needs clear long-term goals that can be strategically implemented across all the bilateral and multi- lateral relationships we need to advance those goals. Greg Bauer State Department FSO Arlington, Virginia Get Outside the Embassy Walls When I served in the Middle East (Dubai, Damascus, Casablanca), many of the kudos I received for my reporting came from my interactions with people “on the street.” While the threat of terrorism and security upgrades have limited how much Foreign Service officers can venture out into the cities and countryside in recent years, I want to encourage the new administration to put the focus back on diplomats having contact with ordinary people. Talking to the elites may provide some window into how a government ministry functions, but the economy’s heartbeat lies in the workers and how they carve out a living. Diplomats belong outside the walls of the embassy or consulate, having exchanges with students, union leaders, activists, and the full range of a society’s social strata. Michael Varga State Department FSO, retired Wilton Manors, Florida Support Global Health Assistance Our global health programs and assistance play a vital role in not only protecting U.S. borders and improving the lives of millions across the planet, but also in serving as a valuable tool in our diplomacy and the projection of U.S. influence. On any given day, health professionals from U.S. government agencies including State, USAID, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Department of Defense, and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) work overseas with host government officials to improve the capacity of their countries’ health systems to ensure that disease outbreaks such as Ebola and mpox are identified and contained at the source. This both benefits the host country and protects the health and welfare of U.S. citizens.
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