28 MARCH 2025 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL • As an early priority, appoint a State Department under secretary for public diplomacy and public affairs who enjoys the confidence of both the president and the Secretary of State. The nominee should have the experience and talent to design and move administration initiatives forward across the executive branch and Congress and be able to seriously engage foreign leaders. • Ask Congress to ensure that the State Department has needed staffing, facilities, and programmatic resources. The department urgently needs more staff and program funding to build flexibility and capacity for rapid action and to launch the new public communication tools it needs to compete effectively. • Support State Department initiatives to engage all U.S. foreign affairs agencies and America’s extraordinary experts and talents in a focused campaign to expose and vigorously challenge foreign government–funded distortions and disinformation initiatives promoting dangerous anti-American narratives in global media. • Expand and leverage our international exchange programs, which give current and future world leaders in-person perspec- tives of the U.S., engage the American public in our diplomacy, and bring huge dividends to the American economy. Joel Fischman FSO, retired President, Public Diplomacy Council of America Washington, D.C. Help Us Fix What’s Broken Forty-five years after the passage of the Foreign Service Act of 1980, the fundamentals of our system are desperately in need of updating. Successive administrations, both Republican and Democratic, have tinkered around the edges, but all have failed to make the important changes that would guarantee the health and future success of our nation’s diplomatic corps. To get started, our nation’s new leaders should launch a serious conversation with members of the U.S. Foreign Service across all six foreign affairs agencies and departments. The conversation should seek to inform the new administration of what is working and what needs fixing. The fundamental building blocks of our Service are sound, but multiple aspects of the current system call out urgently for change. First and foremost is our so-called Open Assignments system. There is no aspect of the Foreign Service career that causes more unhappiness, cynicism, and attrition than our assignments system. All efforts to reform it have crashed and burned repeatedly in recent decades. I do not believe that we need to return to a system in which tenured members of the Foreign Service are forced to take assignments they don’t want. We avoided that choice during our surges in Iraq and Afghanistan; we can and should avoid it now. But we need a system that better matches talents and experience to the needs of the Service and our country. That means individual mentoring, career counseling, and assignment support of the kind that is completely absent today. No one is currently trying to match members of the Foreign Service to assignments that best meet their career goals and our country’s national interest. We also urgently need to reform our system of performance assessment, which is almost entirely based on grade inflation and favoritism. We have tried over the years to come up with good alternatives, and we have failed. I would suggest implementing a system based on the U.S. military’s performance ratings, including numerical grades as well as narrative assessments. The more than 20,000 members of the U.S. Foreign Service stand ready to help the new administration succeed. They need help from the new administration to reform and strengthen our Foreign Service for the challenges that lie ahead. Eric Rubin State Department FSO/Ambassador, retired AFSA President (2019-2023) Boulder, Colorado n We need a system that better matches talents and experience to the needs of the Service and our country.
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