The Foreign Service Journal, April 2004

staffing. So in the best improvisa- tional tradition of the Foreign Service, we solved the problem of covering it by redefining it. Instead of a comprehensive, “macro” ap- proach to our theme, we offer you a set of articles written from the “micro” perspective, each address- ing a different piece of the Foreign Service staffing puzzle. Together, they constitute a progress report on Foreign Service work force planning, such as it is. Some of you know that I was a Foreign Service offi- cer from 1985 to 1997. My A-100 class, the 25th, con- tained 51 people, making it one of the largest entering groups in a long time — but just one of many during the mid-1980s recruitment surge. For a whole variety of reasons, that hiring wave crested just a few years later, and, starting in the 1990s, the Foreign Service came under the budget-cutters’ knife even as its responsibilities multiplied. Foreign Service hiring did not even keep up with attrition dur- ing the 1990s. The U.S. Information Agency was starved of funds, and then abolished. Hundreds of positions at the State Department and other agencies were left unfilled (some for years at a time); many employees were forced to forgo critical training in response to beleaguered posts’ frantic cries to “be here yesterday”; and generally life was made more stressful for those trying (in the mantra of the period) to “do more with less.” Today, entrance classes routinely comprise 80 to 90 new hires, and they follow each other in remarkably quick succession. What made that possible? In a word, DRI: the Diplomatic Readiness Initiative, which has been under way for three years now. See our lead arti- cle, by FSO Niels Marquardt (“The DRI Rides to the Rescue,” p. 20) for more details. And as a companion piece, first-tour generalist Bryan Olthof (a member of the 112th A-100 class) gives us “A Bird’s-Eye View of DRI” (p. 26). Those of us working in Washington sometimes forget about the vital contributions of Foreign Service National employees to our diplomatic missions around the world. So it is worth being reminded that FSNs do a whole range of jobs, sometimes under even more difficult conditions than their American supervisors experience. In an effort to link FSN com- pensation more closely to the responsibilities performed, the State Department employs the Computer Aided Job Evaluation Process, more famil- iarly known as CAJE. But FSO Alexis Ludwig points out that FSNs who work in political, economic and pubic affairs sections possess special skills which are not easily measured — or remunerated — by the CAJE matrix. He therefore argues in favor of “Liberating FSNs from Their ‘CAJE’” (p. 29). Earlier, I alluded to the precipitous dip in Foreign Service hiring during the last decade. The U.S. Agency for International Development, in particular, suffered from that trend. Though it managed to stay alive, USAID was radically downsized, and underwent a reduction-in-force at one point. Shawn Zeller, a staff reporter for Government Executive magazine, describes how USAID is recovering and rebuilding its shattered work force to meet new challenges in “On the Work Force Roller Coaster at USAID” (p. 33). Not a few commentators have remarked on the irony that, notwithstanding its rhetoric about wanting to shrink the federal work force, the Bush administration has actually increased its ranks. But at the same time, the administration has remained true to the traditional Republican preference for devolving government func- tions to the private sector via outsourcing. Heritage Foundation analyst Ron Utt explains the rationale for this approach in “Competitive Contracting: An Avenue for Improvement” (p. 41). This being an election year, it would be even more foolhardy than usual to venture any predictions about the outlook for Foreign Service staffing in the near term. However, there is a set of new challenges before us that weren’t on the table when the DRI was con- ceived: not just Iraq and Afghanistan, but also the impact of new homeland security requirements on con- sular services. One thing is clear: how these issues are addressed will affect every member of the Foreign Service, whatever our grade, agency or professional spe- cialization. A P R I L 2 0 0 4 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 19 Each of these articles addresses a different piece of the Foreign Service staffing puzzle. Steven Alan Honley is the editor of the Foreign Service Journal. An FSO from 1985 to 1997, he served in Mexico City, Wellington and Washington, D.C.