The Foreign Service Journal, April 2013

the Foreign Service journal | april 2013 35 I n early August 2000, a handful of State Department employees from both the Civil Service and the Foreign Service met for lunch at the now defunct Les Halles restaurant on Pennsylvania Avenue. The animated conversation during the noon hour had little to do with the food, but rather focused on the group’s concerns about the diminished role and capac- ity of the State Department and the urgent need for wide-ranging reforms. Some of us were familiar with a 2000 Senior Seminar research paper, “Developing Diplomats for 2010,” which provided useful background for our discussions. The group was dismayed over the impact of budget cuts on departmental operations at home and abroad, and frustrated in dealing with the department’s structural rigidities. While the rest of the world was rushing to embrace Internet-based computer technology, for instance, State continued to limp along with outdated Wang equipment. Its internal procedures were so clogged that it took two years to implement a reform as simple as printing diplomatic notes on letter-sized, rather than legal-sized, paper. Throughout the 1990s, Foggy Bottom had tried to cope with reduced funding by hiring at just 75 percent of Foreign Service officer attrition, 50 percent of FS specialist attrition and 50 percent of Civil Service attrition. As a result, vacant positions and long staffing gaps became the norm at most embassies and consulates. And as the August 1998 terrorist attacks on our embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam had shown, our buildings were not safe places fromwhich to conduct the nation’s diplomatic business. We adjourned from lunch that day with a two-part resolve. First, we would reach out to our State Department colleagues and seek their personal accounts of the impact of the financial and management shortcomings on departmental operations at home and abroad. Second, we would craft a message of needed change and reform and address it to the next Secretary of State. As a shorthand description of our effort, we adopted the slo- gan, “SOS for DOS.” FEATURE SOS for DOS, 13 Years Later Back in 2000, a group of FSOs led efforts to publicize and elevate the need for change at State. Is it time for another grassroots campaign? By Ted Str i ckl er