The Foreign Service Journal, May 2003

When the State Department invited FAS to participate in drafting a new act, Deputy Administrator for Attachés and Management Richard A. “Dick” Smith readily accepted. As a result, FAS, a foreign affairs agency andmember of the Board of the Foreign Service since 1930, became a full- fledged Foreign Service agency with passage of the Foreign Service Act of 1980. Currently-serving attachés and others meeting specific, prior-service criteria were grandfathered into the Foreign Service on Nov. 16, 1981. Dick Smith, by now FAS administrator, became FAS’s first career minister. But Administrator Smith also committed an egregious mistake, which haunts the agency to this day. He asserted publicly and repeatedly that the future lay with those who would join the Foreign Service, and the careers of those who intended to remain in the Civil Service would not be as bright. This fractured a previously harmonious working environment, soon leading to bitter conflict between civil servants and Foreign Service officers over promotion opportunities. The issue has by now been largely resolved through collective bargaining, but residual tension remains. The fourth and last constituent of FAS popped up unex- pectedly, the result of the merger of USDA’s Office of International Cooperation and Development into the Foreign Agricultural Service. Actually, the merger consti- tuted something of a homecoming. In the 1940s OFAR had a technical collaboration branch that trained foreign agricultural specialists from Latin America and managed joint agricultural research programs there. From 1951 to 1954, first OFAR and then FAS collaborated with USDA’s Extension Service to train and send overseas roughly 400 agricultural development specialists as part of the Truman administration’s “Point IV Program,” one of several govern- ment programs later consolidated into the International Cooperation Agency, the precursor of the U.S. Agency for International Development. The Development Thrust OICD was created in 1980 through the efforts of Dr. Quentin West, a former administrator of USDA’s Economic Research Service and former trade policy ana- lyst in FAS. In the 1970s, the USAID headquarters staff included several agricultural development specialists han- dling overseas projects. Ostensibly to increase efficiency of government, but in reality due to criticism from Congress about USAID having too many people in Washington, they were transferred to USDA. At the time, USDA had no log- ical place to put them, but since the Economic Research Service had analysts specializing in foreign countries, the development specialists ended up forming the Foreign Development Division of ERS. During the Carter administration, Dr. West was made a special assistant to the under secretary for international affairs and commodity programs. There he assembled three units into a package, which he proposed be consoli- dated into a new Office for International Cooperation and Development. They were: the ERS’s Foreign Develop- ment Division, which did not really fit in a research agency; the foreign currency-funded exchange programs of the Science and Education Administration, a consortium of USDA agencies engaged in international research that no one agency really owned; and the International Organiza- tion Affairs Staff attached to the office of the FAS adminis- trator, and in which the then-administrator had no interest. In 1993, the new secretary of Agriculture, former Mississippi Congressman Mike Espy, realized that Congress was in a mood to reorganize USDA. To forestall this, he preemptively ordered his own overhaul, calling for a reduction from 43 agencies to 29. FAS and OICD were ordered to merge, precipitating a serious clash of cultures. OICD was made up of aid-oriented staff, who saw development and technical assistance as their mission and tended to view the core FAS mission of promoting exports with distaste. In essence, OICD borrowed its culture from USAID, an agency historically often in conflict with FAS. To comprehend the level of anguish in both agencies over the summary merger, one must recall that at the first FAS attaché conference at Paris in 1955, Secretary Benson reminded the assembled attachés: “The United States, as a matter of foreign policy, is aid- ing many countries in their agricultural development. But the Congress and the president did not give the Department of Agriculture the responsibility for foreign development. That responsibility is vested elsewhere in our government. Our own primary mission is to help U.S. farmers. Any unnecessary diversion of our efforts to other enterprises dilutes our effectiveness and runs counter to the expressed wishes of those who gave us our assignments.” During the planning of the reorganization, the OICD representative on the merger team got administration con- sent to change FAS’s name to “International Agricultural Trade Service.” The idea was that a new name would lead to easier reconciliation of the two divergent cultures, but the move was thwarted by Congress because the FAS “brand name” was viewed as an asset to the government. F O C U S 42 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / M A Y 2 0 0 3