The Foreign Service Journal, May 2007

In the biggest change in Civil Service rules in more than a genera- tion, for example, Congress passed a Bush-backed plan to overhaul the Defense Department’s rules for civilian employees in 2003. (The prior year, in creating the Department of Homeland Security, Congress provided it with similar personnel flexibility.) Though the courts have stalled the labor relations component at both departments, the implementation is moving ahead, albeit slowly. Both overhauls were mainly sold on the argument that the Civil Service needed to be more like the military. “Today we have some 320,000 uniformed people doing what are essentially nonmilitary jobs,” then- Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said at a 2003 Senate hearing. “And yet we are calling up reserves to help deal with the global war on terror. The inability to put civilians in hundreds of thousands of jobs that do not need to be performed by men and women in uni- form puts unnecessary strain on our uniformed person- nel and added cost to the taxpayers. This has to be fixed.” In the post-9/11 environment, Congress agreed, though the new Democratic majority on Capitol Hill is displeased with the Pentagon’s implementation of the rules, particularly as they relate to the restriction of col- lective bargaining rights. But the Bush administration shows no sign that it is rethinking its top-down approach. Promotions in the Foreign Service, which operates under its own set of regulations, have always been based on individual performance, as assessed in annual employee evaluation reports. In between promotions to the next full grade — which have become more infrequent and can often take five to 10 years — small, annual “within-grade” step increases have been auto- matic for all FS personnel with satisfactory ratings. Because it is based on pure performance, Foreign Service members generally view the current system for determining pay raises as fair. But with the Bush administration’s push for a more expeditionary model, there is growing concern that a politically motivated Secretary of State might seek to go beyond current financial incentives to reward employees with promo- tions simply for accepting such assignments. Under such a system, performance would not be the only criterion for promotion — or necessarily even a major factor. A complex bill that would apply such an approach, in exchange for the introduction of overseas comparability pay, failed to win passage in the 109th Congress last year despite intense lob- bying by AFSA and other players. Its prospects in the new, Democratic-controlled 110th Congress remain uncertain. A Tough Balancing Act At the root of the concern for many Foreign Service members who are reluctant to take on protracted assignments at unaccompanied posts, is family life. The AFSA survey last year found that two out of three officers are “very” or “somewhat concerned” about family-friendliness within the service. An equivalent percentage of those reluctant to go to Iraq said separa- tion from their family was a primary concern. No one is saying that balancing a family with a Foreign Service career has ever been easy. “There have always been balancing acts,” says AAFSW’s Ryan. “But it seems to me those balances are getting more and more out of whack.” The department now has about 750 unaccompa- nied, “danger-pay” positions at overseas posts to fill each year, nearly half of which are in Iraq and Afghanistan, a vast increase from prior experience. (The number of unaccompanied assignments has grown nearly fourfold since the 9/11 attacks.) By con- trast, when Staples was a young officer in El Salvador, he recalls that the department only had about 100 such jobs. Most of those jobs are in secure embassy com- pounds, but a growing number are comprised of posi- tions on Provincial Reconstruction Teams. These employees are assigned to work on development and democracy-building projects in the countryside of Iraq and Afghanistan, far from the relative security provid- ed in the Green Zone in Baghdad, or in Kabul. In the minds of many Foreign Service constituents, the very existence of these positions raises the possibility that more diplomats could be injured or killed in the line of duty. That is a grave concern throughout the corps, but all the more so for those with families. F O C U S M A Y 2 0 0 7 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 23 The wartime diplomat’s role, in reality, is not new at all.