The Foreign Service Journal, May 2009

After years of flat funding during which new mission re- quirements vastly outstripped staff resources, Foreign Service hiring at State and USAID is fi- nally on the upswing. Funding provided by Congress in the 2008 supplemental appropriation and Fiscal Year 2009 budget will add about 640 additional “core” State diplomatic personnel and 450 new USAID development officers by this September. Obviously, that is very good news. So, too, is the Obama administration’s recently released Fiscal Year 2010 budget request which, without giving details, states that it “includes funding for the first year of a multiyear effort to significantly increase the size of the Foreign Service at both the Depart- ment of State and the U.S. Agency for International Development.” Continued expansion is desperately needed. A blue-ribbon panel report is- sued last October by the American Academy of Diplomacy documented the need for 2,848 additional State po- sitions for core diplomatic functions and a training complement, as well as for 1,250 additional USAID positions, by Fiscal Year 2014. To achieve that goal will require adding an average of 450 new posi- tions at State and 160 new positions at USAID each year for the next five years. In addition, AFSA also sees a strong case for expanding the Foreign Commercial Service and the Foreign Agricultural Service. Moreover, those hiring targets were based on a 2008 snapshot of needs that may grow even larger in the coming years as the Obama administration un- dertakes new foreign policy initiatives — for example, increasing civilian staffing in Afghanistan. In AFSA’s March 20 meeting with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, she pledged to lobby hard to significantly expand Foreign Service staffing. But she noted that the federal government faces difficult budgetary choices. As President Obama and Congress allocate budget resources, AFSA urges them to be mindful of the fact that adding 4,000 positions to our 13,000- member Foreign Service would have a far greater positive impact on national security than would adding the same number of positions to our 1.4 million- member active-duty military (which is currently undergoing a 92,000-position expansion). Many members of Con- gress understand this. The same is true for Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who has given a series of high- profile speeches over the past 18 months urging that more resources be devoted to funding the civilian element of national security. So it is vital to stay the course on ef- forts to expand the Foreign Service. We must not declare “victory” after just a few years of above-attrition hiring which, at best, would only serve to fill existing staffing gaps. Instead, lawmakers also need to fund the creation of a robust training complement to allow Foreign Service members to attain advanced levels of foreign-language fluency, leadership and management ability, and job-spe- cific functional expertise. Future budgets must also create more posi- tions for Foreign Service members to take rotational assignments with other agencies in order to maintain our lead role in foreign policy coordination. Future budgets must give our foreign affairs agencies the “bench strength” with which to staff up the new contin- gencies that will inevitably arise in the coming years. Thus, the task for the Obama ad- ministration, our supporters in Con- gress and AFSA over the next four years is to continue to make the case for strengthening the personnel and physi- cal platform for diplomacy and devel- opment assistance. We must do more than fill existing staffing gaps. We must enure that the Foreign Service has the right number of people with the right skills and experience to meet the chal- lenges of 21st-century diplomacy. ■ John K. Naland is the president of the American Foreign Service Association. P RESIDENT ’ S V IEWS Stay the Course B Y J OHN K. N ALAND M A Y 2 0 0 9 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 5