The Foreign Service Journal, May 2014

24 MAY 2014 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL The FAS corps was effectively the last time the single-service impulse took tangible form in the Depart- ment of State. (The National Performance Review , a study prepared in 1993 under the leadership of Vice President Al Gore, urged USAID to bring its Civil Service and Foreign Service employees into a single person- nel systemmodeled on the Central Intelligence Agency, but that idea was not pursued.) In 1975, Foreign Service Director General Carol Laise told Secretary of State Henry Kissinger that the drive toward a single-systemmodel had failed and should be aban- doned. Soon after, yet another blue-ribbon commission, this one convoked by Congress and headed by retired Ambassador Robert Murphy, came down in favor of a dual-service system, a posi- tion endorsed by Deputy Under Secretary for Management Larry Eagleburger. Vive la Difference When the Carter administration and Congress wrote the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 and the Foreign Service Act of 1980, a merger of the two systems was never seriously discussed. (Creation of a single senior service, instead of the separate Senior Foreign Service and Senior Executive Service that emerged, was briefly under consideration, however.) The American Foreign Service Association had favored a single-service system in the 1950s, but after the reformers known as the Young Turks took control in 1968, AFSA argued in favor of a “clear division” between the home (Civil Service) and Foreign Service. AFSA praised the Foreign Service Act of 1980 for its “reaf- firmation of the distinction between the Foreign Service and the Civil Service.” (The distinction was blurred for the director general of the Foreign Service, who under the legislation became respon- sible for all of the department’s human resources, including its Civil Service employees, but had little to do with Foreign Service personnel in agencies other than State.) The years since passage of the 1980 Act have not been kind to the position of the Foreign Service within the Department of State. In 1988, the department had 9,232 full-time employees in the For- eign Service and 4,677 in the Civil Service, a ratio of 2 to 1. By 1998, the department had cut its Foreign Service staff by 16 percent, to 7,724. The number of civil servants, however, had increased by more than 6 percent, to 4,977, so the ratio had fallen to 1.6 to 1. To repair the damage to the Foreign Service, Secretaries of State Colin Powell and Hillary RodhamClinton undertook programs—the Diplomatic Readiness Initiative and Diplo- macy 3.0, respectively—that secured congressional support for increased funding and additional positions for Foreign Service and Civil Service employees in the Department of State. Under these programs, the Foreign Service grewmore rapidly than the Civil Service, but over- all personnel data tell a different story. By 2009, State employed 12,018 members of the Foreign Service and 9,487 members of the Civil Service, a ratio of just 1.3 to 1. Throughout this period, the emphasis that AFSA and other foreign affairs organizations placed on the unique characteristics of the Foreign Service clashed repeatedly with the emphasis of the department’s leadership on teamwork and unity of purpose. AFSA and other organizations were quick to criticize Secretary Powell when he changed the annual Foreign Service Day celebration to a more inclusive Foreign Affairs Day in 2001 and renamed the Foreign Service Lounge the Employee Service Center. More seriously, AFSA fought a long and litigious campaign to block certain high-profile assignments of Civil Service employees to Foreign Service positions overseas, and to inhibit such assign- ments generally. These and other efforts to defend the distinction of the Foreign Service did not reverse the Service’s diminishing prominence in the Department of State and in the conduct of the country’s foreign relations. Nor did such efforts sit well with the department’s management, which tried under successive secretaries to make (in Secretary John Kerry’s words) “each com- ponent of our workforce … work together as one cohesive and vibrant team.” The Foreign Service Act of 1980 is now 34 years old, the age of the Foreign Service Act of 1946 when it was replaced. The drafters of the 1980 legislation had no great admiration for the dual-ser- vice system, but like Secretaries Byrnes, Acheson and Rusk, they concluded that keeping it was preferable to attempting change. With two very different personnel systems—not to men- tion a large and growing cohort of appointees exempt from the disciplines of either—the Department of State lacks the cohesion and vibrancy Sec. Kerry has called for. The department’s man- agers, its Foreign Service and Civil Service employees, and its congressional committees of jurisdiction should start now to look for ways to harmonize the systems, with renewed dedication to merit principles, equal opportunity, and a fair balance of rights and obligations. Only fundamental change can give the Secretary what he wants and deserves. n Wristonization was completed in just four years, but few found the result satisfactory.