12 JUNE 2024 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL TALKING POINTS Can you imagine if United Airlines, or Microsoft, or Google, or the University of Virginia had 13 percent of its positions unfilled? What happens is you end up with incredible workload burdens. You end up shifting certain duties. You end up with posts that don’t have enough people. … We’re in this race to catch up, but you can’t catch up if your budget, like this past year, has been cut by nearly 6 percent. —Deputy Secretary of State for Management and Resources Amb. Richard Verma at the Center for Strategic and International Studies on April 3. Contemporary Quote State Releases Chatbot The State Department launched a pilot for its internal AI chatbot the week of April 19 in response to employee requests for help in streamlining processes such as translating and summarizing. Secretary Blinken signed the Enterprise Artificial Intelligence Strategy FY 2024-2025 on Nov. 9, 2023, saying in a statement: “The Department of State will responsibly and securely harness the full capabilities of trustworthy artificial intelligence to advance United States diplomacy and shape the future of statecraft.” Approaches toward generative AI vary across different sectors of the federal government. Certain agencies, such as the Social Security Administration, Veterans Affairs, and the Department of Energy, have blocked the technology altogether. Others, such as NASA and the Department of Agriculture, have begun to cautiously explore this terrain by creating “sandbox” testing environments and organizing boards to review potential use cases. Kelly Fletcher, the State Department’s chief information officer, stated that the agency is encouraging its workforce to use these AI tools to determine how they will best be used in the future. On Gaza Assistance The U.S. embassy in Jerusalem announced the death of a 21-year embassy employee who worked for USAID’s mission to the West Bank and Gaza. Arab Israeli Jacob Toukhy was killed in an altercation with an o -duty police o cer on April 13. According to R. David Harden, a former USAID assistant administrator, Toukhy was a “good soul” who contributed to briefing senior U.S. government officials, helped Palestinians and Jordanians find common ground for shared water resources, and managed many of the mission’s youth programs. Toukhy’s death comes in the wake of humanitarian violence in early April, when seven members of World Central Kitchen’s (WCK) team were killed in an IDF strike in Gaza. WCK’s convoy, made up of Australian, Polish, American, Canadian, and Palestinian nationals, was hit after it left its warehouse in Deir al-Balah, where it had unloaded roughly 100 tons of humanitarian food aid to Gaza. WCK says Israeli forces were aware of the convoy’s movements and purpose when they fired on the vehicle. In response, WCK paused its operations in the region, and the IDF launched an official investigation into the circumstances of the incident, resulting in the dismissal and reprimand of officials involved in the incident. On April 25, José Andrés, founder of WCK, delivered a eulogy to the fallen aid workers at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. On April 28, WCK announced that it would resume operations in Gaza. The mission of aid workers at the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in Gaza has also been stymied since Israel alleged in late January that 12 members of UNRWA staff took part in the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks and asserted that many UNRWA staff are military operatives in Gaza terrorist groups. After an investigation, UNRWA terminated 10 of the 12 accused staff, with the remaining two being deceased. UNRWA maintains that remaining staffers have no ties to Hamas. On April 22, a final report of the Independent Review Group on UNRWA determined that Israeli authorities have yet to provide proof of their claims that U.N. staff are involved with terrorist organizations. UNRWA employs 32,000 people across its area of operations, 13,000 of them in Gaza. Israel’s allegations led 16 countries to pause or suspend funding of $450 million to UNRWA. The U.S. was UNRWA’s chief donor, contributing $300-400 million a year; U.S. Congress officially suspended contributions after an initial pause in funding. Janez Lenarcic, European commissioner for crisis management, called for a resumption in funding for the “Palestinian refugees’ lifeline.” Germany signaled that it would resume funding in the wake of the April 22 report, joining Australia, Canada, and Sweden.
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