The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2006

Thanks to the Diplomatic Readiness Initiative, State is out of the crisis situation it faced in the 1990s, when intake of new officers failed to keep up with attrition. More than 1,000 offi- cers were hired between 2002 and 2004 under the DRI. The initiative is now over, but, says O’Keefe, “We continue to hire slightly above attrition.” For 2007, the administration has requested more than 250 new positions in the areas of trans- formational diplomacy, security and consular affairs. “What it means is we are not going to fall back as we did before,” says O’Keefe. It will also ideally open enough wiggle room to allow more officers to gain critical lan- guage training, program management and public diplo- macy skills. By contrast, many say that the entire Civil Service is now in the midst of a “human capi- tal crisis.” In 2001, the Govern- ment Accountability Office (at that time known as the General Accounting Office), which oversees the executive branch for Congress, put the state of the federal work force on its list of high-risk areas, arguing that “serious management chal- lenges across a wide range of federal agencies, covering pro- grams that involve billions of federal expenditures, can be attributed to shortcomings in how agencies manage their human capital.” The GAO went on to argue that agen- cies — during the downsizing of the 1990s — had allowed their skills at recruiting and training new workers to atrophy, and that with much of the federal work force C O V E R S T O R Y J U LY- A U G U S T 2 0 0 6 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 23 Even the prospect of achieving overseas comparability pay has not allayed widespread doubts about Rice’s willingness to go to bat for her department.