The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2007

J U LY- A U G U S T 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 5 If you look back over my columns for the past two years, you will note that I’ve taken some pretty strong positions about how diplomacy generally, and the State Department and USAID in particular, have been short-changed in the federal budget. This has been true for many years and continues right up through the FY 2008 request that Congress is dealing with presently. This penury is a short-sighted, penny-wise and pound- foolish approach to national security. Quite simply, the United States cannot be a superpower on a shoestring. On June 5 the Foreign Affairs Council, a nonpartisan grouping of 11 organizations committed to diplomacy and supporting the Foreign Service, released its independent assessment of Secretary Rice’s management of the State Department. In evaluating its conclusions and recommendations, it is important to understand that the FAC is the consummate insiders’ group and includes the retired princes of the Foreign Service. Inveterate sniping at Secretaries of State is not what the FAC is about. Instinctively it seeks the middle ground and consen- sus positions, bending over backward to be balanced and include all points of view. AFSA is one of the FAC’s members, but the report itself was researched and written by two retired ambassadors and AFSA’s role was minimal. The FAC report’s key judgment is that the fundamental ability of the State Department to do its job has been severely compromised by its failure to get the resources it needs. This funding shortfall is most acute in terms of personnel, which the report identifies as being 1,100 positions below what is required by Secretary Rice’s signature “transformational diplomacy” initiative. It also concludes that the lack of funding for programs is a huge weak- ness that further jeopardizes the TD initiative. “In the first two years of Secretary Rice’s stewardship almost no net new resources have been realized,” the FAC report states. Making up for this shortfall, its key finding concludes, “will require the aggressive and sus- tained personal involvement of both the Secretary and Deputy Secretary, both within administration councils and with Congress.” The FAC report highlights the pro- found but widely unrecognized impact the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have had throughout the State Department, both overseas and in Washington. The “vacuuming up” of personnel resour- ces gained during Colin Powell’s Diplomatic Readiness Initiative, as well as considerable discretionary financing, have placed great strain on the department. On an issue of particular impor- tance to AFSA members, the FAC report decries the 18.6-percent pay cut that Foreign Service personnel take when serving overseas and calls on the Secretary to “engage in a full-court press to win over Congress” to elimi- nate it. Regarding foreign assistance and USAID, the report calls for a strength- ening of the agency’s capacity to devel- op and implement policy at the same time that the administration is reform- ing the allocation process. In a clear effort to be balanced and give credit where it is due, the FAC report notes that significant manage- ment progress has been made during the past two-and-a-half years in several discrete areas. It focuses on achieve- ments in the Bureau of Consular Affairs, the Foreign Service Institute and the Bureau of Overseas Buildings Operations, as well as in the areas of information technology and public diplomacy. It lauds several new initia- tives, particularly those related to strategic planning, harmonizing State and USAID management activities overseas, and integration of the State and USAID budgets. The bottom line, though, is that the State Department’s leadership has clearly not understood that to achieve its goals, it must get far more resources for diplomacy — and to do that the Secretary herself must be much more involved in the effort. The department spokesman tried to parry criticism in the media’s coverage of the FAC report by protesting that Sec. Rice is already very involved. The point, though, is that regardless of what she has done up to now, it is going to take far, far more of her time and energy to actually suc- ceed. The alternative is that transfor- mational diplomacy disappears in 18 months. P RESIDENT ’ S V IEWS The Verdict Is In: State’s Woeful Underfunding Threatens Transformational Diplomacy B Y J. A NTHONY H OLMES J. Anthony Holmes is the president of the American Foreign Service Association.