The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2014

20 JULY-AUGUST 2014 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL anyone to assess an ambassador as my students did. The problem is that even though the law says each post should be inspected every five years, inspections occur only about every eight years due to a lack of resources. This means most ambassadors will come and go without a thorough review of their performance. They do, of course, get annual evalua- tions like every other officer; but those are written in Washington and are not the best measure of how well the mission is man- aged. And they are never made public. As part of the OIG inspection, every employee at an embassy is required to fill out a personal questionnaire in which they are asked to rate the work environ- ment and management of the post. Instead of this happening only when an embassy comes up for an inspection, an abbreviated PQ could be sent in electroni- cally by everyone at every post every year. With these 360-degree evaluations, the IG could quickly identify the embas- sies with the most serious problems and send a team to do a rapid review. A similar system could also be used within the State Department to rate the effectiveness of every bureau and the assistant secretary who runs it. And those results could be added to the IG’s website. Power and Responsibility This systemwould apply to all ambas- sadors. That could be challenging for AFSA, because it is both the professional association and the labor union of the Foreign Service. In this case, for instance, it can either work to improve the quality of ambassadors and the professionalism of the Foreign Service, or diminish both by defending all of its members, including the incompetent. Thus far, thanks to the posting of the inspection reports on the IG’s website, four ambassadors have resigned. They were all political appointees. A system of abbreviated annual PQs would have to apply to all embassies, even though career ambassadors face bigger challenges than their political counter- parts. Morale problems are typically worse at embassies with hardship and danger pay—posts where political appointees rarely tread. The Quadrennial Diplomacy and