The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2017

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | JULY-AUGUST 2017 61 Employing family members overseas isn’t just good for morale. It makes financial sense too, and helps keep our embassies functioning. Out in the Cold: How the Hiring Freeze Is Affecting Family Member Employment Donna Scaramastra Gorman is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in Time Magazine , Newsweek , The Washington Post and The Christian Science Monitor . The spouse of a Diplomatic Security agent, she has lived in Amman, Moscow, Yerevan, Almaty, Beijing and Washington, D.C., where she currently resides. W e knew it was coming. But on Jan. 23, when the White House released a memo- randum regarding an across-the-board gov- ernment hiring freeze, the shockwave rever- berated throughout the State Department’s community of eligible family members. EFMs typically feel like the smallest, weakest members of State, powerless to make many decisions regarding their own fates. This freeze would take away the last thing over which they could maintain some semblance of control: their job at post. Hiring Freezes: A History This isn’t the first hiring freeze the State Department has endured. Back when many of today’s FSOs were still in school, FEATURE President Jimmy Carter authorized a federal hiring freeze. And President Ronald Reagan famously signed a memorandum ordering a hiring freeze on federal civilian employees as his first official act after his inauguration. The federal pay freeze of 2011, during the Obama administration, continued through 2014. While that freeze didn’t stop hiring, it did, combined with the 16-day government shutdown in October 2013, have a chilling effect on State Department morale and staffing. The current hiring freeze appears to be the first to have a profoundly negative impact on the well-being of the Foreign Service EFM community. One Foreign Service officer who has worked in multiple human resources offices overseas says he is worried about spouses this time around. “The last freeze, in 2011, actually worked to our advantage for EFMs,” he explains. Because State couldn’t hire FSOs, they resorted to hiring EFMs to fill critical positions. That opened up a world of new jobs within the Expanded Professional Associates Program, as well as other professional-level positions. But this freeze, he warns, “has the potential to damage EFM job opportunities far into the future.” Jobs that had been previously earmarked for EFMs could now be filled as Locally Employed staff positions, and the LE staff could then occupy those positions for 10 to 20 years, effectively removing those jobs from the pool of available jobs for EFMs permanently. Also, he notes, programs like EPAP, the Consular Adjudicator pro- BY DONNA SCARAMASTRA GORMAN