Contact: nepal@afsa.org We’re All in This Together This month’s FSJ sent my mind back to the spring of 2025, when those of us serving at posts with a USAID presence watched in disbelief as the agency was dismantled at unimaginable speed. I remember the surreal emails demanding snap decisions about lifesaving and strategically vital programs based on fragmentary information in incomplete Excel spreadsheets. Most of all, I remember the shock at the callousness and cruelty inflicted on our USAID colleagues—American and locally employed staff alike—who were not just coworkers, but friends, mentors, and pillars of our communities. The overwhelming majority of my State Department colleagues shared that sense of outrage. We rallied around our USAID counterparts. Embassy Amman worked around the clock to make the case for preserving our USAID programs. Our community association organized free pizza for USAID colleagues, and signs and lapel pins of support appeared across the mission. Yet I also heard familiar criticisms: that USAID could be difficult to work with, that its bureaucracy was cumbersome, and that its contracting mechanisms were byzantine. We all have a professional obligation to examine critically how the U.S. government operates overseas, including the work of our partner agencies. And I can assure my fellow State Department colleagues that our interagency counterparts have no shortage of critiques for us. But hearing those complaints during such a profound crisis reminded me how easily we can be divided, even when we have far more in common than what separates us. I’ve encountered similar fault lines in my role as AFSA State vice president. The questions take different forms. Why is AFSA still talking about USAID? Shouldn’t we move on? The answer is simple: AFSA will not abandon our USAID colleagues. The courts and Congress continue to consider the legality of the administration’s actions. Many lost their health insurance and benefits. Many have suffered profound financial and professional harm. Too many remain unemployed. We can—and must—continue advocating on their behalf. Others ask whether we’ve devoted too much time to defending employees affected by the July 2025 reductions in force. My answer to this question is equally straightforward. Challenging those RIFs is not only about vindicating the rights of those who lost their jobs. It is about protecting every member of the Foreign Service. Under the arbitrary rules the department used to separate our colleagues, any one of us could be next. I’ve also heard concerns that AFSA spends too much time on chief of mission nominees, given how few Foreign Service members ever compete for those positions. With limited resources, they ask, shouldn’t we focus instead on assignment policies that affect everyone? But what matters more to our colleagues overseas than the quality of the leaders entrusted with their missions—and with their safety and that of their families? The questions differ, but they reveal the same underlying temptation: to see another group’s concerns as less deserving of our attention than our own. This year’s changes to the employee evaluation report (EER) system offered another warning about the dangers of division. The department unilaterally imposed a new scoring system without negotiating with AFSA, creating an artificial scarcity of top ratings. The result was predictable. Colleagues found themselves competing against one another for a limited number of 4s and 5s. We all heard talk of supervisors who were “holding onto” the highest scores to improve their own prospects for promotion and performance pay. Senior employees were pitted against the mid-level officers they rated, mid-level officers against entry-level employees, and generalists against specialists. Whether intentional or not, the effect was the same: to weaken solidarity within our ranks. We should refuse to accept this false politics of scarcity. Our profession is strongest when we reject the notion that one group’s interests must come at another’s expense. The illegal purge of our State Department colleagues, the destruction of USAID without congressional authorization, and the elimination of our statutorily based collective bargaining rights by executive order— none of this is normal, and we all need to do our part to push back. I’ll be the first to acknowledge that the relentless attacks on the Foreign Service over the past year and a half have stretched AFSA thin. We cannot fight every battle simultaneously with limited resources. But we dramatically improve our chances when we stand together—regardless of agency—defending the Foreign Service, defending our institutions, and defending one another. Because, in the end, we’re all in this together. n STATE VP VOICE | BY ROHIT NEPAL AFSA NEWS 46 SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2026 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL
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