The Foreign Service Journal, September 2013

56 SEPTEMBER 2013 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL THE CASE FOR A PROFESSIONAL FOREIGNSERVICE The long-term deterioration in the role of the Foreign Service that is already under way should be the subject of a public discussion that has not yet taken place. BY THOMAS BOYATT, SUSAN JOHNSON , RONALD NEUMANN AND THOMAS P I CKER I NG Thomas D. Boyatt, a former ambassador to Colombia and Burkina Faso, and a former AFSA president, is president of the Foreign Affairs Council and chairs the Academy of American Diplomacy’s “Foreign Affairs Budget for the Future” project. Susan R. Johnson, a Senior Foreign Service officer, was AFSA’s president from 2009 to 2013. Ronald E. Neumann, a former ambassador to Algeria, Bahrain and Afghanistan, is president of the American Academy of Diploma- cy. Thomas R. Pickering served as ambassador seven times, including at the United Nations and in Moscow, as well as under secretary for political affairs. T he comments we have received on our recent Washington Post opinion piece (“Presidents Are Breaking the U.S. Foreign Service”) were over- whelmingly positive. Most of the critiques we have seen were descrip- tive, dismissing the piece as divisive and elitist, and deeming it an attack on the Civil Service and political appointees. But none of the critics have challenged our fundamental observations: that the presence of the Foreign Service officer corps in senior positions at the State Department has steadily shrunk, relative to other personnel categories, and that the Foreign Service’s input into the foreign policy process (and management of the department) has similarly declined. Since the mid-1970s, the percentage of positions at the FEATURE