The Foreign Service Journal, September 2018

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | SEPTEMBER 2018 27 Blues frustration: “You give ’em books and give ’em books,” he said, “but all they do is eat the covers.” This article looks at three tough issues that have been repeat- edly studied to scant effect: dual personnel systems, interagency coordination and professional development. A Single Service Resistance and inertia thwarted early proposals to merge the State Department’s Foreign Service and Civil Service employ- ees into a single personnel system. The Commission on the Organization of the Executive Branch of Government (called the Hoover Commission after its chairman, former president Herbert Hoover) met from 1947 to 1949 pursuant to an act of Congress. The commission’s foreign affairs task force argued for a single service, in which all members would be available for foreign and domestic assignments and subject to selection out. Only a merger, the task force argued, could heal the “cancerous cleavage” between the two services that burdened management and sapped morale. Dean Acheson, named Secretary of State in 1949, had served on the task force and supported the merger. As Secretary, however, he had his hands full negotiating the creation of new international alliances and institutions in the wake of World War II, and defending himself and his department against vicious attacks from the Republican right. He left the merger question alone. “The Secretary,” he later wrote, referring to himself in the third person, “regarded a far-reaching and basic reorganiza- tion of every person in the department as General Grant might have regarded a similar proposal for the Army of the Potomac between the Wilderness and Appomattox.” Nevertheless, the idea of a single service across the Depart- ment of State seemed so sound that it appeared again and again in various forms for the next 25 years. Studies by the Rowe Committee (1950), the Brookings Institution (1951) and a White House personnel task force (1953) repeated the Hoover Com- mission’s proposal with little variation—but no action followed. When the idea appeared for a fifth time, in a 1954 study by a State Department committee on personnel (chaired by Henry Wriston, president of Brown University), Secretary John Foster Dulles took some 1,500 civil servants into the Foreign Service and opened a like number of Civil Service positions in the department to Foreign Service members—but he kept the two services separate and distinct. During the mid-1960s, proponents of a single service brought the idea back in altered form in a bill that passed the House. In the Senate, however, former Foreign Service Officer Claiborne Pell (D-R.I.), a member of the Committee on Foreign Relations, grew concerned that a merger would cost the Foreign Service its elite status. The bill died in committee. Deputy Under Secretary for Management WilliamMacomber then tried to accomplish administratively what the bill would have placed into law; but his efforts were opposed by Civil Service unions and overturned in federal court in 1973. The cleavage between the department’s two personnel sys- tems—not to mention a third system, for increasingly numer- ous non-career political appointees—remains a challenge for management and a source of occasional workplace friction. Employees with different wages, benefits, rights and obligations mesh uneasily into the “one team” the Secretary of State asks for and deserves. It is a pity that when solutions were offered and possible, they failed to be adopted. The Interagency Studies and directives that deal with the problem of policy coordination across agencies, in Washington, D.C., or in embas- sies overseas, have offered solutions marked by impracticality or wishful thinking. In 1949, the Hoover Commission noted, more than 45 agencies had representatives overseas. The Department of State and the Foreign Service accounted for only about 11 per- cent of U.S. government civilian employment abroad, and less than 5 percent of the budget for international affairs. With so few resources at its command, said the task force, the Department of State should concentrate on coordination of the overseas work Why So Many Great Reports and Good Ideas Go Nowhere