The Foreign Service Journal, October 2008

when they observe wrongdoing, with all the protections provided federal employees. A National Peace Corps Associa- tion survey of returned volunteers found widespread support for the bill. It would also require a review of the Peace Corps’ medical clearance system, which some volunteers say is arbitrary and most agree has proved an impediment to recruiting older participants. An April Washington Post story revealing that a Peace Corps Volunteer had been dismissed after being diagnosed HIV-positive, underscored such concerns. Tschetter declined to explain Peace Corps policy on volunteers with HIV or AIDS, but he says the agency is following up on the recommendations made in a March report by the Peace Corps Inspector General that found the med- ical clearance process to be overly burdensome for vol- unteers. On the other side of the debate are some country directors, such as Robert Strauss, who directed Peace Corps operations in Cameroon from 2002 to 2007. He agrees the agency needs to retool itself, but believes it should recruit a more professional group of volunteers and empower its staff to monitor them more closely and evaluate their work. An important corollary of this view is the idea that the Peace Corps is first and foremost a development agency, so its success in that regard should be carefully examined. Strauss believes that, because of the difficulty in securing new funding for the Peace Corps, the agency should reduce its overseas presence from the current 74 missions to 50, while giving country directors more lee- way over their own budgets. Now, he says, when direc- tors economize, they must return saved funds to Washington, providing little incentive for thrift. A better system, he says, would grant country directors a budget that they could use with more discretion. But both the Ludlam and Strauss proposals would actually harm the Peace Corps, Tschetter responds. The Dodd bill, he argues, would undermine management’s flexibility and would create “administrative burdens” while raising “significant safety and security concerns” and creating costs that Congress may or may not provide funding to cover. In the face of the Bush administra- tion’s opposition, the bill has lan- guished. Tschetter endorses Strauss’s pitch for greater evaluation of Peace Corps projects but rejects the rest of his proposal, which he believes would overly constrict the agency’s mission. Significantly, even with a looming retirement crisis facing the govern- ment’s work force, the administra- tion has done little to formally track whether Peace Corps Volunteers move on to Civil or Foreign Service jobs. Tschetter says the agency encourages returning volunteers to consider applying for such positions, but he could cite only anecdotal information about how many actually do. The Way Forward On a more positive note, Kevin Quigley, the president of the National Peace Corps Association and a volunteer in Thailand in the 1970s, argues that in one sense, the Bush administration has pioneered a welcome change in melding Peace Corps objectives with those of the White House on HIV/AIDS prevention. The agency has set volunteers to work on the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief in most of the 74 countries where it operates, and receives specific funding for HIV/AIDS work in more than 20 posts. By contributing to a princi- pal administration development goal, the Peace Corps can make a better case for greater appropriations, says Quigley. But he believes the Bush administration has missed other opportunities to use the Peace Corps more effec- tively. For instance, he advocates allowing more flexibil- ity in the traditional 27-month time commitment for vol- unteers to attract greater numbers of older people, or those with less time to dedicate. And he says the admin- istration’s dismissal of the Dodd bill means the adminis- tration is missing a chance to pursue more aggressively the agency’s oft-ignored third goal: teaching Americans about foreign cultures. Among other provisions, the bill would award grants to private nonprofit corporations and to Returned Peace Corps Volunteers to enable them to develop programs and projects in the United States to further understanding among cultures. Most unfortunate of all, say Peace Corps advocates F O C U S 24 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / O C T O B E R 2 0 0 8 Encouragingly, John McCain and Barack Obama are both strong supporters of the agency. (Continued from p. 22)