The Foreign Service Journal, October 2020

28 OCTOBER 2020 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL The State Department’s decades- long resistance to implementation of even basic EEO standards is as legendary as it is dismaying. beyond belief,” Judge Sporkin boomed at State Department law- yers in 1994. “Eight years is unbelievable. It’s a disgrace, absolute disgrace. ... You reject every type of proposal, everything, and it just isn’t right.” (See “A House Divided: Racism at the State Department” by Bruce Shapiro, Chapter 9 in Diversity and U.S. Foreign Policy: A Reader [Routledge, 2004].) • The State Department inspector general reported in 2006 that State’s Office of Civil Rights was not giving sufficient atten- tion to “monitoring upward mobility programs” and “performing Equal Employment Opportunity Commission–required barrier analyses that are critical to identifying and eliminating barriers to equal opportunity.” The IG stated: “Although barrier analysis is not a new discipline, S/OCR does not have a comprehensive program to carry out that analysis. Barrier analysis requires adequate data collection and careful scrutiny of such factors as the human resources programs designed to increase diversity in the Department ... and the upward mobility programs for underrepresented employees. S/OCR has never had adequate staff devoted to this function.” (See Department of State Inspec- tor General’s Report of Inspection of the Office of Civil Rights, ISP-I-06-41, June 2006.) • “I believe the State Department has the worst record of the hiring of minorities, particularly of Hispanics. This is something that I have been pursuing since my days in the House on the International Relations Committee. This is something I have pursued on this committee, and I do not seem to get anyone’s attention. [I]t ... cannot continue this way,” stated Senator Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), speaking at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during confirmation hearings for Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield in February 2012. (See the transcript, “Hear- ings Before the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, 112th Congress, Second Session, February 7 through November 28, 2012.”) The hubristic attitude of State Department human resources personnel and senior leadership is the reason the department has for decades ignored or defied Equal Employment Oppor- tunity Commission mandates most federal agencies dare not overlook. For example, in 2016 the director of State’s Office of Civil Rights, John Robinson, confirmed that his office was not conducting barrier analysis, as required by the EEOC and recommended by the GAO in its 1989 report. Robinson told me this in a deposition during discovery proceedings related to my lawsuit against the department, adding that it was because the Under Secretary for Management never gave him resources for this activity. Similarly, State ignored the recommendation in the 1989 GAO report that it comply with a mandated Special Emphas is Program for Hispanics, breezily stating in its 2015 annual EEO filing under Management Directive 715 (MD-715) that “S/OCR addresses Hispanic employment issues on an ad hoc basis, though no official Special Emphasis Program is in place.” Until 2016, State also failed to comply with record-keeping obligations required by federal regulations from the Office of Personnel Management and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commis- sion (such as the requirement to preserve for one year any notes written by promotion board panel members). In 2006 State’s Bureau of Human Resources abruptly and unilaterally stopped reporting Foreign Service diversity statistics to OPM for inclu- sion in the annual federal workforce report. What is most troubling is the lack of urgency that top officials have displayed in statements they make out of public earshot regarding deficiencies in retention and promotion of women and minorities. For example, the failure to address decades of deficiencies in the retention and promotion of Hispanic officers was the subject of a meeting in April 2011 between former Direc- tor General of the Foreign Service Nancy Powell, then Human Resources Deputy Assistant Secretary Robert Manzanares, and the leadership of an affinity group, Hispanic Employee Council of Foreign Affairs Agencies. According to the notes HECFAA representatives made during the meeting, DG Powell said that “State wants a better story to present to Members of Congress with an interest in increasing Hispanic representation at State.” But at the same time, they reported, she “cautioned ... that things would not change overnight and that it was important to manage expectations.” DG Powell’s words in 2011 amount to a stunning admis- sion of State’s inability to level the playing field for Hispanics specifically, but also for women and other minority groups. Fully 22 years after the 1989 GAO report urged State to address the underrepresentation of women and minorities in the Foreign Service, five years after a 2006 inspector general report on S/OCR criticized the failure to monitor upward mobility pro- grams for Hispanics, and two years after State declared in its