THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | OCTOBER 2024 17 SPEAKING OUT Jennifer Davis is a career Foreign Service officer currently serving as the senior U.S. coordinator for lawful migration in the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration. She previously served as the chief of staff at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations, consul general in Istanbul, as the executive assistant to Secretaries of State Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, as special assistant to Secretary Condoleezza Rice, and in several other overseas and domestic tours. She is the 2022 recipient of AFSA’s Rivkin Award for Constructive Dissent. Prior to joining the Foreign Service, she was an attorney in her native North Carolina. She is married to a fellow diplomat and is the proud mom of two sons. The opinions expressed here are offered in her personal capacity and are not intended to represent the positions of the Department of State. “This is every Foreign Service officer’s worst nightmare,” my career development officer said gently. It was 2020, and I had just been informed that my security clearance had been suspended while Diplomatic Security investigated my use of a certain phrase during an official media interview two years earlier, in 2018, while I was serving overseas. I was in shock. I had only learned of the investigation when my promotion was held in abeyance in 2019. What followed was a nearly five-year ordeal that involved both my security clearance, which was reinstated shortly after I was allowed to respond in 2021, and a subsequent lengthy disciplinary proceeding. As the disciplinary proceeding ground on, in 2021, I wrote a letter of dissent to Secretary of State Antony Blinken about my case and sent a set of recommendations to improve State’s administrative security clearance and discipline procedures to Deputy Secretary of State for Management and Resources Brian McKeon. For this, I received AFSA’s 2022 Rivkin Award for Constructive Dissent. At the award ceremony, I told the audience I never wanted to become an expert on this aspect of the State Department’s work. But my experiences had taught me that we cannot always choose what happens to us; we can only choose how we respond. In the end, the Foreign Service Grievance Board fully exonerated me earlier this year, ordering my retroactive promotion, reconstituted performance and promotion boards, back pay with interest, and payment of attorney fees. But the experience troubled me deeply. Several aspects of the State Department’s security clearance and discipline process lack basic elements of due process and fairness and must be reformed to protect the integrity of our institution and the rights of our employees. b The basic facts of my discipline case are these: In 2018, as a consul general, I gave a media interview overseas at the request of our chargé d’affaires, relying on the standard practices of public diplomacy to do so. I had a pre-brief with my public diplomacy team; I worked from cleared talking points; and I checked in with my leadership before the interview. During the media interview and after, while negotiating quotes and attribution, I used a phrase that is quite common in diplomatic parlance to explain our policy. The department would prefer I not share the details here, and I will honor that. But it is fair to say the phrase is one uttered publicly by U.S. diplomats every day, and, in my case, it was used in pursuit of our mission’s first priority—the protection of our staff and American citizens. The Case for Reforming State’s Discipline Procedures BY JENNIFER DAVIS Most antithetical to the basic principles of due process is that employees are not given the opportunity to provide evidence and be heard before department officials make decisions.
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