THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | OCTOBER 2024 19 misconduct. Pursuant to 3 FAM 4322.3(d), the department must give an employee “appropriate notice that an administrative inquiry has been opened.” Yet many employees only find out about an inquiry when changes to their personnel files are frozen. The department should not only routinely inform employees of inquiries, but also provide the employee with an explanation of the disciplinary process and what to expect. Several different offices are involved in these discipline inquiries, and for employees in shock, it becomes a sea of acronyms and procedures to which they have never been exposed. Even providing this information as a one-page handout would improve the current opacity. Length of Time. Two years into my case, I was told that it was being “expedited”—and that was after an official joked during an interview that the case was “so old it had whiskers.” It should not have taken five years to move my case to a neutral arbiter. The long delays often cause employees, whose careers and lives are placed on hold, to wave a white flag. To achieve the correct outcomes while still protecting the rights of our employees, we must place limits on the amount of time these cases can remain pending and provide the relevant offices with the human resources they need to expeditiously and fairly adjudicate their backlogs. b I remain hopeful that the State Department will implement these reforms. Throughout my ordeal, I was buoyed by messages of support from colleagues, mentors, and friends, who at times had to inject steel into my spine to stay the course. Yet at my core, and despite the significant harm, I believed eventually justice would prevail. It did. It goes without saying that the protection of our national security information is critical. The laws and regulations that ensure government officials protect sensitive information are essential to the proper conduct of diplomacy. I have taken great care, including in jobs where I was charged with protecting some of our nation’s most sensitive information, to fully honor those commitments. Before joining the Foreign Service, I practiced law, and in college I studied U.S. history and political science. I come from a military family, and, as with other Foreign Service officers, it was my profound love of country and our special experiment with democracy that led me to join our diplomatic corps. As a political officer overseas working on democratic reforms, I lauded our emphasis on transparency and due process and our protection of freedom of speech and dissent. Today, the same love of country that brought me to the Foreign Service endures. I understand what a privilege it is to have an abiding faith that justice will prevail, to believe in the capacity of our systems to reform, to have the right to express my dissent, and to have benefited from the steadfast support of my colleagues and AFSA. Every day, brave and committed U.S. Foreign Service officers step out into the diplomatic trenches, in complex and sometimes murky environments, promoting U.S. interests and protecting American citizens and our employees overseas. The need for proactive and vibrant diplomacy in the field is as great as ever, and our diplomats must know that our institution will treat us with transparency and fairness as we conduct that challenging work. n
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