No images? Click here As America’s geopolitical confrontation with China intensifies, the United States Foreign Service remains bogged down by bureaucracy; overemphasis on race and sex preferences in hiring, assignments, and promotions; and a misguided ethos that has contributed to its loss of influence over time.
Former Senior Foreign Service Officer (FSO) Matt Boyse hosted three former senior FSOs to discuss how the Trump administration can reform the State Department, especially the Foreign Service and Civil Service. To deliver more results that advance the US national interest, the State Department and the recently constituted Congressional Commission on Reform and Modernization of the State Department should focus not on the usual calls for “bigger budgets, more people, more special envoys, and more diversity,” but rather on great power competition, human resources reform (intake, assignments, promotions, and training), and organizational culture. Key Insights 1. Focus on merit. “So it used to be . . . maybe 20,000 people would take the written test. Of those, maybe 1,000 would be invited to take the oral exam. Of those, about 6 to 10 percent would pass and be invited to become foreign service officers. That’s kind of the short version. So there was an objective standard you had to meet. You had to get, whatever, 10 points or 80 percent on the exam and 7 out of 10 on the oral. But then in about 2022—and I think it started before that, 2015, it really started—they developed another step because the outcomes weren’t what they wanted. . . . They didn’t look at the real variables, they just looked at the outcome. They said, ‘we don’t have enough people who look like this in the Foreign Service. We want it to look like America, so we need to rig the system so that’s the outcome we get.’ So what did they do? They changed the intake process so that the Foreign Service oral exam no longer had a 10 percent pass rate. It had a 50 percent pass rate. So once you got there, it was a coin toss whether you got in or not.” — Simon Hankinson 2. Offer more pathways to employment and grow the Foreign Service’s pool of skills. “But there’s a lot that could be done just in terms of the personnel: Hopefully, foot stomping the importance of merit principles. Something more flexible in terms of personnel systems, to recruit and retain the best talent in a very competitive modern labor economy. Some sort of lateral entry at the middle ranks has been talked about for a long time: a Foreign Service reserve core that would enable people to come and go from the career Foreign Service and sectors of the economy that are critically important for skills that are, frankly, in very short supply in our Foreign Service. [And] training. We’ve talked for a long time in bipartisan ways about, How do we revamp training generally across the department? Do it better. The DoD invests a lot in professional military education. This is not necessarily a resourcing issue, but it is a prioritization issue, and Congress can help the State Department to prioritize better.” — Drew Peterson 3. Focus on results rather than processes and bridge the gap between Washington and its embassies. “My number one issue is the overall ethos of the State Department. When I came in as assistant secretary, I was really bothered by so much, but it finally hit me that I had to tell my folks literally, I said, ‘Listen, listen, our job is not to produce paper. It’s to produce results. The paper can be used to produce results, but we need to focus on what results we actually get out of the work that we put into this.’ Then there was such a major disconnect . . . between Washington and all of our embassies in the field. If it wasn’t for our embassies, there’d be no work for Washington to do. And folks in Washington just don’t get that.” – Ambassador (ret.) Tibor Nagy Go DeeperThe DoD has failed to fix the policies that have hollowed out the US defense industrial base and left America’s military unprepared for war. “We are in an undeclared state of emergency,” warned Palantir’s Shyam Sankar. He joined Hudson’s Mike Gallagher, Nadia Schadlow, and Peter Rough to explain how Washington can change course. President-elect Donald Trump is sincere in his desire to end the war in Ukraine, and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has emphasized that he wants a “fair” end to the war. Luke Coffey gives five reasons Ukraine matters to the US and explains how Washington can ensure Ukraine enters negotiations from a position of strength. Despite fears about tariffs, the Trump team’s tough-on-China policies are good news for the strategically vital US-Japan economic relationship, explains Kenneth R. Weinstein in Nikkei Asia. Act Now Be a part of promoting American leadership and engagement for a secure, free, and prosperous future for us all. |