How the Trump Administration Can Reform the Foreign Service

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In the 100 years since the 1924 Rogers Act, many reforms have been proposed to make the Foreign Service more effective. Congress this year funded the bipartisan Congressional Commission on Reform and Modernization of the Department of State to “examine the changing nature of diplomacy and the ways in which the department can modernize to advance the interests of the United States.”

In recent years, prominent former foreign service officers have published studies on how to strengthen the Foreign Service and the State Department. But despite America’s massive deficit spending and declining US influence abroad, most proposals double down on the status quo: they recommend larger staffs and budgets, more emphasis on race and sex preferences in hiring, and greater control by career officials at the expense of elected leaders. 

The incoming Trump administration has a rare opportunity to address these weaknesses and help the Foreign Service, and more broadly the State Department, advance the US national interest in the context of intensifying great power competition.

Join Senior Fellow Matt Boyse for a conversation with three former senior foreign service officers: Heritage Foundation Senior Research Fellow Simon Hankinson, Ambassador (ret.) Tibor Nagy, former assistant secretary of state for Africa, and University of Pittsburgh Adjunct Professor Drew Peterson. They will take stock of where the Foreign Service is today and highlight the opportunities for and challenges to reform during the second Trump administration.

Event Transcript

This transcription is automatically generated and edited lightly for accuracy. Please excuse any errors.

Matthew Boyse:

Okay, let’s start then. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to today’s event on the Foreign Service. My name is Matt Bose and I’m a senior fellow here at Hudson and former FSO, by the way. And warm welcome to those also who are joining us online.

Before I introduce our distinguished panel, I will just offer a few kind of remarks to frame the discussion. And then we’ll move to the panel and then we’ll move to some Q&A afterwards from our live audience. And I see a couple people in the audience who are also from the Foreign Service, so I’m sure there’ll be some insights and questions.

So on this question of reform of the Foreign Service, this has been around for decades. It’s a very complex issue obviously because it’s wrapped up in a whole bunch of other issues. Like for example, how the effectiveness of US foreign policy, generally what makes it successful or not.

The function of the State Department itself. The whole dynamic between the State Department, the NSC, the White House, et cetera. The reform of bureaucracy itself and a lot more. Some see the need for Foreign Service reform because they see US foreign policy, US diplomatic influence weakening. Fewer foreign policy successes. And they believe that Department of State needs significant reform to deliver better results.

Others no longer necessarily even look at the State Department for major foreign policy results, but rather look towards the NSC or the White House. Still others think about reform in very different terms altogether. For example, they even wonder whether we’re represented in the right places around the world.

But there’s a broad sense that the State Department as an institution, as well as some of its key components, basically the Foreign Service, civil service, need reform. The last major reforms were legislative reforms reflected in the Foreign Service Act of 1980, which was almost 45 years ago.

Now, in the meantime, many people have grappled with this old issue of reform. Study groups have written long papers suggesting how to reform Foreign Service. Just in the last few years, we’ve had a couple, one by the Council on Foreign Relations, one by the Belfer Center. That was in 2020. In 2022, we had an Arizona State University. Along paper with fp21 has been doing some work recently on this.

The American Foreign Services Association publishes little sort of bits and snatches along the way and proposing ways to make the operation work better. But most of these attempts, there are some very common themes that come through these. Always you see the term revitalizing, modernizing, right sizing, streamlining, diversifying, and even making Foreign Service ready for the 21st century, which of course we’re now already almost a quarter through it.

And of course, the Secretary, Secretary Blinken laid out his vision and his priorities in an October 2021 speech entitled The Modernization of American Diplomacy. And by means of what he called the Modernization Agenda. He delivered an update on that just a few weeks ago on October 30th, where he reported many changes, positive changes in his view that had been made. Now of course, opinions differ as to how successful that agenda has been.

So there isn’t nearly enough time to go into all this, but most would I think would agree that the Department of State and AID are not delivering better results after all these reforms. Many serving officers believe the situation in curious has actually gotten worse.

Now, almost 100 years ago this year in 1924, the Rogers Act established the Professional Foreign Service. Now, the Trump administration has a major opportunity to change policies and practices that have accumulated over time and left the institution less effective than the sum of its parts to the detriment of the US national interest. It is encouraging that the Trump administration is looking at government efficiency and effectiveness and aligning missions with resources and budgets to more closely deliver on key national interests.

Now, the bipartisan effort by the Congress led by, this latest one led by Senators Hagerty and Cardin to stand up a commission on reform and modernization of the State Department for the 21st century. That is also promising. The fact, however, that it is bipartisan, offers opportunities and challenges.

Because I mean, on the opportunity side, of course, legislation is necessary to make certain changes. But then there are also challenges because the two parties, Democrats and Republicans, really view the organization through very different lenses. And delivering sort of yes-able proposals that deliver real change and that both sides can agree upon will probably be a challenge.

But it isn’t our intention to go into all these studies today or to resolve these issues at all. That’s impossible, of course. But we can offer some observations based on this distinguished panel’s well over 100 years of Foreign Service experience. So with me to discuss the state of state are three other former FSOs, well known for their thoughtful and provocative views.

Simon Hankinson, a senior research scholar at Heritage. Drew Peterson, adjunct professor at the University of Pittsburgh. And Tibor Nagy, a two-time ambassador, former assistant secretary, and emeritus professor at Texas Tech.

All of us left the Foreign Service in the last few years. All of us have noticed changes that have diverted the Foreign Service from its mission of advancing core US national interests, that have diluted its resources and weakened the institution’s effectiveness. They have not led to more successes.

It is our sort of considered opinion that the answer to the State Department’s challenges is not necessarily the same old, same old. Larger budgets, more people, more special envoys, more diversity, et cetera, et cetera, as most of the reform proposals advocate for. In fact, some of the solutions lie at the root of the problems that the state and the Foreign Service face.

We want to stimulate debate so that the Trump administration, Secretary-designate Rubio and the Congressional Commission can deliver significant change in the next four years. There is an opportunity and there is a will and a window now for significant reform.

Simon, you’ve written a couple, that I’ve seen, a couple of very interesting pieces lately on DEIA at state that show a clear shift away from the meritocracy that has been the foundation of the Foreign Service for decades and decades. Your most recent piece on promotion statistics and DEIA policies, remember the A, we have to, policies, received a lot of attention. So what have you found in your research that you can share with us?

Simon Hankinson:

Well, if you don’t mind, I’m going to back up to the 36,000-foot view just to give you the framework. Because I think once you understand the framework, then my findings will make a lot more sense.

And that’s this. In human societies, variables produce disparate outcomes. Most nurses and kindergarten teachers are women. Most firemen are men. There are reasons for that. People who believe in equal opportunity believe that as long as you don’t tell a man he can’t be a nurse or a kindergarten teacher, who cares? As long as you don’t tell a woman she can’t be a firefighter, who cares?

If the objective test tests the job, people compete, they do what they want to do, and merit and talent, and that’s the American way. That’s one view. But there’s another ideology that has various names, woke, critical theory, critical race theory, et cetera. That posits a completely different philosophy, which is that any disparity between the outcomes of group A and group B can only be the result of structural forces, structural racism, structural sexism.

We can’t consider other variables. For example, group A does two hours of homework a night, group B does an hour, group C does a half an hour. Group A, 75 percent of the kids are born with a mother and a father. Group B, 75 percent of kids are born without a father in the household. All of those are factors that lead to positive outcomes and negative outcomes. But you can’t consider that in this, let’s call it the critical theory, oppressor-oppressed matrix.

So we have these two competing philosophies, equal opportunity and equal outcomes. And equity is now what used to when I went to law school meant it was a particular type of law. It meant really fairness is the vernacular. But now it means desired outcomes by race and sex. It means that in any given institution, you ought to have 50 percent men, 50 percent women, 14 percent Black, whatever the Asian percentage is 6 percent. It’s growing. Hispanic, 20 and so on.

And so organizations that bind to this theory, I’m just going to call them woke organizations for ease of reference, have to rig the system. They have to engineer mechanisms to achieve equity. And that in a nutshell is what DEI is. It’s not diversity. We all like diversity as it arises from competition and choice and merit. Diversity’s great.

We all love inclusion. No one wants to exclude anybody unless it’s a profession that they have to be excluded from because they can’t do the job. And equity just means fairness. But when you lump them together with a capital letter, they become this philosophy of equal outcomes. And so today, not entirely under the Biden administration, but they supercharged it with President Biden’s executive orders DEI, A, is a euphemism at best or a Trojan horse at worst for this philosophy of equal outcomes.

And it’s essentially giving us a race, sex, caste-based outcome in every organization including the State Department. So once you see that, then you can see specifically what’s happened within the State Department. So it used to be you would take the, about 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 six 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 seven 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. And they didn’t look at the fact that the schools suck in many parts of the United States and the educational system has collapsed. They didn’t look at the collapse of the family.

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, was a coin toss whether you got in or not.

And they rigged through this thing called the Qualification Evaluations Panel, the first part, the written test. Where now you have to write an essay which can include your lived experience, your challenges, and all these other things. It’s very similar to what they did in colleges when they wanted to not look like they were discriminating on the basis of race.

They invented this holistic process where we assess things like character. And lo and behold, some groups with amazing SATs and high grades score very low on the character assessment. While other groups with lower scores and lower grades score amazingly high and it works out so you can get in the right kinds of people.

So that’s what they did for the Foreign Service. And that approach has allowed them to hire a Foreign Service that looks a lot more like America but is no longer meritocratic in the same way that it was 20 or 30 years ago. And that same philosophy has been applied to the promotions and to the assignments process. Now I have some data on this. Please read my reports. If you Google Hankinson, DEI state, everything will come up, a few articles, a few reports, but I also have a lot of anecdotes.

I had a guy write to me today, and most FSOs, if you know anything about the Foreign Service, it’s a pretty left-wing organization. I would say like DC probably 95 percent of people voted for Harris this time. So we’re not talking about a bigoted organization that doesn’t believe in equity and fairness. These are mostly people who have been gently red-pilled over time.

But I had a guy reach out to me and say that of all his friends who are competing for jobs, let’s say the O1 level, equally qualified, excellent officers, women and men, the women are getting six to eight offers for overseas assignments. The guys are getting zero of the ones that he knows. And I’m hearing this from a lot of different people. It is not, as I say, it’s statistically very difficult to nail down.

And then as to what those jobs do, we all know if you get better jobs, you tend to get better jobs after that. It’s a self-fulfilling cycle. And on the promotions, if you look at the report I just came out with, which was a surprise even to me, and I’m an ultra-cynic, for the last 20 years, women have had an unequivocal advantage over men in promotions.

Now, you could believe that women are just better at their jobs over 20 years in every category than men. They’re just smarter, they work harder. Or you could believe that someone put their foot on the scale to try to right the wrongs of 200 years, or I guess in women’s case, you could say 40,000 years, to try to even things out. And I believe that’s what’s happened.

There are some who believe that’s right, we should right the wrongs of the past with present discrimination. My personal view is that we are not an ethnic state. The only thing we have is values. We have a constitution, we have equality, we have merit. And if we sacrifice those things in the name of equity based on caste and race and sex, we’re doomed as a country. Sorry, a bit long-winded.

Matthew Boyse:

No, no, carry on. Because this is a deep vein to be mined. Once you start going into this issue in greater detail, it becomes more and more an issue and that you start, we hear from our colleagues and not just men by the way. By the way, this is not just a male thing.

Okay. Drew, you’ve been working with the Hagerty Commission or in touch with them on a regular basis. Do you have a, can you give us a sense of what’s going on there right now? I mean, we know that they’re standing up this commission, well, the Hagerty-Cardin Commission. That they’re standing it up, they’re starting to staff it. They funded it, and so they’ve got a couple years mandate. What can you tell us about them? About that effort and that might be of interest?

Drew Peterson:

Thanks, Matt. And thank you for pointing that out and to Hudson for convening this conversation. Because I think you’re right that this is a window of opportunity for significant reform. So Congress has enacted in law and also appropriated bipartisan Congressional Commission on reform and modernization of the State Department.

It doesn’t have staff yet. Senators Hagerty and Cardin were the co-sponsors of the initial legislation and have been the co-chairs. I believe we’re now at quorum. There’s not been a ton of press about this, but since President Biden named his four, the White House gets four nonpartisan picks. They named them last in mid-October. There was a little bit of press about that.

But effectively for most of this year, despite having appropriations, it’s been sort of the steady drumbeat of appointments to the commission from both houses of Congress, both sides of the aisle. Even though the commission’s not yet at the point where it’s operational and likely won’t be. My understanding is that now that there is a quorum, there could be staff and there could be a commission clock within about 60 days.

But one of the things that needs to happen first is that Senator Cardin, who has now succeeded to the chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, needs to appoint a successor as the Democratic co-chair. So my understanding is that that is the practical next step before the committee starts operations.

So presuming that optimistically, that could happen sometime after we have a new Congress in the new year, a new administration in the White House, there are some real opportunities to move forward. It’s about an 18-month clock. They then can do their sort of blue-ribbon panel sort of recommendations.

They do need to be bipartisan. And I’m glad you highlighted at the top that that is both a huge opportunity for potential fundamental reform of the Foreign Service. The Rogers Act going back 100 years. Things that we haven’t been able to look at since 1980, the Foreign Service Act of 1980.

So those ideas could be big, right? I mean, this does not touch on the State Department’s relationship with all of the other departments and agencies. It would not touch on the State Department’s relationship with the White House or the National Security Council. Those are more of Article II constitutional questions.

And at this point are also the product of a long-standing bipartisan trend of increasing numbers of political appointees in top assignments. As well as often idiosyncratic management of particular policy issues out of the White House. So those things not necessarily going to be addressed by the commission.

But anything that relates to State Department organization. Personnel, structure, the Foreign Service, how the State Department does overseas, platform, all of the buildings and operations, the security posture. There’s a specific provision in the legislation to look at the link between diplomacy, defense development, commercial health, law enforcement, science technology, and other core United States national interests.

So this is a great opportunity. It is a great opportunity to right-size, streamline, and fit to purpose the Foreign Service in the State Department for what remains of the 20th century. And obviously for technological, strategic, economic, and institutional competition across the full spectrum with the People’s Republic of China, which I think is clearly that’s the pacing threat for the Department of Defense.

That should also be the pacing challenge and scenario for the State Department. Not to be out-competed by our adversaries in the diplomatic realm, whether that’s bilateral diplomacy, multilateral institutions, diplomatic presence, or otherwise. So this is a real opportunity.

Obviously the most significant changes would come if the commission is able to make a strong set of bipartisan recommendations. Which could then be the basis for the Trump administration in a couple of years to work with Congress to legislate. The mandate is, as I said, narrower in scope than everything that could be on the table, right? It’s not going to address State Department DOD relationship, right?

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 system, 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. 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. In a utopian world, Congress might even repeal some of the mandatory reporting requirements that it’s imposed on the State Department, which are part of the reason the State Department has difficulty prioritizing and doing certain things, focusing on them at expense of various other things.

And so there are lots of how many mandatory requirements are there for reports to Congress? I mean, some of those could be streamlined. That would require Congress to do. Getting back to training and FSI, developing some sort of doctrine or trade craft so that there is a more robust defined body of knowledge that defines the Foreign Service and diplomacy. I think that’s something that people on both sides of the aisle see as important. Getting our use of technology, our ability to interpret data, our skill sets in terms of economic skills.

When the commission was launched just earlier this year, Senator Hagerty told one of his favorite anecdotes from his time as ambassador to Japan. Which is that he was looking at a particular issue in his first week or two at the embassy. And said, I need somebody on staff who’s got an MBA.”

And so he looked around and the staff at Mission Japan is hundreds of American direct hires. He said, “Surely somebody here has an MBA or degree in economics.” And nobody did. Nobody did. And so being able to bring in more people with diverse skill sets and the intellectual skill sets and capital that we need to compete the rest of the century, I think is really important.

There’s no need necessarily though to wait for that. I mean, we may seize those opportunities. We may not. Opportunities are just that. There are probably many more that are not seized than those that are. But in the meantime, there are a few things that President Trump and his team can begin implementing starting on inauguration day.

A lot of changes that could be made well below the level of legislation to streamline how the department does recruitment, assignments, evaluations, tenure, and promotion in particular. These processes have been criticized in countless reports, as you noted, Matt, for being insufficiently transparent. In Simon’s really excellent work, producing results that are insufficiently diverse or what have you. But these are all perspectives that I would highlight privilege the viewpoint of the officers who are going through the process rather than the public benefit that is supposed to be served as a result of the process.

These seem to overlook to me the most obvious shortcoming, which is ineffective outcomes. These processes are exceptionally inefficient and costly. They often produce high rates of vacancy, curtailments, and other things that inhibit high-performing embassy operations. The department bottom line spends far too much time on these processes for insufficient results.

Just to sort of anecdotally, most junior officers, I did about a year of consular work as a junior officer. Most spend, maybe two, maybe more. I knew a few who spent five or six years between consular and training before they were actually assigned to do the role that they had been hired to do by the State Department. Which at this point we can have all sorts of euphemisms about training generalists and all that.

That doesn’t do that. That produces burnout. No high-performing institution can recruit somebody for a particular role or skill set and then send them to do five or six or seven years of other things. And expect them to be high-performing in the skill set after having not done it for five, six, or seven years.

So I think that there’s a lot that can be done well below the level of legislation in terms of modernizing, streamlining, and more effectively producing these outcomes. I’m really glad Simon mentioned the Qualification Evaluations Panel. In addition to everything he observed about sort of diversity and quota system critiques, which I think are valid, I think another main result of the Qualification Evaluations Panel is that it has made it much more difficult for younger people with less life experience to join the Foreign Service.

So gone are the days when most of your junior officers were actually junior people coming straight out of university or wherever. Because in fact, a university degree still is not required. And that’s probably a good thing because if you can pass the test, you can pass the test. That was always the way it was.

But today in an organization that’s already too heavy at the top, we have a shortage of people in the junior levels. And we’re bringing in people whose average age at this point, I don’t know what it is, but it’s well into the 30s. It’s well into the 30s, people on their second and third careers. And that’s fine, but you need to fill the lower ranks of the service somehow, and you need to fill consular roles in particular.

You need to do that with limited non-career appointments. You need to do that with civil service excursion tours. And you need to restructure a lot of the intake pipeline so that we have a broader diversity of people, not just in terms of race, sex class or whatever, but also in terms of geography and in terms of age of life.

I mean, you need to bring younger people back into the Foreign Service even if they don’t spend a 28-year career there. I mean, that was the way it was 50 years ago. Today maybe people will come and spend 10 years in the Foreign Service or five or even three, and then they’ll go do something else. And with a Foreign Service Reserve Corps, that could be easier to structure. It could be easier to structure more diverse and interesting career paths for people to come and go and develop expertise outside of the department and bring it back in.

So we have not nearly enough time to discuss everything that could be done here, but I think all of these are some interesting points that could be addressed. Reorganization of the department also can happen at levels below legislation. Obviously legislation required to address the biggest pieces, the bureaus. The over-line top-line budget, which again, doesn’t necessarily need to be bigger so long as we are smarter and better prioritized with what we have.

But things like the organization of the Undersecretariat, families of bureaus. That could be reorganized. What is called the J-family, the Undersecretary for Civilian Security, Democracy, and Human Rights has long been a very incoherent organization that has been begging for reform and reorganization. Most of the issues that are dealt with in that bureau are either political, economic, or security in nature and could be redistributed to other families within the department. The fact that there is not an undersecretary with primary responsibility for consular affairs seems to be a major oversight.

You could very easily foresee an Undersecretary for N. There’s already a C, but for some sort of single-letter principle that oversees consular affairs, population refugees, and migration. Maybe the Special Envoy for Hostage Affairs. Sort of a consular affairs border security and migration related undersecretariat. That would be coherent and would align with one of the cones of the Foreign Service.

And then doing away with J, redistributing its bureaus. You would then have six undersecretariats that cohere to the five cones of the Foreign Service, plus T for security, which is almost sort of a sub-cone. That would seem to make a lot of sense. That would seem to be the kind of thing that you could do without legislation. You could do without.

There would of course be resistance from bureaucracy, but truly there’s not a lot of fanfare. This is not a political issue. This is just about making the department serve its purposes. It’s basic core purposes better.

I don’t want to take up too much time. We can talk more about the commission, its structure, what it can and can’t do. But on the note of diversity and diversity of perspective, because it’s been raised, and I think it’s important, it’s very hard to put one’s finger exactly on this. But Simon mentioned that the election returns in the District of Columbia were what, maybe 7 percent for Donald Trump. That was probably what it was.

If you look at the latest federal election commission data, individual donations to individual candidates, those numbers are $38,000 to President Trump’s individual candidate re-election effort by people whose employer is the Department of State. 795,000 for Harris. So that is a 21 to one split.

This is not an exact science. I don’t mean to precisely define the number of Republicans and/or conservatives and/or people who voted for Donald Trump who are in the Department of State. But I think anybody who’s spent time in the department working in the department or dealt with it intimately in the last few years can tell you that that is probably representative of the general split.

And I would submit to you, again without knowing the exact figures that have been released lately, because the department has not always been super transparent about these things. 21 to one is probably a much greater split than any other demographic category you could possibly imagine.

And so if we are not addressing the fact that 50 percent, roughly 50 percent of our country is 5 percent of the State Department and the Foreign Service, that would seem to be a major oversight in terms of intellectual and perspective diversity. So I’ll leave it at that for there because I think we are short on time, but there’s a lot more to discuss. And thank you, Matt, and the panel.

Matthew Boyse:

Yeah, no. This question of diversity is, I mean, not only MBAs in Japan, a major economic superpower really. But also this question of 90 percent of the Foreign Service voting in a particular way. I mean, it’s hard to, this question of political diversity is as important as any other form of diversity as well. And something that might actually also deserves a bit of attention because it produces a monoculture which is not healthy for big organizations, and especially in a dynamic world with great power competition that we face.

Tibor, you’ve been an ambassador twice. You’ve been an assistant secretary in a major geographical bureau. What do you see that needs the most attention? Because of all these issues, I mean, there are so many issues that you get a group of Foreign Services in the room and they’re so smart, they’ll come up with 100 different things that need to be improved. And of course they’re all right. But you have to also prioritize. And what do you see?

Ambassador (ret.) Tibor Nagy:

Less than 10 minutes, right? We’re going to do all this. And disclaimer, my views are no means objective. I spent my entire career avoiding Washington, staying out on the field because I was scared to death about Washington being overly bureaucratic. So I come back as assistant secretary and I have to tell you I was wrong because it was 10 times worse than I even feared. So I’m going from that point of view.

So these are like my major areas. Some of these the new secretary can address immediately. Some of them will require a major legislation or reform. 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, and I saw this from the field, but then again, I saw it from sitting in Washington. That there’s a huge 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.

Total uncoordinated taskings coming out of Washington here. That the embassies are just besieged, absolutely besieged by work that they have to do. So much of it is duplicative, so much of it is unnecessary. I remember we used to laugh about how many times our African embassies were asked to go in and demarche their foreign ministries on recognizing Kosovo. And these are countries that don’t even know where Kosovo is, but we have to spend time over, over again doing that.

So much of the policies coming out of Washington or developed in Washington are so aspirational they can never be implemented in the field. I think of President Biden’s Africa policy, which was a list of desiderata. But it was no way that our small embassies in the field could ever begin to implement all of those things.

One of my thoughts is that we need to bring back a program we had back in the, I think late ‘70s and early ‘80s called the SCP Program, Special Embassy Program. Especially small embassies, that were then allowed to not have to do all of these congressionally mandated reports. They were prepared either in Washington or by the larger embassies.

They only focused on the essential functions of diplomacy. And it was so wonderful to work in one of these. When I was in the Seychelles, we had seven people. And I promise you, we were much more productive than when I ran the Embassy in Nigeria where we had like 200 people. So bring back the SCP Program.

You mentioned too many offices. 24 assistant secretaries. 24. And then you add the others who are in those kind of positions and you’re at 40-something. It is absolutely ridiculous. You have special envoys tripping over each other.

I hate special envoys. I mean, in Africa, I did have two, but there was a rationale. It is ridiculous to have a special envoy for a single country. You only have a special envoy if it’s a very complicated issue requiring multiple countries, lots of travel going back and forth, and then you represent the view across there. But so many special envoys. And of course then they have their own staffs, and it’s one more piece in the bureaucracy.

Talking about having too many offices. Then you bring up this nasty issue of clearances. They were one of my biggest headaches was getting notes, demarches, instructions, reports through the various parts of the State Department. And especially the single issue offices were the biggest problem because you start with a recommendation or a paper that’s going through. And I know this is inside the weeds, but every single office that goes through, I called them Christmas trees. Because every single office would hang an ornament on there, which was their issue.

So if you’re the Bureau of Funny Walks, then that has to be put on that demarche. Make that your number one priority until it gets to the next office where they put their ornament on there. And the problem is when you go through so much of a clearance at the end of it, this paper that started out being fairly straightforward with recommendations for action, it becomes totally anodyne.

And I would go to these G7 meetings and other meetings with my papers prepared, and the stuff was basically meaningless. My colleagues, especially, for example, the French, they came through with very, very precise sophisticated points. And there I was basically reading anything that could be taken off the news, nothing precise. It was very, very frustrating.

Then for me, the biggest area of course is the evaluation process, what we call EERs in the State Department. To me, that is totally dysfunctional, should be thrown out, should be started from scratch, and changed totally.

It is incredible for our institution that for at least three weeks of the year, the entire organization comes to a stop while everyone focuses on doing these evaluation reports. That at the end of the process, about 5 percent of the organization gets promoted. So that leaves about 95 percent of the people unhappy. I mean, you talk about shooting yourselves in the foot.

And it is not a fair evaluation process. It is a creative writing process. The promotions are based exclusively on how your rater and reviewer can write. Unless, as in so many cases, you’re writing your own evaluation report. And in my case, as assistant secretary, I had 54 evaluations to write. 54, including 48 ambassadors and charges.

I knew the really good ones and I knew the really bad ones, but the ones in the middle, I didn’t have a clue as to what they were doing every day. So you do the logical thing, you tell them to write their own, and then you spin it a little bit. But so many people in the State Department are doing that, that it is just an absolute sham.

And then mentioned before, the precepts. Now there are five key precepts, but recently one of them was changed. So we’re literally, as they say, changing the goalposts in the middle of the game. And since people are scored on each of those five precepts by the promotion panels, it’s a totally non-transparent process. No one has any idea of, you get the one on DEIA and you don’t know where that came from or why that hit you.

And then to me, one of the fundamental things, our promotions are based on potential, not performance. Now, that is a disconnect. It is such a subjective issue as what constitutes potential when you have performance. But anyway, there has to be a much, much better system.

Next one is we just have to assume that the resources are going to shrink. They’re not going to be more and more resources for the State Department and more and more people. And we can do the work, the essential with less people. Drew mentioned the Foreign Service Reserve Corps. I am a huge proponent of the Foreign Service Reserve Corps because that’s what we need when we have crises and we need to serve some people.

I know one of the organizations I belong to, these American Academy of Diplomacy has a fairly detailed proposal on a Foreign Service Reserve Corps. And it would really make a lot of sense. When COVID hit, we needed something like Foreign Service Reserve Corps. Or the bureau I was in charge of Africa. I mean, look at what’s happening in Africa. There’s always a crisis going on.

So you’re having to take people out of their offices to set up task forces and things like that. But oh, so who’s going to do their jobs in a bureau that’s already fairly understaffed? So desperate need for that.

I’m all for supporting employees because employees are our resource. So yes, we should do everything to support families, keep them together with the tandems, with what we call the debtor positions. Where you have a spouse overseas and they’re actually doing a distance position because the jobs can be done by a distance. Wonderful. Let’s move some of the offices out of Washington. They can be done at a distance.

But we seem to have forgotten a very important concept. And that’s called needs of the service. Needs of the service. In other words, you’ve just come in, we need a GSO in Ouagadougou, so you’re going to be the GSO in Ouagadougou. We have gotten away from that.

And also there was a very important mechanism called fair share bidding, when if you go from Budapest to Vienna to Madrid, maybe it’s time for you to go to Ouagadougou. You’re not going to spend your whole career on the cushy track kind of thing. So I would bring that back.

And then finally I’ll end up with the Foreign Service Institute because ambassadors are so critical to the operation of every single embassy. So critical. I had 48 ambassadors. I only had three political appointees. I know AFSA always comes out with, “Oh, we need to have less political appointees, blah.” There will never be less political appointees. Every single president’s going to appoint at least 30 percent political appointees.

And Foreign Service Institute ambassadorial training course task to do a much, much better job of two categories of ambassadors, political ambassadors, they need to have their own course because they desperately need training to be effective. And then first-time ambassadors also. Because again, I can speak for Africa, we have small embassies and we often have embassies where every single person in that embassy is doing their job for the first time. So they can’t just go ask somebody else.

I felt like I was a mentor sitting as assistant secretary to like 20-some ambassadors who were trying to do it for the first time. And they would call me and say, “Hey, this is coming up. What in the world should I be doing?”

So I will stop there, but I will end up, we’re talking about reform, reform, reform. I’m going back to 1993, Vice President Al Gore’s National Performance Review. Where Al Gore proposed a government that works for people cleared of useless bureaucracy and waste, and freed from red tape and senseless rules. And then he went on to quote, “Washington is filled with organizations designed for an environment that no longer exists. Bureaucracies so big and wasteful, they can no longer serve the American people.”

Matthew Boyse:

Here, here. So some of the things you mentioned, a bunch of things, Tibor, ethos. You remember during the Trump administration, Secretary Pompeo put together and ethos for the State Department, which was so garden variety neutral normal, that you couldn’t possibly have any issues with it.

What was the State Department’s mission? Who are our people and what do we do? And it was impossible almost to find anything wrong with it except for the fact that it had been drafted and advanced by Secretary Pompeo. Which then on day one of the Biden administration was removed from the building as though there was no more ethos to this body of people, all of whom are supposedly there to advance the American US interest with that mission.

Ambassador (ret.) Tibor Nagy:

But even that ethos, it went through the clearance process.

Matthew Boyse:

Yep.

Ambassador (ret.) Tibor Nagy:

By the time it came out. . . To me, it’s a simple ethos, beat China.

Matthew Boyse:

It had some very good parts to it, and day one, was not invented here. We were not allowed to talk about the Abraham Accords on the 21st of January, a massive success during the Trump administration. And of course after the ethos had been taken down.

You mentioned having served in Africa so many years, I’m delighted that the President has finally gone to Africa in the last few weeks of his presidency. In an enormously important continent where there is all sorts of great power competition, which has been, and of course, it’s maybe about time that he did. Good that he’s getting there finally, last few weeks of his presidency.

You mentioned that the change in precepts, the promotion precepts, to emphasize diversity over some of the other issues that had been emphasized over the course of decades and decades. Well, a person, a senior officer at a very important European embassy in April during the evaluation period, described to me a situation where he was forced to review officers.

And he was actually almost unable to tell which country they were serving in because they were so focused on proving how they’d been served on the diversity council. And they’d been doing the diversity this and et cetera, et cetera. So that, you read this what did Officer X do during the year? Well, this advanced diversity, but which country? This has gone way, way too far.

And then finally, let’s just. . . Well, we are sort of, maybe we just one last question for the group. So okay, you’ve got this massively, this huge bureaucracy. You’ve got rather entrenched ways of doing things. You’ve got the protection that the bureaucracy or that is provided or accorded to people who are civil servants of either Foreign Service or civil servants.

You have resistance to change. You have an enormous undertaking. Where should the Trump administration start? I mean, because everything that you all have said, it makes perfect sense and seems like it should be a priority. But of course when everything’s a priority, nothing’s a priority.

Where are the biggest problems? And where should the Trump administration focus? So that on day one, this unwieldy enterprise can start producing more results for the American people, for the national interest? And also get to the point where the people who work there feel that they’re more productive? Anyone want to take a stab at that?

Simon Hankinson:

Well, I at one point spoke all or part of five languages, and the worst was Spanish. And I learned a new word not long ago from the new president of Argentina, Javier Millet, afuera. And I think that’s the approach we need to take.

We’ve been incrementally sort of put down this hole of clearances, of bureaucracy, of EERs, of just garbage that clogs the arteries of this institution full of smart people that’s supposed to get stuff done. So I think we need to go and we can’t do this incrementally, and it doesn’t have to be in four years. Let’s hope it could be in eight or 12 and that maybe Republicans and Democrats could agree that this needs to be done.

We have to start slicing things out. So if there are 24 assistant secretaries, let’s cut half of them. Special envoys, representatives, coordinators, I call them circs, I don’t know how many there are, 25, 30 of those. The ones that aren’t congressionally mandated, adios. We don’t need them.

Drew Peterson:

There were 72 in 2017. In 2017 there were 72.

Simon Hankinson:

72. We have ambassadors in every country. That should be the person who’s coordinating the efforts for that country. And if he or she can’t, then they got to go and be replaced by somebody who could do that job.

So we need a soup to nuts evaluation. The one thing that conservatives agree on is we can’t have unlimited funds, just keep doubling the staff and have a training float. And no, that’s not going to happen. So let’s figure out what really needs to be done, put our resources there, and strip out everything else.

We’ve got like five reports, the religious freedom report. There’s a congressional religious freedom report, there’s the human rights report, there’s the child trafficking port. They all basically cover the same territory. How about just one big report on all that?

Ambassador (ret.) Tibor Nagy:

Which it used to be.

Simon Hankinson:

The right stuff, which it used to be. We can do this. What can be built, the sclerosis can be undone more quickly, I think, than it built up.

Matthew Boyse:

That makes a good point because this proliferation of special envoys and mandate, congressionally mandated reports, okay, we can’t ignore congressionally mandated reports. When Congress wants something, we have to pay attention. And of course, and we do.

But this also produces a lot of wear on officers who end up spending vast amounts of time on things that they are almost unable to do their job in terms of the bilateral relationship, et cetera. So you have this rather difficult situation where officers are so burdened by these kinds of activities that it’s harder for them to do their jobs. And there has to be some prioritization. Without the prioritization, you just lose your focus. And in the end, where does it get you?

Ambassador (ret.) Tibor Nagy:

Hey, Matt, on the prioritization, you have to have a traffic cop. And if the geographic bureaus could have the say that you want to send a demarche request to the embassy in Nagambie to ask for recognition of Kosovo, the Africa Bureau has to have the power to say no, they’re overburdened. They don’t have, it’s not a congressionally mandated report. No. And that just doesn’t happen.

Matthew Boyse:

Yeah, there has to be a lot more no being said. Okay, so one place to start that Simon has suggested. We have 10 more minutes. Maybe another just one parting shot. Where to start this unwieldy enterprise?

Drew Peterson:

I’ll give a very small parting shot. I don’t want to be repetitive. I do think the team is going to come in. I think they should be doing a baseline top to bottom review of every single unit of the organization. Every administration transition that comes in ultimately produces lots of sort of workarounds to the bureaucracy.

I think the ideal would be that you get to a point where the echelon structures, the normal echelon structures are actually doing what they’re supposed to do. And you don’t need all of these special envoys and coordinators and everything else.

But I’m glad that EERs have been mentioned multiple times. I’ll make a modest suggestion for EERs. Maybe in the long run we need a completely new process. But in the short run, let’s cut the length by 50 or 60 percent and make it all center on one question. What did you do? What did the person in this case do to advance the United States national interest in the country to which they’re assigned? That’s it. And that should be 350 words from them and from their rater and/or reviewer.

OERs, officer evaluation reports in the military are not a perfect example, but they are a good bit shorter. They’re much less of a creative writing exercise. And I think when you think about the fact that for three weeks the State Department spends a lot of effort on that.

Ambassador (ret.) Tibor Nagy:

Comes to a stop.

Drew Peterson:

But then there’s also assignments and transfer season, there’s bidding, there’s all of these seasons. And when you add it all up, you might come up with a fairly unflattering ratio of time spent just managing the institutional activities versus time spent actually advancing foreign policy goals in the United States. I would start with that one modest thing. As well as looking at J-family bureaus, because I think that really needs to happen.

Matthew Boyse:

Any last parting shot?

Ambassador (ret.) Tibor Nagy:

I would just immediately, the new team’s going to come in and if they’re not careful, they’re going to be sucked in to the quicksand because the institution grabs. They tried to grab me, but I knew what was going on, so I did it the other way around.

But they have to come in and they have to be prepped to say, “We’re going to change the clearance process. Starting next week, it’s going to be done like this. We’re going to re-institute the SCP program. It’s going to be done like this.” Because otherwise they’re handed their schedule and the secretary’s schedule is in 15 minute bits and it’s done. It’s back on autopilot. So Tillerson tried.

Matthew Boyse:

Which sort of gets to this question of there used to be, or there is a deputy secretary for management and resources, DMR, that position should be focused on for management and management reform.

Ambassador (ret.) Tibor Nagy:

Yeah.

Matthew Boyse:

The R should stand for reform. And of course some people don’t like that position at all. But the point is that because the new administration comes in and gets sucked into policy, into crises, et cetera, et cetera, they’re going to need people to focus on this full time. And to ensure that this actually, that change actually happens.

Rather than just starting to get sidetracked and distracted. Or blocked because the bureaucracy will certainly put up a fight opportunity or any significant change. So the point is that it’s going to require a really persistent energy and focus and top cover. So that these issues that have been festering for years and years and years can actually be addressed and will be addressed. Just somehow rather than that it’s 2026 and suddenly what has happened?

We’re starting to run short of time. Shall we open it up to comments, questions? How about? I see a lot of hands already. You, sir?

Peter Kovach:

Peter Kovach, USIA state officer for 30 years, and I’ve been reemployed in Newton since. I would say the biggest change in my career is that when I came in before computers, we were more anthropological. Washington would listen to the reporting from the field by our analyses.

Now it’s all top down and not a total loss. I mean in public opinion influencing. And the research that when I’ve gone out to fill in as a retiree that I am presented with, really is overwhelmingly good. But I think that that has implications for the five cones. I think the political cone, which frankly dominates the ethos at the State Department, a little bit of pale male in Yale, if I can be blunt.

Matthew Boyse:

That tends to be the case.

Peter Kovach:

Really needs to be. I think some of the best offices, the career ambassadors I ever worked for were Management Cone.

Ambassador (ret.) Tibor Nagy:

Thank you.

Peter Kovach:

And I think that coming from USIA, which was an agency that was much better managed than state, I really appreciate that. I think there’s got to be a fundamental readjustment of how diplomacy has changed. I mean now we have the internet, we have intelligence agencies, we have think tanks. We have robust international press, a lot of sources of analysis. And so that field analysis isn’t so important. I think we’ve got to restructure the whole task environment. Thank you.

Matthew Boyse:

I think the male pale Yale thing, not to belabor that point, but that’s way, way overtaken by events. I know virtually they’re a handful. There are still, I mean. But the point is that that is that stereotype may have been true when you started, but it’s gone by the wayside. Not true now. Sir?

Michael Vince:

Forgive me. Michael Vince, I just finished my article on the subject. So the number of assistant secretaries in higher department in 1960 was about 50. Today it’s almost 200.

Ambassador (ret.) Tibor Nagy:

Wow.

Michael Vince:

And all of these have gotten here because over the years, presidents have had trouble running this department and have made incremental changes. And we’ve ended up with this system where every single cause and this issue has this bureau and all these bureaus are pushing their own agenda with no particular concern for the broader picture.

And there’s no one between the levels of national mission and the secretary that has any incentive to reconcile these and say, “No, we’re going to prioritize this over this or that over this.” And it pulls the department apart. And that to me is the single biggest issue that the department needs to address, which also what my article is about. Which is we’ve dealt with this sort of problem before. The military did it with Goldwater-Nichols.

And what you need to do is have a department that, apologies to you, that I think the undersecretary of consular affairs is exactly the wrong direction. It’s how we got here and how we have 200 of these officials. It’s we need to rearrange this department on regional lines where you have one undersecretary for administration, you have four regions, Americas, Europe, Middle East, Africa, and Pacific.

And then you give those bureaus and those undersecretaries control of everything else goes under them. They have the ability to say no, they have a budget. They get their operational mission from the secretary. Then they go and carry it out. You have a properly organized department that has intermediate structures where people have both the ability and incentive to take in these various viewpoints, all of which I think are valuable. Like you say, it’s not just political affairs, it’s economics, it’s all of these things. It’s a more complicated world.

But no one right now has that incentive or ability to say, “No, we’re going to prioritize these things and not those things.” And unless we change that department or organization, we’re not going to be able to change the culture of the department.

Because ultimately what happens, what gets promoted, what gets funded is what people will do in the long run. And right now we have a system that discourages any sort of bigger picture thinking beyond that national mission. And we get the results. The system is optimized, reduce the results that you’re getting. If you want different results, you need to change the system. If you want to learn more, you can read my article.

Drew Peterson:

I do think that the commission presents an opportunity to do some of the things like Goldwater-Nichols did for the Defense Department. Not that all of those necessarily were the right things. Or that, I mean now we’re looking at reforming some of those things. But to take that as a fair analogy, I think the commission presents the opportunity for that scale of change if we can get bipartisan agreement around it.

In the meantime, there’s a lot that could be done to reduce those 200. Many of those I suspect are special envoys and coordinators of various sorts. You can cut a lot of those. And you could reorganize the families of bureaus that exist by statute into more logical families. So I think that’s at a minimum, that’s sort of table stakes. That’s where you start. But I agree that bigger change is necessary.

Matthew Boyse:

Ma’am, I saw your hand?

Speaker 7:

Yes. Well, I’m a veteran of 34 years in the foreign affairs agencies, 18 as a career officer and eight as an appointee. And so I’ve been back and forth between the systems. And also I was very interested in what you said about the role of women because at one time I was president of the Women’s Action Organization in State.

But what I have found is reform movements tend to produce some undesired results. Where we had a whole lot of mid-grade officers were booted out in the early ‘90s after an attempt at reform. Where we had the intake of women and minorities under the mid-level program, most of whom, having been one myself, I know were never accepted in the system.

So it is a real problem to look at how you can produce an institutional reform where you still get some acceptance and the people coming in are accepted. Just comments on that if you have any.

Matthew Boyse:

So in other words, buy-in from the institution?

Speaker 7:

From the institution. Because I mean there were some outstanding mid-level officers who were booted out under one major institutional reform because you had to check a whole bunch of boxes. And then we didn’t have a consistent pyramid. We had a gap in the mid-level.

But the other thing was this massive thing even in my day when we were trying to recruit women and minorities, it was by no means as huge as what you present, as what they’ve done today. But if you want a reform that is structural and that addresses some of the long-term problems, especially the yes minister culture, then somehow we have to have something that doesn’t continue to produce the institutional resistance. Because every time we’ve had some sort of reform, the institutional resistance is overtaken.

Matthew Boyse:

Sir?

Peter Humphrey:

Peter Humphrey, intelligence agent and a Foreign Service officer. The weird things I find are that the diversity thing is a little strange. I’m a meritocracy guy myself. And if the Foreign Service turns into Asian females, 100 percent, I couldn’t care less. The meritocracy reigns.

Second of all, clearing cables from the embassy to the desk informally, before you actually send the cable from the embassy to the desk. That gets a little weird.

And thirdly, career destruction officers try to push sort of a diversity of your posts. But I think some fraction of us should be allowed to specialize insanely, the way the British service does. So if there’s a woman who is a world expert in Yemen and she gets into the Foreign Service and she really doesn’t want to do anything other than Yemen or a neighbor too, for God’s sake, let her do it.

Ambassador (ret.) Tibor Nagy:

Absolutely.

Peter Humphrey:

Some fraction of us, let us specialize.

Drew Peterson:

Regional organization.

Matthew Boyse:

Here, here. This question of specialization is actually quite important because we’re noticing more and more cases of people who are arriving at places for which they’re not prepared. In contrast to earlier eras, when you had the Chrysanthemum Club and you had the German Club and you had people who were deep, deep expertise in regional areas, they spent their entire careers there.

Excuse me. It’s not COVID. And that area, that ethos has weakened over time. It still exists. There’s still an enormous amount of talent and regional and other expertise, but it isn’t what it was and it’s not as valued as it was. And it deserves attention.

Ambassador (ret.) Tibor Nagy:

Yes.

Simon Hankinson:

Yeah. And just on that, I’m with you. This is a European guy here and Tibor and I did a lot of the less. . .

Ambassador (ret.) Tibor Nagy:

The 25 percent differential.

Simon Hankinson:

Right. I do believe in the fair share. But I also noted throughout my career that we are the only Foreign Service that I ever encountered that had absolutely no language requirement when you came in. The Germans had to have English, obviously, German and two other languages. Every other service. And we have zero.

And some of us are good at languages. I’m not bad, but I know people who are smart who cannot learn a language and so they kill themselves to get a two plus. Two plus in Spanish and that’s it. This ought to be a requirement. I mean, we really ought to test for language before people come in and make sure that they pass that in the first five years. And we don’t.

Speaker 7:

That’s very interesting.

Drew Peterson:

Or at least to have two speeds, right? Because there are good officers who are not good at language, I think to your earlier point. But I think on top of that, the best linguists in the Foreign Service who are a real asset to the Foreign Service are not being trained at FSI. They are being trained prior to FSI. And I think that needs to be accommodated.

Matthew Boyse:

Yeah. FSI is something that also needs some attention, but that’s an entirely-

Ambassador (ret.) Tibor Nagy:

We could do a session on that.

Matthew Boyse:

I know. I’m looking at the clock here and I’m also looking at, do we have to sort of hang it up at some point? How many more minutes do we have?

Speaker 12:

A few more minutes.

Matthew Boyse:

A few more minutes. Thank you. So a lady in the back please. You may.

Deborah Ash:

Thank you. My name is Deborah Ash. I’m a Foreign Service retiree and happy to be working in the Africa Bureau.

My question is, I got here late, apologies, traffic was terrible. But will Marco Rubio be briefed about what we’ve been discussing here? And is there going to be, and I think I heard you saying there should be a team ready to go in and help implement the great ideas I’ve heard here. Is that something we’re going to do out of this meeting?

Drew Peterson:

I don’t know.

Deborah Ash:

Thank you.

Matthew Boyse:

Well, we do intend to write this up and to share it with the transition team. So there are lots of ideas out there. And the Ben Franklin Fellowship Program has been sharing ideas as has . . . So the idea is that this gets factored into the system and we would be very eager to work with the incoming secretary and others on these issues because they’re very, very important. Steve, did you want to?

Steve Dewey:

Yeah, so I’m just curious. Steve Dewey. I’m curious, a question to any of the panelists. I’m curious, what are your opinions on the right sizing of the State Department personnel-wise? I understand there’s roughly 60,000 local hires in foreign countries and roughly 25,000 US citizen employees.

And of that 25,000, it’s roughly split half-and-half between Foreign Service officers and federal civil servants. And I’m curious, in your opinion, what do you think is the right sizing for the State Department for those different categories?

Matthew Boyse:

Oh, dear.

Simon Hankinson:

The short answer is no bigger than it is today. I mean, we’ve seen, all of us who’ve worked in the State Department have seen people who do jobs that don’t need to be done. And we’ve all done things that don’t need to be done. So there’s savings that can be done there.

Artificial intelligence, a lot of things about it terrify me, but it does a lot of things really well, like a lot of scut work that we need to do. 15 years ago when I was in counselor affairs, I proposed an automated interviewing system to take people’s fingerprints, photographs. Take that out of the hands of local staff and Americans so they could concentrate on the stuff that needed brain power.

They were like, “Great idea.” That’s the last I ever heard of it. There’s automation, there’s artificial intelligence, there’s ways that we can do things incredibly cheaply. And if not cut staff, then at least attrit somewhat and not grow.

Ambassador (ret.) Tibor Nagy:

Also, reprogram staff. Matt might disagree with me, but I don’t think Luxembourg needs three political officers, whereas Nigeria does.

Matthew Boyse:

I don’t disagree with you, I don’t disagree with you. With all due respect to Luxembourg. Okay, we’re starting to run a little-

Drew Peterson:

That’s a hard question, but if I might, just a quick example that I think could illustrate the principle. I think there’s some argument for, especially with the Foreign Service, reducing size and increasing pay over time. I think that that could be something that is warranted given the labor market.

But setting that aside, I’ll take a very specific example. For a long time people have said, “Okay, A-100 should be longer.” If we’re very serious about having a professionalized US Foreign Service that has a common body of professional knowledge, A-100 needs to impart more actual knowledge. It needs to not just be five weeks of basic bureaucratic orientation.

It needs to actually impart a core body of skills that diplomats are accountable for having and developing throughout their careers, regardless of where they serve. I think there’s good argument for that for A-100 being, let’s say a semester long and intensive and actually imparting this.

And the answer from FSI and AFSA and various others has always been, “Well, we need more resources to do that because we don’t have a training float the way DOD does.” But how many vacancies are there in embassies overseas? I mean, couldn’t we start closing up some of these things that have been long-term vacant? Or subject to serial curtailments by a series of officers? And start building that training float out of hide if we think it needs to be done.

I guess the bottom line is if it needs to be done and if it’s a function that needs to be done, it should be prioritized at the expense of other things that are currently being done that don’t need to be done.

Matthew Boyse:

Yep. One last, any last parting shots? Everything? Sir?

Ambassador (ret.) Tibor Nagy:

Just speak up.

Sharif:

Speak, yeah. Hi, my name’s Sharif. I currently work in AI and biosecurity, but I’m awaiting clearance for role at state. So something that came out to me, and I think this pain point was really interesting too, because what you see from a lot of people when you’re talking about . . . Thank you. Recruiting people who are young into the Foreign Service or into the State Department, they are seeing a lot of their peers go on to incredibly high-paying careers, the best and the brightest, if you’re talking about meritocracy.

That move quickly, that hire quickly where you can get promoted quickly. And I’m not sure that the same system exists as it is right now. And not to mention you want to talk about ideological background and diversity of background and even training. I mean, I’m a biochemist and I know that the future is going to have challenges around issues of AI, issues of biotech, especially in the competition with the PRC.

But I could make a lot more money going somewhere else. And not to mention the fact that the actual hiring process takes so long. I mean, start to finish. If you’re coming in, I grew up in the Midwest, I don’t really have anything in my background. But it could easily take something like from FSOT to actually starting A-100, anywhere between a year and a half to two and a half years.

And that’s very hard for someone starting their career to be thinking about, well, do I spin my wheels for a while waiting for this to happen? And once you get to that point, maybe you’ve been promoted a few times, it starts to make less and less sense.

So do you have any insights on actually creating the pipelines to some of these academic disciplines or some of these career fields? Or even different places in the country? I mean, I never knew how to join the Foreign Service until I went to graduate school and I had an ambassador who took me under their wing and told me about it. So I never would’ve guessed how to enter this kind of path. So I would love to hear any insights on any of this.

Drew Peterson:

I think it’s a great question. And I mean, I would say thank you for suffering through the process to serve our country. I think that’s great. We need more people like you. And if we’re not making it easier and more attractive for people like you to join the State Department, I think that that is a huge missed opportunity.

And that has to do with diversity of intake pipelines, whether that’s diplomats in residence around the country, reaching out beyond just the standard public policy and social sciences programs. Those are still going to be, I think, under any scenario, a majority of the type of people who are attracted to Foreign Service.

We absolutely need, whether it’s a new cone that actually deals with . . . Although the economic cone is supposed to deal with all of these issues. Maybe we actually need more people on AI and biotechnology in the economics cones. Maybe there’s sub-cones that attract people to different sub-fields that could be useful. But I think that you’ve highlighted a really important issue for our country.

Matthew Boyse:

And of course the unfortunate thing is what you just said has actually been said now for at least I’ve been hearing it for at least 30 years. And no mechanisms have been developed in that period of time to address these problems.

So here it is 30 years later or whatever, maybe even longer, and they’re still talking about the same things not having been resolved. So I don’t know, on that happy note, I don’t want to keep everybody longer than we. Thank you very, very much for joining us. Thank you to our panel. All right. Yes, and come again to Hudson for our next events.