State Seeks Additional Funding to Hire Foreign Service Officers Regional bureau chiefs, assistant secretaries and other managers here and abroad have been ordered to select by the end of the week positions that can be frozen, said Harry Thomas, director general of the Foreign Service, at a Senate hearing Wednesday. “It’s not something that we like to do,” Thomas said. “We have to do it because we don’t have enough people.” State has more than 11,400 Foreign Service officers filling positions. But about 13 percent of its positions abroad are vacant, said Sen. Daniel Akaka, D-Hawaii, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs subcommittee on oversight of government management. The shortfalls are worse in the Middle East, where nearly 19 percent of positions are empty. Thomas called on lawmakers to approve funding for 1,400 new officers to fill vacant slots for State and the Agency for International Development as part of the 2009 budget. But that won’t be nearly enough, said American Foreign Service Association President John Naland and retired Ambassador Ronald Neumann, president of the American Academy of Diplomacy. Neumann said State needs to add at least 2,350 more staff beyond the 1,400 proposed new hires to meet all its needs. That would include 1,250 more staff to fill currently vacant positions, replace employees lost to attrition, and meet new departmental needs, 1,250 more employees to assist with foreign aid, and another 1,250 employees to help train Foreign Service officers in languages and other skills. “The bottom line is they do not have enough,” Neumann said. “We are in bad shape.” The staffing shortages have forced the military to pick up diplomatic and reconstruction duties that should be State’s responsibility, Naland said. This trend worries Naland, who said it could damage America’s “soft power” of diplomacy. “If left unchecked, this growing militarization of diplomacy and foreign assistance will reduce America’s options when responding to foreign challenges,” Naland said. “As the saying goes, if the only tool you have is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail.” |
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