Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s restructuring of some diplomatic positions to focus more on high-priority countries like China and India was necessary but insufficient, and only an expansion of the Foreign Service can address America’s growing challenges around the world, U.S. diplomats say.
Miss Rice announced in 2006 her plan to relocate hundreds of positions, mostly in Europe and Washington, to countries where she said the U.S. is underrepresented.
After three rounds of shifting resources — and resistance from the European bureau — the department identified 285 positions that would be moved, with China emerging as the biggest winner with 26 new slots, officials said.
“I moved [about] 300 people out of Europe, not because Europe isn’t important, but because I needed them in China and India and Brazil,” Miss Rice told The Washington Times in a recent interview. “We need them not just engaging governments, but engaging [nongovernmental organizations] and the business community and civil society.”
The relocation of 14 positions has been “deferred past 2008” because the State Department ran out of money, said one official in Washington. He cited as the main reason the high cost of moving a position and the fact that a diplomatic slot requires different funding depending on where it is in the world.
Democratic presidential contenders Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton have talked about expanding and reforming the nation’s diplomatic corps to deal better with the many challenges the U.S. faces around the world.
“Instead of having more Americans serving in military bands than the diplomatic corps, we need to grow our Foreign Service,” Mr. Obama has said in several speeches.
More than two dozen U.S. diplomats on five continents interviewed in the past week gave mixed reviews of the “global repositioning” effort. They spoke on the condition of anonymity since department policy forbids speaking with the news media.
The diplomats said the State Department should create new positions without cutting existing ones.
The department has not received funding from Congress for that purpose since 2004, despite the Bush administration’s annual requests, the official in Washington said. The White House has asked for about 1,100 new positions in its 2009 budget request, but it has yet to be approved by Congress.
“In the absence of a serious and sustained infusion of fresh resources for American diplomacy, ’global repositioning’ is far too little, too late,” said a senior Foreign Service officer in the Middle East.
The department asked each regional bureau to identify positions it could sacrifice, but it came down especially hard on the European bureau, officials said. A senior officer serving in Europe said the “repositioning” was not “handled gracefully at the time of implementation.”
The official in Washington said the committee in charge was simply following Miss Rice’s orders.
An officer in Latin America said that, while embassies lost positions, their workload did not diminish. He said his embassy’s political and economic section was cut in half, and it still has to perform time-consuming tasks such as compiling many congressionally mandated reports on human rights, human trafficking, narcotics and other issues.
“We all understand the need and the priorities,” the officer said. “But you can only cut so much without hitting bone.”
The State Department, like any large bureaucracy, is notorious for resisting change, and many officials said implementing Miss Rice’s repositioning order has not been easy.
“It’s an uphill effort, since it really goes against the grain of the organization,” said a senior Foreign Service officer in Latin America.
A senior Foreign Service officer in Asia said U.S. missions in Europe are still “woefully overstaffed.”
An officer in Europe said that when she served in China several years ago, she was “the sole officer responsible for our public outreach for an area the size of Western Europe with a population of about 180 million people.”
But the officer in Asia warned that too many new positions are being created in China. Adding a few positions in more countries, particularly small and developing ones, would be more beneficial, he said.
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