Hooper's War – Peter Van Buren » Why the Ben Franklin Fellowship at State?

One of the first major internal reform efforts to fail near completely followed the frustrations of the Vietnam War, which exposed weaknesses not only in policymaking but also in how diplomats were recruited, managed, used in the field (the CORDS program), and promoted. Yet the 1975 Murphy Commission ended up recommending only minor changes. The most significant reform came with the Foreign Service Act of 1980, some 200 years after the Department’s founding and the last big change in the past 46 years. The Act modernized hiring and promotion procedures, solidified the “up-or-out” promotion model, and attempted to make assignments more equitable. Yet critics argued it reinforced excessive careerism and encouraged risk-averse behavior among officers seeking promotion.

The post-Cold War period saw Secretary of State Madeleine Albright attempt and fail at management reforms focused on improving workplace efficiency and modernizing outdated information systems. It wasn’t until even later Secretary of State Colin Powell decreed desktop Internet for State based on his experience in the Army, replacing spotty stand-alone dial-up service, as the rest of the world experienced an information revolution.

After the September 11 attacks, failed internal reforms centered on Secretary Condoleezza Rice’s “transformational diplomacy,” which required large-scale diplomatic deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan at the expense of literally every other embassy and issue in the world, all despite the earlier failure of the similar CORDS program in Vietnam. The moves decimated State Department personnel and promotional systems for years afterwards. Secretary Hillary Clinton emphasized without effect workplace modernization through her “Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review,” which sought improved talent management. She also unsuccessfully pushed for greater recruitment of specialists in tech and economics to keep pace with the modern world.

Over nearly five decades, State Department reform played at modernizing personnel systems and bureaucracy, while institutional inertia and passive disruption limited any lasting change. The organization and systems in place when I was sworn in were more or less the same ones there when the door hit me on the way out 24 years later.

I was witness, and participant. I spent most of my career in the Consular field, for many years issuing visas to foreigners and later managing new-hire Foreign Service Officers to do the same. I spent years of Prozac-tinged cognitive dissonance blithely being told to ignore or overlook the clear letter of immigration law and issue, issue, issue visas no matter what the obvious truth about illegal stays was. There are whole ethnic neighborhoods in California and New York that should have a statue of me as one of their founders because I issued thousands of visas under policies that prioritized volume over enforcement credibility. I was a good soldier and did what I was told to do about visas, and helped many young officers make their professional peace with the hypocrisy. BFF has since helped several people who feel much this same way as I did into new positions of authority over the visa process, and championed many changes to an immigration system that ran steadily in contrast to the law for decades. I am glad someone has surfaced some of it all and maybe even will do some more things to change it all.

I also grew weary of State’s 19th century model of country “desks” and stove-piped embassies organized more or less the same way in every nation no matter the on-the-ground truth and with basically the same personnel wire diagram since the American Civil war. It was worse at the Mothership in Washington, where every decision, however minor, had to pass through layers of “clearances,” basically negotiated agreements through the layers of bureaucracy above and around you. For awhile I wrote the first drafts of State’s “travel advice” for multiple countries and then would spend weeks cajoling signs-off from dozens of offices who claimed a bureaucratic stake in the bland copy I churned out.

Even AFSA, the Foreign Service’s professional association (full-disclosure, I was a dues-paying member for most of my career and benefited from their legal advice) wrote “As much as members of the Foreign Service in the Department of State embrace calls for reform of broken and ineffective systems, most of them have figured out how to navigate those systems and are concerned that changes would negatively affect their ability to advance. Changes were met with resistance. Within the Foreign Service, I found a strong culture of ‘putting in the time.’ At State risk intolerance extends beyond concerns for physical danger. While policy successes are celebrated, failures are feared to be career-ending; and this can lead to knee-jerk reactions that discourage innovative thinking.” And she was writing about State under Secretary Antony Blinken, in the Biden era, way before Trump II.

The Red versus Blue controversy around BFF misses the larger, more important story: the State Department has resisted meaningful reform for decades, through administrations of both parties. If internal reform repeatedly fails, outside pressure becomes inevitable. The real last change, the Foreign Service Act, put some 20th century makeup on an 18th century organization best positioned to conduct diplomacy with the Ottoman Empire. What is left to do is a dirty job, long ignored, that now someone has to do if America is to have a diplomatic service capable of working across multiple administrations instead of just trying to wait out leaders it does not like while championing those it does. It is now necessary for an organization like Ben Franklin Fellows to step in and take on the fight.

Why the Ben Franklin Fellowship at State?

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