Rice Bashed Over State Dept. Staff Gaps, Low Morale

Rice Blamed for Staff Shortage, Low Morale Among US Diplomat
Rice Blamed for Staff Shortage, Low Morale Among US Diplomats
By P. Parameswaran
Agence France-Presse
Wednesday 06 June 2007

Saddled by the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US State Department faces an acute staff shortage amid "worsening morale," according to a study blaming Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for the problem.

The report by the influential Foreign Affairs Council, comprising mostly senior retired US diplomats and ambassadors, said the department faced a shortage of 1,100 staff and that in the "first two years of Secretary Rice's stewardship almost no net new resources have been realized."

Rice took office in January 2005, facing the full impact of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"My own view is that the foreign service is at the front edge of a personnel crisis and if something isn't done about what we have identified here as 'job number one,' we are going to be in a very, very serious situation a year or so from now," the council's president, Thomas Boyatt, told a news conference.

"Job one" is to obtain 1,100 new positions needed "to move the foreign service from where it is to where it needs to be," said the council's report, "Managing Secretary Rice's State Department: An independent assessment."

Reinforcing the view that Rice had to bear responsibility for the crisis, Boyatt said: "Every cabinet level officer has the responsibility of taking care of the institution he or she leads.

"Every secretary of government has responsibility to at least lead that institution as healthy as they found it, if not to improve it," he said.

Boyatt said that the State Department was "more overstretched" than the military.

The manpower shortage had strained staff morale, Boyatt said.

"Morale of course is strongly impacted because we don't have enough people," he said.

Declining morale also stemmed from cuts to basic salaries of nearly 19 percent for junior and mid-level officers leaving Washington for overseas assignments, he said.

"It is also impacted by the fact that it is even more stressful today in the foreign service than it has been in the past ... more dangerous," he said.

Positions envisaged over the past two years for training and to fulfill Rice's so-called "transformational diplomacy" initiative had not been realized, the report said.

Rice's initiative is aimed at shifting hundreds of foreign service positions from Europe and Washington to difficult assignments in the Middle East, Asia and elsewhere in a bid to boost democracy through foreign partnerships.

According to the report, some 200 existing jobs - mostly overseas - were unfilled and an additional 900 training slots necessary to provide essential "linguistic and functional" skills "do not exist."

State Department spokesman Sean McCormack defended Rice, saying: "She's been a bold leader, and a bold manager."

"She has made a lot of tough calls in moving personnel slots from places in Western Europe to other critical posts where they're needed in Indonesia, China, and India as well as other places," he said.

But he agreed that there was a resource strain on the foreign service because of Iraq and Afghanistan.

"Well, point out for me two more important foreign policy challenges facing the United States right now? I think you'd be hard-pressed to find them," he said.

McCormack also said it took two years to train up department officers to professional-level proficiency in some of the more difficult languages, including Arabic and Chinese.

All 1,069 new positions and program funding increases in the department between 2001 and 2005 had been absorbed by assignments in Iraq, Afghanistan and other "difficult" posts, the report said.

The report also said that for the 2008 financial year, the department has sought 3.98 billion dollars and an additional 1.88 billion dollars for Iraq.

Boyatt said the council's view "is widely shared" within the foreign service and the State Department.