State Department Alums Take Aim at Foreign Service Reform

The Hudson Institute hosted a Tuesday panel discussion on the potential for a reform of the State Department and the U.S. Foreign Service under the incoming Trump administration. 

The panelists, Simon Hankinson, a senior researcher at the Heritage Foundation, Drew Peterson, an adjunct professor at the University of Pittsburgh, and Tibor Nagy, the former assistant secretary of state for Africa, proposed that the State Department has become bloated and overly bureaucratic, handicapped by a failure to clearly conceptualize the intended goals of the department and its appendages and suffering from a lack of talent and training.

The panelists suggested a number of important reforms that the incoming Trump administration can take to create a stronger, more efficient diplomatic corps. The first was to immediately eliminate the DEIA requirements from the State Department’s core precepts, as well as the hiring and promotion processes. In the past several decades, Simon Hankinson explained, hiring and promotion have been deliberately skewed to benefit certain minority groups, especially women, rather than selecting on the basis of merit. This produces a department with poorer performance and diverts energy that should be directed into serving the national interest into attempting ever-more-radical social engineering for further diversity gains.

The elimination of DEI should be accompanied by a restructuring of the hiring and promotion process, added Peterson, noting that the current process wastes massive amounts of time and prioritizes the interests of foreign service officers rather than the effective production of results. The new process should emphasize bringing in younger talent to better fill out junior service grades, be more flexible to facilitate the easier acquisition of expert talent from outside the federal government and ultimately strive to outfit the department for long-term diplomatic competition with the People’s Republic of China.

Nagy asserted that one of the principal goals of the Trump administration should be to rationalize the structure of state department offices and bureaus, noting that the current structure results in the massive misdirection of resources to producing paperwork as opposed to doing diplomacy. Nagy proposed the wholesale elimination of large numbers of special envoys and single-issue offices, as well as the reinstatement of the Small Embassies Program, to reduce staff and exempt participating embassies from normal requirements for paperwork, allowing them to focus on completing their diplomatic missions.

The panel closed with the moderator, Matt Boyse, a fellow at the Hudson Institute, noting that many of these problems have been present for years without effective action from either presidential administrations or Congress, and that the arrival of the new Trump administration provides an opportunity to make urgent reforms.