Ten years have passed since the U.S. Information Agency was abolished. Over that period, many new Foreign Service Officers have replaced the USIA Foreign Service veterans. The new officers enjoy higher career aspirations than I did — right up to ambassador — but they have no longer enjoy a near monopoly on embassy information and cultural affairs work, as USIA’s FSOs once did.
I recently came across a declaration signed by ten of the new FSOs. Calling themselves the Front Line Working Group, they referred to themselves as “mid-level public diplomacy officers,” declaring: “We have no institutional memory of the U.S. Information Agency; many of our careers began with the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and the realization that not everyone loved America or our values.”
The officers described their dilemma as follows: “Public diplomacy-coned officers usually will do at least two, and possibly four years of out-of-cone work before bidding on their first public diplomacy position. When they do bid on PD jobs, they are often disadvantaged in the process because they cannot clearly demonstrate their public diplomacy experience. PD leadership can help by establishing clear guidelines for new officers that outline necessary PD skills and how to obtain them during entry-level tours, whether in PD positions or not.”
Training and certification matter. The USIA fielded a foreign-service corps who had been selected with media and culture-related skills in mind, steeped in tradecraft, and qualified in language before deploying on assignment. The system was far from perfect, but none of those standards is being respected today.
The General Accounting Office reports a vacancy rate of 13 percent for public-diplomacy positions at embassies worldwide. The gap is most severe at the mid-level, according to the GAO, placing “pressure on State to appoint junior officers to so-called ‘stretch positions.’” An internal study by the Bureau of Human Resources counted 125 officers with other specialties (political, economic, consular and management specialists) who were filling public diplomacy positions — qualifications not disclosed. Finally, the GAO had found in October 2008 that 25 percent of officers in public diplomacy language-designated positions did not meet the language requirements.
The State Department began its stewardship of public diplomacy with a human resources deficit after USIA had lost a third of its budget during the 1990s, forcing years of downsizing and hiring freezes. State may hire as many as 1,000 new Foreign Service officers in Fiscal Year 2010 if Congress approves the Department’s budget request. Considering that there are no more than a thousand FSOs in the public diplomacy career track at this time, a healthy share of the thousand new officers could make a critical contribution to public diplomacy’s effectiveness by lowering vacancies and enabling adequate time for training between assignments.
The new officers rightly call for more rigorous professional standards and training. That too will be necessary to improve the government’s public diplomacy programs overseas.
July 6, 2009 at 9:05 pm
[...] State Department official Joe Johnston reminds us that there used to be a government agency that focused solely on public diplomacy. It’s been [...]
July 8, 2009 at 1:04 pm
Good for you, Joe. Every word you wrote about the way State recruits and trains PD officers is true. Back in the old USIA days many of us had spec ialoized training and/or experience in cultural and/or media affairs but since USIA was merged into State back in 1999 (thanks to President Clinto9n, Madeleine Albright and the evil Sen. Jesse Helms) PD has been nothing more than an afterthought at State. We can hope for better dcays but I fear that the future of PD is bleak as long as it remains where it is. I see a lot of academic discussion about PD by p0eople who have never been practitioners. I’ll shut up now. Abrazo,
Guy
July 9, 2009 at 1:00 am
Nice post. Finally read the GAO study you site which labels PD as “strategic communications” (ouch). But it also shows how fragmented public diplomacy efforts are in State and elsewhere, how uncooperative the military is even in response to a Congressional study (above it all?) and that – as Guy Farmer says – pd will never work well as long as it remains where it is.
July 9, 2009 at 11:31 am
In the initial years after the merger, I thought it was we, the former IOs, who were unwilling to change. However, after a decade, dozens of reports, and hundeds of speeches on the “value” of public diplomacy, it’s obvious that the Department and the ‘State” culture have simply not changed. Although there may be plans to increase the size of the PD Cone, it will be years before these officers reach an audience and they will never have adequate tools or support to do their jobs. The initiative and the funds have passed to the military in many areas and State leadership in the Bureaus and the 7th floor is content to have it that way.