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STATEMENT OF MR. DANIEL F. GEISLER PRESIDENT,
AMERICAN FOREIGN SERVICE ASSOCIATION

TO THE HOUSE APPROPRIATIONS SUBCOMMITTEE ON COMMERCE, JUSTICE, STATE AND THE JUDICIARY

April 15, 1999

Mr. Chairman and Members of the Subcommittee:

The American Foreign Service Association (AFSA) is the professional organization and the recognized bargaining agent for the 23,000 active duty and retired Officers and Specialists of America's Foreign Service.

We serve in Washington, and a few other cities in the U.S., but most of us are posted abroad. Our mission is to enhance the security and economic prosperity of Americans here at home by shaping events abroad to our advantage.

We would like to call the Subcommittee's attention to four issues: (1) the need to construct safe embassies in countries where we have vital interests, (2) the State Department's lack of workforce planning, (3) the importance of public diplomacy in foreign affairs, and (4) the ever increasing financial burden on our employees of overseas service.

SECURITY OF OUR DIPLOMATIC POSTS AND MISSIONS

AFSA supports the Administration 's request for international affairs funding as the minimum required for us to do our jobs successfully. The tools of leadership are not free. The Administration's request for the 150 Account does not go beyond current services. That means there is no room in it to fund the security required for our overseas missions.

We saw last year on August 7 why these funds are desperately needed. The tragic bombings in Nairobi, Kenya and Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania graphically brought to the Nation's attention the dangerous nature of this post-Cold War world.

AFSA's immediate concern is the proper funding for embassy security in FY2000 and subsequent years. Over the years, our leaders have focused on embassy security only after a tragedy. We saw it in the 1970's after Khartoum. We saw it in the 1980's after Beirut. We see it again today in the wake of Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. However, as the memory of each loss fades, attention wanes. Commitment declines. Funding is diverted until a new tragedy ensues. We must break this cycle. For some, embassy security is an academic issue. For us, it is literally a matter of life and death.

The January 8, 1999 release of the Accountability Review Boards' report, commonly known as the Crowe Report, pointed to this cycle when it said "there was a collective failure by several Administrations and Congresses over the past decade to invest adequate efforts and resources to reduce the vulnerability of US diplomatic missions around the world to terrorist attacks." The Boards also recommended spending about $14 billion over the next decade to make our missions safe enough.

Thus AFSA was appalled at the grossly inadequate security request submitted by the Administration. Although the President acknowledged in his State of the Union address the need to provide our people serving abroad with secure workplaces, the Administration failed to request the money to do so.



The Administration's FY2000 budget request lists only $36 million in embassy construction funds for next year. There is no money to complete five high-priority projects for which design and site acquisition is underway. The $36 million is for design and site acquisition, but not construction, of eight new projects. They also requested a five-year advanced appropriations of $3 billion beginning FY2001. AFSA believes the Administration's security funding request is too little and unrealistically distributed with over 50 percent of the money slated for the final two years. Our enemies will not wait until 2005 to attack.

Mr. Chairman, as we were dismayed with the Administration's request, we were equally heartened by the bipartisan Congressional support for increased funding for embassy security that has been forthcoming from leaders such as yourself and Mr. Serrano and from both the responsible authorization and appropriations committees. We wish to express our sincere appreciation. Your pointed challenge of the request forced at least the State Department officials to abandon this part of the request and promise to present a new funding plan - one we trust that will be realistic and provide additional funds for embassy construction and relocation in FY2000.

There is one more important point to make in this discussion on embassy security and it is a point that the Foreign Service and the Crowe Commission are in disagreement. While AFSA is strongly urging that adequate funds be provided in a timely fashion for embassy security, we, on behalf of the Foreign Service, are not saying that we want our embassies to be transformed into fortresses in outlying suburbs. In the Foreign Service, we've always known and accepted the fact there are no 100% guarantees of safety.

In discussing a response, some have suggested that we close some of our posts and missions. We believe it would be a grave mistake to permanently close embassies in response to terrorism, and it would be counterproductive.

Permanently closing embassies would create new opportunities for terrorists to flourish by giving them a haven where we cannot monitor their actions. It would cut us off from contacts with foreign law enforcement agencies. It would limit our ability to influence foreign government leaders. Pulling out embassies would abandon private American citizens living abroad, severely curtailing our capacity to advise and protect them. It would prevent us from serving American business abroad. In the war against international terror, our overseas missions serve as America's forward deployment. We cannot deploy without risk, but risk must not keep us from deploying.

Likewise, there have been serious discussions about regionalization of embassy operations. We do this already. There are regional environmental officers, regional security officers, and many more who fly into a country and provide greater support and coverage to the embassy on the ground. This helps reduce the embassy footprint. AFSA believes if the U.S. has a presence, we should call it an embassy with an ambassador. The actual costs are marginal and the presence of an ambassador lends far greater voice in pressing our interests.

There is another form of regionalization also being discussed, a form in which there is no U.S. presence in a country. In this case, an ambassador is accredited to more than one country and flies in periodically to pursue U.S. interests. This is also being done, but not on a wide scale. For instance, our Ambassador to the Philippines is also accredited as Ambassador to Palau.

In regionalizing our representation or in closing posts and missions, the United States must decide where we have interests that warrant an overseas presence, and then protect the people who establish that presence. There may be good reasons for closing a U.S. mission. Retreating from terrorism is not one of them. Retreating is admitting defeat. It would be unworthy of America.

The Foreign Service has no desire to cower in our embassies, or to abandon our posts. Well-designed chanceries with adequate setback will save lives, but will not eliminiate all risks. We prefer accessible missions to hardened fortresses on urban perimeters. We recognize the need to balance accessibility and safety but we also need to be able to do our jobs.

A NEEDS BASED WORKFORCE PLAN

Mr. Chairman, AFSA has long advocated that the Department of State needs to establish a realistic, forward-looking, needs-based workforce planning system.

This is not a new idea nor original to AFSA. A decade ago, the Thomas Commission's "Report of the Commission on the Foreign Service Personnel System" stressed, "the need for long-range planning [which] would allow personnel managers to assess the effects of demographic and societal change and …changes in the mission of the Foreign Service and the overseas environments in which it operates…"

Similar calls for workforce planning can be found in the 1992 State 2000 Report, and more recently in the 1998 reports by the Stimson Center and the Center for Strategic and International Studies on diplomatic needs for the next century.

In discussing this issue with members of the AFSA Governing Board who helped work on the 1980 Foreign Service Act, they thought the matter was addressed with the Sec. 601(c)(2) and (4) provisions requiring the Department to report annually on the "upper and lower limits planned by each agency recruitment, advancement, and retention" of Foreign Service personnel with a view to establishing "a regular, predictable flow of talent upward…" .

To the best of our knowledge, this annual reporting requirement has not been met since 1995.

Our concern goes well beyond compliance with an important reporting requirement. AFSA is concerned by a chronic lack of coherent workforce planning to equip the Foreign Service with a highly trained cadre of professionals with the knowledge, skills, and abilities required to manage American's foreign relations in a rapidly changing world. The Foreign Service is not like a business, it generally does not hire people to fill mid-level positions. It trains them from the bottom up. Thus, long term projections of needs become even more important.

Workforce management in the State Department focuses on important, but narrowly defined, personnel issues such as assignments, promotions, and recruiting. What it lacks is a model for assessing fundamental needs with which to procure and allocate skilled personnel. AFSA welcomed the State Department's Overseas Staffing Models as an important advance in determining the proper size of the diplomatic workforce. However, since its inputs are staffing levels rather than skills, its output is essentially a tool for allocation, not for planning. It does not operate on projections of skills that the Foreign Service will require in order to meet the seven goals of the International Affairs Strategic Plan.

The State Department is particularly weak in incorporating training needs into personnel policy. This is surprising, given the availability of world-class training facilities at the National Foreign Affairs Training Center (NFATC) in Arlington, VA. Unfortunately, both personnel policies and the culture of the Foreign Service conspire to make training difficult to obtain, even when it is sought. The downsizing of the Foreign Service has left the State Department with more positions than people, creating chronic staffing gaps throughout the agency. Many Foreign Service supervisors still insist that their subordinates forego vital training, lest training exacerbate staffing gaps.

Forward-looking, needs-based workforce planning must take training requirements specifically into account, and must make training an integral part of managing the workforce.

In the past, AFSA urged the Congress to avoid micromanaging. However, we have come to the conclusion that an outside element is required to make real workforce planning come about. As the Congress played an important role in instituting the Overseas Staffing Model requirement, AFSA urges the Congress to help the Department institute a needs-based work force planning system. The House International Relations Committee's current authorization bill contains language calling for a quadrennial report on the long term staffing plans for the foreign affairs agencies.

We ask the Subcommittee to support the institution of a workforce planning report. The foreign affairs agencies need to plan systematically today if we are to maintain the world's top-ranking diplomatic corps tomorrow. We seek Congress's assistance in bringing this about.

PUBLIC DIPLOMACY

Further, Public Diplomacy continues to be an important and necessary tool of diplomacy. There has been much attention placed on the administrative integration of USIA with the Department of State. Equally important, however, is the integration of public diplomacy as a tool of policy implementation. We are concerned that this area is not receiving as much attention as it should.

One of the factors regards the transparency of the resources allocated to public diplomacy. AFSA supports the Congressional approach of having a separate line in both the authorization and appropriations legislation specifically designating the funding of the International Information Programs (IIP) and the Academic and Cultural Exchanges accounts. While it is true that the funding could be tracked in the 4" thick Congressional Presentation Document of the Department of State, separate lines would help in providing greater transparency for this important part of diplomacy.

THE INCREASING BURDEN OF SERVICE ABROAD

Mr. Chairman, last year, I began a discussion with the Subcommittee on the increasing burden of service abroad. This burden is impacted in many ways from the level of medical care we receive to the impact on our wallets on an daily basis and in terms of our retirement. In health care, more out-of -pocket funds are required if a member of the Foreign Service or his family must leave the country for medical care.

Many of our allowances have not been adjusted for inflation for decades. Also, Hardship and Danger Pay incentives, originally provided by the Congress in 1966 for Post Differentials and in 1983 for Danger Pay Allowances, are, in real terms, being eaten away by the effects of the Department's reducing hardship allowances in the hardship-designated posts, and by Locality Pay, which Foreign Service lose when going abroad.

Loss of pay increases the already growing financial burden of overseas service. This situation is particularly pronounced for personnel approaching retirement, since annuity calculations are based on the average of the highest years of salary. As you know, these are generally the last three years of service. That means that a Foreign Service Officer or Specialist serving abroad in the last three years of a career will experience a 7.5% permanent loss in retirement. This factor weighs most heavily on those employees who retire at the lower salary grades, especially Specialists.

CONCLUSION

Mr. Chairman, the Foreign Service proudly serves our people and our Nation. We serve because we believe in our country, and in the work we do. Yet there are areas in the agencies and in the way Foreign Service personnel are treated that need to be improved. As practitioners in the field, your decisions will directly impact us in our work sites and in our homes as we serve this Nation abroad. I thank the Chairman and the members of the Subcommittee for the opportunity to offer testimony on this important legislation.