Woe at the State Department

Remember how the State Department has been forced to freeze hiring for 10 percent of its positions around the world? With wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and little support from Congress, the United States' beleaguered diplomatic corps is increasingly forced to "do less with less."

But State's staffing woes are deeper and date back further than the current administration, Mark Johnson, a veteran foreign-service officer, argues in the latest edition of the Foreign Service Journal. Rather than creating the shortage of manpower, Johnson says, Iraq and Afghanistan merely made an already bad situation worse.

And he's got reams of data to back up his argument:

• State's budget in 2000 was half of what it was in 1985, in real terms
• By 1997, State was short some 700 foreign-service officers
• In 1997, only half of FSO in "language-designated positions" were getting the language training they needed
• By 2000, Johnson estimates, the department was short anywhere from 2,000 to 3,500 positions

Johnson doesn't forsee any changes on this front. As he notes, "Political realities make increasing the numbers of the Foreign Service in the near term highly unlikely." So what's to be done? Johnson recommends a few bureaucratic fixes, such as outsourcing more clerical functions and reducing useless paperwork, but the bottom line is that, "in more and more arenas, the Foreign Service does not have the staff to even show up." For the richest, most powerful nation on Earth, that's pretty sad.