Why I Joined the Ben Franklin Fellowship

The New York Times claims “a private conservative group’s involvement at the State Department has alarmed veteran diplomats and congressional Democrats who say it has established a worrisome degree of influence.” Eric Rubin, a retired diplomat of more than 40 years who recently led the mainstream State Department American Foreign Service Association (AFSA), wrote it “functions as the equivalent of a Communist Party cell in Soviet government ministries.” Some are even trying to out and doxx members who wish to remain anonymous. It’s the controversial Ben Franklin Fellowship (BFF).

The fellowship is a DC-based nonprofit founded by former American diplomats, bringing together active officials (including Christopher Landau, Deputy Secretary of State), academics, and legislators to force reform at the U.S. State Department. The group says it is nonpartisan in not supporting any political party, but its aims and think pieces support Secretary of State Marco Rubio in dismantling policies that have undermined diplomacy and left the Department less influential than it should be in major national security decisions. State has failed to reform itself, so something like BFF is badly needed.

That’s why I am a public member of the Ben Franklin Fellowship.

I speak only for myself about BFF. I have long believed (well before my whistleblower book about Iraq and subsequent forced retirement from State) that the 18th-century institution was structurally resistant to change. The Trump administration changes have been sharp and quick, but I wonder if any less draconian process would have produced any results at all—over my own 24-year-career at State, I watched blue ribbon panels come and go alongside outside studies and white papers, all full of ideas that were ignored. To me, BFF is a public way of supporting change, even when it hurts and even when it sometimes hurts good people. It is a lot of weight to throw on to BFF. But you have to start somewhere.

Since the end of the Second World War, when the task of nation-building across Europe and Japan was largely handed to the military even after it was first proposed by the secretary of state, reform efforts at the department have focused less on grand strategy and more on tweaks to the internal personnel systems and bureaucratic culture. Critics from Congress, presidential administrations, and diplomats themselves have long argued that State is too hierarchical, slow-moving, insular, and constrained by outdated personnel practices. Despite repeated reform initiatives, many of the same complaints of rigid promotion systems, weak leadership accountability, poor technological modernization, and resistance to change, have persisted.

One of the first major internal reform efforts to fail almost completely followed the frustrations of the Vietnam War, which exposed weaknesses not only in policy-making but also in how diplomats were recruited, managed, used in the field (the CORDS program), and promoted. Yet the 1975 Murphy Commission ended up recommending only minor changes. The most significant reform came with the Foreign Service Act of 1980, some 200 years after the department’s founding and the last big change in the past 46 years. The act modernized hiring and promotion procedures, solidified the “up-or-out” promotion model, and attempted to make assignments more equitable. Yet critics argued it reinforced excessive careerism and encouraged risk-averse behavior among officers seeking promotion.

The post-Cold War period saw Secretary of State Madeleine Albright attempt and fail to make management reforms focused on improving workplace efficiency and modernizing outdated information systems. It wasn’t until even later that Secretary of State Colin Powell decreed desktop Internet for State, based on his experience in the Army, replacing spotty stand-alone dial-up service, as the rest of the world experienced an information revolution.

After the September 11 attacks, failed internal reforms centered on Secretary Condoleezza Rice’s “transformational diplomacy,” which required large-scale diplomatic deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan at the expense of literally every other embassy and issue in the world, all despite the earlier failure of the similar CORDS program in Vietnam. The moves decimated State Department personnel and promotional systems for years afterwards. Secretary Hillary Clinton emphasized without effect workplace modernization through her “Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review,” which sought improved talent management. She also unsuccessfully pushed for greater recruitment of specialists in tech and economics to keep pace with the modern world.

Over nearly five decades, State Department reform played at modernizing personnel systems and bureaucracy, while institutional inertia and passive disruption limited any lasting change. The organization and systems in place when I was sworn in were more or less the same ones there when the door hit me on the way out 24 years later.

I was witness, and participant. I spent most of my career in the consular field, for many years issuing visas to foreigners and later managing new-hire foreign service officers to do the same. I spent years in Prozac-tinged cognitive dissonance blithely being told to ignore or overlook the clear letter of immigration law and issue, issue, issue visas no matter what the obvious truth about illegal stays was. There are whole ethnic neighborhoods in California and New York that should have a statue of me as one of their founders, because I issued thousands of visas under policies that prioritized volume over enforcement credibility. I was a good soldier and did what I was told to do about visas, and helped many young officers make their professional peace with the hypocrisy. BFF has since helped several people who feel much the same way as I did into new positions of authority over the visa process, and championed many changes to an immigration system that ran steadily in contrast to the law for decades. I am glad someone has surfaced some of it all and maybe even will do some more things to change it all.

I also grew weary of State’s 19th-century model of country “desks” and stove-piped embassies organized more or less the same way in every nation no matter the on-the-ground facts and with basically the same personnel wire diagram since the American Civil War. It was worse at the Mothership HQ in Washington, where every decision, however minor, had to pass through layers of “clearances”—basically negotiated agreements through the layers of bureaucracy above and around you. For awhile I wrote the first drafts of State’s “travel advice” for multiple countries, and then would spend weeks cajoling signs-off from dozens of offices who claimed a bureaucratic stake in the bland copy I churned out.

Even Maren Brooks of AFSA, the Foreign Service’s professional association (full disclosure: I was a dues-paying member for most of my career and benefited from their legal advice), wrote, 

As much as members of the Foreign Service in the Department of State embrace calls for reform of broken and ineffective systems, most of them have figured out how to navigate those systems and are concerned that changes would negatively affect their ability to advance. Changes were met with resistance. Within the Foreign Service, I found a strong culture of “putting in the time.” At State risk intolerance extends beyond concerns for physical danger. While policy successes are celebrated, failures are feared to be career-ending; and this can lead to knee-jerk reactions that discourage innovative thinking.

And she was writing about State under Secretary Antony Blinken in the Biden era, way before Trump II.

The Red-versus-Blue controversy around BFF misses the larger, more important story: the State Department has resisted meaningful reform for decades, through administrations of both parties. If internal reform repeatedly fails, outside pressure becomes inevitable. The real last change, the Foreign Service Act, put some 20th-century makeup on an 18th-century organization optimized to conduct diplomacy with the Ottoman Empire. What is left is a dirty job, long ignored, that now someone has to do if America is to have a diplomatic service capable of working across multiple administrations instead of just trying to wait out leaders it does not like while championing those it does. It is now necessary for an organization like Ben Franklin Fellows to step in and take on the fight.

The post Why I Joined the Ben Franklin Fellowship appeared first on The American Conservative.