What should (and won’t) happen at the State Department

Spurred by the Bush Administration announcement of a major overhaul of the State Department, ZenPundit Mark Safranski gives his suggestions for some of the directions reform should take including outreach, strategic thinking, depth, and jointness. For the details on his suggestions, read Mark’s post.

How should the State Department (or Foggy Bottom as it’s sometimes called because its headquarters is in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood of the District of Columbia) be overhauled? Beats me. It’s an enormously complicated agency with dozens of bureaus and offices and a dizzying array of responsibilities. A good place to start might be with its mission statement:

“Create a more secure, democratic, and prosperous world for the benefit of the American people and the international community.”

Compare that with the Preamble to the United States Constitution:

We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

From its very inception in 1789, the Department of State has had a lot of domestic competition from the Chief Executive (the elected officials of the various administrations are notoriously referred to as “the temporary help” by members of the permanent State Department bureaucracy), War Department (now the Department of Defense), and various other federal government departments and agencies.

Competition in formulating and promoting foreign policy isn’t from other federal government officials and departments alone. Governors of states and state legislators are in on the act making trade junkets (the first overseas mission by a sitting Secretary of State didn’t take place until 1906). Former presidents of the United States, corporations, banks, NGO’s, students, vacationers, people making technical support calls to help desks in Bangalore, and little old ladies from Poughkeepsie who buy and sell on eBay are all making and promoting U. S. foreign policy.

The people of the United States don’t need the State Department to create anything. They can and are doing it themselves with greater rapidity than any bureacracy however skilled and efficient can possibly hope to match. That trend will only accelerate over time.

The changes that I’d like to see in the State Department lie in the direction of State becoming lots less proprietary and technocratic and much more responsive to its clients both inside and outside of the government. But I genuinely doubt that change will come in that form.

I could go on and on about how the federal government should, can, and must change. But I think I’ll leave it at that.

Oh, and Mark, Tom Barnett’s SysAdmin force already exists: it’s called the State Department (they just don’t know it yet) and rather than looking for support within the Department of Defense I hope he’s looking at State since I suspect it will be easier to convince a bureaucracy that’s looking for new missions in a period of decreasing influence than a bureaucracy that has more missions than it can handle already.

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