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Rice blamed for staff shortage
05/06/2007 23:46 - (SA)
Washington - Saddled by the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, the State Department faces an acute staff shortage crisis amid "worsening morale", according to a study which blames Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for the problem.
The report by the influential Foreign Affairs Council, comprising senior retired American diplomats and ambassadors, said the department faced a shortage of 1 100 staff and that in the "first two years of Secretary Rice's stewardship almost no net new resources have been realised".
Rice took office in January 2005, facing the full impact of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"My own view is that the foreign service is at the front edge of a personnel crisis and if something isn't done about what we have identified here as 'job number one', we are going to be in a very, very serious situation a year or so from now," the council's president, Thomas Boyatt, told a news conference. 1 100 new jobs needed
"Job one" is to obtain 1 100 new positions needed "to move the foreign service from where it is to where it needs to be", said the council's report, Managing Secretary Rice's State Department: An independent assessment.
Reinforcing the view that Rice had to bear responsibility for the crisis, Boyatt said: "Every cabinet level officer has the responsibility to taking care of the institution he or she leads.
"Every secretary of government has responsibility to at least lead that institution as healthy as they founded, if not to improve it," he said.
Boyatt stressed that the State Department was "more overstretched" than the military.
The report said that about 200 existing jobs - mostly overseas - were unfilled and than an additional 900 training slots necessary to provide essential "linguistic and functional" skills "do not exist". People 'pushing it to the limit'
All 1 069 new positions and programme funding increases between 2001 and 2005 had been absorbed by assignments in Iraq, Afghanistan and other "difficult" posts, it said.
"Morale of course is strongly impacted by the fact that we didn't have enough people - which means that an awful lot of people are pushing it to the limit," Boyatt said.
"It is also impacted by the fact that it is even more stressful today in the foreign service than it has been in the past ... more dangerous," he said.
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