“State Dept. Faces Staffing Crisis, a Report Says” by Agence France-Presse
New York Times--June 6, 2007

WASHINGTON, June 5 (Agence France-Presse) — Saddled by the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, the State Department faces a staff shortage crisis amid “worsening morale,” according to an independent study that blames Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for the problem.

The report, by the influential Foreign Affairs Council, an organization of retired American diplomats and ambassadors that monitors United States diplomacy and State Department management, said that about 200 existing jobs — mostly overseas — were unfilled and that the department needed an additional 900 training slots to provide essential language skills and other expertise.

All 1,069 new positions and increases in financing between 2001 and 2005 had been absorbed by assignments in Iraq, Afghanistan and other “difficult” posts, the report said, adding that in the “first two years of Secretary Rice’s stewardship, almost no net new resources have been realized.”

At a news conference, the council’s president, Thomas D. Boyatt, a former ambassador, said, “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 No. 1, we are going to be in a very, very serious situation a year or so from now.”

Sean McCormack, the State Department spokesman, dismissed the report as “armchair quarterbacking.”

But Mr. Boyatt said, “Every secretary of government has the responsibility to at least leave that institution as healthy as they found it, if not to improve it,” reinforcing the report’s perspective that Ms. Rice had to bear responsibility for the crisis.

He added, “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.”

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