This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Dec. 24, 2012 - The slaughter of four Americans at Benghazi on Sept. 11 provoked many questions regarding what actually took place and why. A special report prepared for the State Department criticized the workings of two departments within State that failed to provide adequate security for American diplomats in Libya. This report has resulted in the resignations of four key personnel.
What is missing from this contemporary dialogue is any focus on the State Department itself as a bureaucratic institution with a history and culture that shape the behavior of those who labor within in. That culture is one of caution and slow motion.
“Marrying the natives” is a phenomenon whereby presidential appointees arrive at a department bureau as the president’s people. Within roughly eight months they become captive of the bureaus, which win their loyalty and affect their vision.
Too often, the media and elected officials talk of policy and gauge the impact that policy has. Bureaucracy tends to be viewed as a black box through which policy passes. Yet, bureaus implement; and their implementation is based on more than policy content. Bureaucrats’ standard operating procedures and rewards system and the constituencies they serve affect how laws are carried out. The effect frequently is not benign.
In the case of the State Department, Donald Warwick’s study (“A Theory of Bureaucracy”) provides us with a certain historical context in which to judge security in Benghazi. Warwick’s work is several decades old but there does not appear to be a follow-up showing any marked change. Many political scientists now acknowledge that institutions set the parameters in which behavior occurs. The same can be said of bureaucratic history and culture.
First, the State Department is very hard to evaluate: It does not have a succinct mission, measurable or not. Second, although it has regular civil service employees, the Foreign Service — the prestige corps — has had its own personnel procedures. A key factor in this has long been “selection out”: If a foreign service officer was not promoted within seven years, he had to leave the service.
Evaluations tended to be very positive so any negative comment would stand out and be damaging to the officer. This personnel feature contributed to a very in-bred caution. External events of 60 years or so did the same.
China fell to Mao’s forces in 1949. Some appalled Americans cried out, “Who lost China?” Certain foreign service officers who had provided reports on the weakness of Chiang Kai Shek’s government and its likely fall were vilified and drummed out of the service.
In the same period, the late Sen. Joseph McCarthy talked about the card-carrying men in the State Department, communists that the department knew about and did nothing about. This red-baiting further traumatized the department and added to its excessive caution. Reports from the field became blander and blander and passed their way through increasing bureaucratic layers.
Other entrants in the field of foreign affairs such as the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the Agency for International Development became more dominant in Washington. And as this happened, the State Department’s task or mission became less clear. Except for retired foreign service officers, the department has had no constituency to lobby for it on Capitol Hill.
To a greater degree than in other Cabinet departments, the Secretary of State is our country’s chief diplomat. Neither Hillary Clinton nor her predecessors have managed State to any appreciable degree. A secretary’s exhausting diplomatic journeys are the focus of his or her activity. The timidity and caution of the rank and file does not usually come into play. The department has been called the “fudge factory” and its location in the Foggy Bottom section of Washington, D.C. is seen as apropos by many.
Various presidents beginning with Richard Nixon have tried to address bureaucratic shortcomings with a one-size-fits-all reform to little avail. Management by Objectives, Program Plan Budgeting, Zero-Based Budgeting and governmental reinvention have all withered. Too many of these attempts tied reform to budget and never analyzed the inner working of bureaus. Some have a strong power base, some are rule-bound, some try to apply uniform operations to disparate programs. But they all affect implementation in a non-neutral fashion.
It is ironic that no one appears to be concerned with bureaucratic implementation in the drive to cut federal spending. It’s not a straight-forward area. The State Department’s culture may not have affected the inadequate security at U.S. missions but it certainly could have. A student once asked me if I thought a bureau was a sum of its staff or if it had an independent life. More often than not, the independent life envelops the staff.