Vetting Ourselves to Death Posted by Patrick Barry

Paul Farmer wasn't alone as he languished in State Department limbo this summer.  According to Dave Herbert of National Journal, a crop of would-be interns also fell victim to a vetting process that is receiving increased criticism for going too far: 

"...while the trials and tribulations of top-level appointees are well-documented, security clearance delays are much worse at the lowest rungs of the State Department. Half a dozen current and former interns complained to National Journal.com that start dates are routinely pushed back because of the slow pace of clearances."

Given what I've heard about the average internship experience at State, it's tough for me to fully sympathize. While State is doing these prospective civil-servants a disservice by stringing them along like this, the fact that we still don't have a USAID administrator seems like a far bigger tragedy.  But as Herbert points out, these interns' woes point to a much bigger flaw with State's clearance and vetting process:

Looming in the background are charges of even more serious dysfunctions. Concerned Foreign Service Officers, which is made up of current and former State Department employees, alleges that investigators sometimes practice ethnic and religious profiling, robbing Foggy Bottom of applicants with critical language skills. And Hirsch argued that unlike the Office of Personnel Management and the Department of Defense, which conducted the majority of clearance applications, the Bureau of Diplomatic Security doesn't have enough checks against profiling.

This is a serious, serious problem.  Take Afghanistan. Where exactly is State going to get the Dari or Pashto speakers so critical for the U.S. to have any chance of stabilizing the country?  As of the publication of this Gareth Porter article from last May, there were only 18 Pashto-speaking FSOs in the entire department, and only 2 stationed in-theater.  One obvious way of quickly correcting this deficiency would be to heavily recruit Afghan-born U.S. citizens.  But its unclear whether such a push can be successful, given the dysfunctional vetting process that Herbert describes.    

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