That being said, there are a couple of issues currently ongoing that greatly affect my livelihood. These issues are complex, but I will try to summarize them for you so you can understand why they are so important to me and my fellow colleagues:
1. As you may or may not be aware, the government of the United States is currently operating under a "continuing resolution." What this essentially means is that our Congress has failed to agree on the 2011 budget and the U.S. Government is operating on a budget $6 billion lower than 2010 budget numbers until April 8. If, for any reason, Congress fails to agree on a budget and does not authorize another continuing resolution by April 8, the whole government (except for essential personnel) will go on furlough until a new continuing resolution or a 2011 budget passes. This means that we will not get paid for several weeks. When this last happened in 1995-1996, the government lost millions of dollars because of this and eventually did retroactively pay government employees for the furloughed time. This is not guaranteed this time, nor do any politicians want to see this happen again, as it is a very messy process and makes our Congress and our government look very, very bad. More related to the State Department, the Congress is seeking to cut $100 billion from the budget, as suggested by the House Appropriations Committee to meet their commitment to reduce U.S. debt. Both President Obama and Congress have stated that the majority of cuts will come from discretionary, non-National Security spending. Unfortunately for me and my colleagues, many of our Representatives and Senators do not feel that the work that we do classifies as National Security efforts. Without a natural constituency (such as that which the Department of Defense enjoys with its military bases in every state) or a strong professional lobby, that means that the State Department and USAID budgets are often the first to be slashed. It's an easy cut - it doesn't offend the voters in congressional and senatorial districts and our representatives get to look like they are making strong efforts to balance the budget (even though our budgets may represent less than 1% of the total federal budget). Over the long term, that means that we have fewer resources to meet an ever-growing list of initiatives that must be done, often to keep the peace or extend multi-lateral relations. We are lucky that we do have some defenders, and I strongly urge you to write to your representatives in Congress to let them know how you feel about this issue. I promise you I am doing the same.
As an excerpt from Senator Patrick Leahy's (D-VT) argument for counting the State Department and USAID as National Security initiatives, I give you this:
"Our Republican friends in the House should know that we cannot counter the influence of al Qaida and other violent extremists through military force alone. They should know that helping countries such as Southern Sudan rebuild after conflict, building stable democratic institutions in countries such as Egypt, preventing the trafficking of nuclear material and other weapons in the former Soviet Union, educating and providing jobs for youth who would otherwise be fodder for terrorist recruiters in the Middle East, combating the corrosive influence of organized crime in Central America, preventing the spread of deadly viruses in Africa and Asia—viruses that are only one airplane ride away from the United States—or supporting NATO, the International Atomic Energy Agency, or U.N. peacekeeping—these are all parts of our national security. It is the diplomats here and abroad, and the funds they administer, that help make U.S. leadership possible around the world."2. One of the State Department budget items that has strongly come under attack is a pesky line item called Overseas Comparability Pay. In the face of the two-year wage freeze that President Obama imposed on the federal government, many in our current Congress believe that this constitutes a salary raise, when in fact, it is not. The best description I have seen comes from the form letter the American Foreign Service Association (AFSA) provided us to send to our representatives in Congress:
"The Federal Employees Pay Comparability Act of 1990 was adopted as a way to reduce the government-wide disparity between the public and private sectors and is a basic component of salary for all civilian Federal employees, based on annual survey data collected by the Department of Labor. As a result of this law, every federal government employee working in the United States received “locality pay” as part of their salary. Until 2009, the only United States government civilian employees who did not receive this part of their salary were Foreign Service personnel serving their country overseas.
Locality pay for Foreign Service personnel and other federal employees serving in Washington, D.C. is now approximately 25%. Under the law prior to 2009, Foreign Service personnel serving abroad sacrificed this part of their salaries and took large pay cuts to their base salaries. As a result, because retirement packages are based upon base pay (including “locality pay”), Foreign Service officers representing their country abroad received smaller retirement packages than their colleagues who stayed in Washington. This was not sustainable and in 2009 a bi-partisan solution was found to correct this policy problem. Closing the pay gap is not a pay raise -- it is a correction of a 17- year-old unintended inequity in the worldwide Foreign Service pay schedule—an inequity that grew every year.
Today thousands of Foreign Service employees serve in hardship assignments around the globe, which now constitute nearly 60% of all posts. The number of unaccompanied posts has increased more than fivefold in the last decade. Assignments overseas are increasingly challenging, difficult and in many instances, dangerous. There has been strong bipartisan recognition that it is time to invest in diplomacy and development. Penalizing Foreign Service employees whose mission is to serve overseas to advance and protect our national interests by cutting their base pay undervalues the importance of their work, widens the gap between those serving in the United States and those facing hardships and sacrifices overseas and creates real disincentives to serving on the front lines of American diplomacy and development."So, as you can see, Overseas Comparability Pay is incredibly important to me and my colleagues, as it determines our contributions to retirement and puts us on an even playing field with our civil service counterparts. Moreover, our civil service colleagues often do not have to choose between their jobs and the ability of their spouses to have a fulfilling career that contributes to household finances. In righting an inequity in our overseas payscale, Overseas Comparability Pay allows our Foreign Service families to be able to better afford to serve our country, even when our spouses cannot work. A much more organized and compelling argument was made previously by a friend whose wife has an engineering degree and has the difficulty of trying to find work every few years, except in those countries where we have no bilateral agreements that allow it. I encourage you to read his story.
3. Let's talk about that 2-year wage freeze. I've already talked about how this relates to our Overseas Comparability Pay, but I haven't yet touched on a wider issue: that of our Foreign Service Nationals (FSNs). In every U.S. embassy and consulate overseas, we have a host of local employees (usually from the host country, sometimes from a third country) that form an integral and necessary part of our staff. I don't pretend to know all of the laws and regulations affecting their pay and benefits, but I do know these two things: their salaries are paid in the local currency (here in Argentina, that makes it the Argentine peso), and, as U.S. government employees, they are subject to the 2-year wage freeze. Without going into too much detail (partly to keep myself from appearing incredibly ignorant by publishing incorrect or badly understood information), let me just say that this is wreaking havoc on our FSNs. Largely due to perceived wage increase injustices in the past (whether or not that is true, I cannot say) and the fact that Argentina "enjoys" one of the highest rates of inflation in the world (not currently recognized by their government however), this has been very traumatic for our Argentine staff. As you can easily guess, on top of greatly affecting their purchasing power (many have to find new housing, move their children into different school systems, and make other life-altering household budget cuts), this is also harmful to our FSN-American staff relationship. We are working to remedy this situation as best we can here, but progress is rocky at best. It is easy for us, as Americans, to say, "Well, if the work environment is so bad, just leave," but this alternative is not available to all our staff. Hiring practices in Argentina are not the same as they are in the U.S. and the EEO laws are certainly not on par. More and more young adults are finding that their advanced degrees do not help them land jobs and are increasingly living at home with their families for even longer periods of time. On the older end of the scale, it is my understanding that there is a lot of age-ism practiced here - if you're over a certain age, your hireability apparently drops off a cliff. I've even been told that if you don't "look the part," you don't get hired. These limitations make it such that, even with the wage freeze, a job at the U.S. embassy is still one of the most appealing options out there (despite our not very Argentine work hours).
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So you can see that I and my colleagues are closely watching our Congress (and the rest of our government), waiting to see how we will fare over the coming months. We are committed to doing our part to elevate the reputation of the United States abroad; to working with our foreign counterparts to create a more receptive environment for U.S. business interests and peace; and to sharing our culture with the rest of the world. But it is certainly frustrating to see that our jobs are often misunderstood or poorly imagined by our compatriots at home, so badly so that no one bats an eye as our budget gets massacred because our Foreign Service is viewed as "discretionary" spending. In the end, we will certainly make do with the budget we are authorized, but as our resources dwindle, so too does our ability to make forward progress.
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