U.S. Diplomatic Missions Overseas Nearing State of Crisis, Panel Finds

An independent panel issued a stinging report Friday on the state of America’s overseas diplomatic missions, concluding that they are overstaffed, poorly organized, woefully equipped and living in a bygone technological age.

“We are perilously close to a state of crisis,” said panel chairman Lewis Kaden, a New York attorney with ties to the Clinton administration. “There are great people out there, but they are not being given the tools to work in the right way.”

The report was especially caustic in describing the working conditions at many U.S. embassies and consulates.

“We found shockingly shabby and antiquated building conditions at some of the missions we visited,” the report stated. “Throughout the world we found worn, overcrowded and inefficient facilities.”

Kaden noted that the mission in Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, had been dubbed the “folding-chair embassy” because work space is so cramped that staff members must fold chairs to reach their desks.

Speaking to reporters at a presentation of the panel’s findings, Kaden also said bureaucratic turf battles and heightened worries over secrecy have left diplomats without access to either simple e-mail or the Internet, thus stifling communication in an age driven by access to information.

“It is a disgrace,” he said. “Our personnel, representing 30 agencies, cannot communicate either with each other or with other posts around the world or with the government back in Washington the way my organization, or probably your organizations, take for granted.

“It’s not expensive or a technological issue, it’s a [bureaucratic] cultural issue,” Kaden said. He estimated that it would take $200 million and about one year to set up an efficient Internet-based communications system for the network of U.S. missions.

The report, commissioned last year by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, was intended to recommend criteria for the location, size and composition of U.S. posts overseas after terrorist bombs gutted U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. More than 200 people were killed in the blasts--12 of them American--and thousands were injured.

Several senior and former senior members of government as well as representatives from private industry served on the 25-member panel.

The panel set out a $500-million to $600-million spending program to overhaul and streamline the more than 250 U.S. overseas missions, including what it calls “right-sizing” many of them--strengthening some smaller missions but transferring much of the administrative and support work at major embassies such as in Paris and London back to the United States. It suggested that the overhaul could result in efficiency-related savings of nearly $400 million.

The administration will evaluate the report before presenting an implementation plan to Congress.

Most measures could be completed within two years, Kaden added.

Another report commissioned after the Africa embassy bombings that focused exclusively on security concerns was submitted earlier this year and called for $15 billion in additional spending over the next decade. While Congress reacted to that report by voting immediate supplemental funding of $1.4 billion for the current year to boost security, the mood in Congress about the U.S. role overseas has noticeably soured in the months since.