Editor’s Note: This project brought together experts from across subfields to generate ideas for improving the practice of US diplomacy.
Sarah Arkin and Daniel Langenkamp work at the U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy and are experts in the field of public diplomacy. They are part of a team that conducts mandatory annual reviews of U.S. public diplomacy programming, giving them deep insight into the activities of the State Department.
Lula Chen is a research fellow at fp21, a think tank focused on implementable reforms to the processes and institutions of American foreign policy, and is a research scientist at MIT.
By Evan Cooper, Research Analyst, Reimagining US Grand Strategy
There have been persistent attempts to reform the State Department, stretching back to the presidency of George W. Bush. The Biden administration implemented what it called a modernization agenda, which made significant changes to the organization and its functions, with mixed results. Now the Trump administration is undertaking a major reform, attempting to transform the Foreign Service and change the very structure of the State Department. At the same time, a Congressional commission has been established to “examine the changing nature of diplomacy and the ways in which the department can modernize to advance the interests of the United States.” Amidst this quest to improve the functions of the State Department and define its role in U.S. foreign policy and the world, these experts convened to provide their ideas for reform. Four experts shared their thoughts of how to improve the Department’s functions, providing ideas for how to better U.S. public diplomacy, improve its use of data, and make the department more efficient
Modernizing Public Diplomacy
By Sarah Arkin and Daniel Langenkamp, U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy
The United States has not seen as intense a struggle for the hearts and minds of audiences worldwide since the end of the Cold War. It is a battle taking place on every continent, in every public space, and on every television set, cell phone, or computer in the world. The United States’ two most recent National Security Strategies recognize the myriad ways authoritarians are weaponizing the information space to undermine democracies, polarize societies, and threaten U.S. foreign policy interests. The ability of actors to directly reach vast audiences — in the palm of their hands — around the world is unprecedented. Public diplomacy must not simply promote positive views of the United States or encourage people-to-people exchanges for the sake of mutual understanding but should directly advance U.S. national interests, including by countering the information operations of U.S. adversaries.
The Undersecretariat for Public Diplomacy (more commonly known as the R family) undertook a significant modernization agenda of its own starting in 2019, including technology, training and the Public Diplomacy Staffing Initiative (PDSI), which organized Public Affairs Sections around audiences, strategic content, and resource management rather than programs. The Department should continue these broader efforts to ensure PD officers are best equipped to respond to the rapidly changing information environment.
Funding: Analysts assess the People’s Republic of China spends many billions of dollars per year to shape opinions worldwide via its media empire, exchange programs, Confucious Institutes, and other investments. Similarly, Russia spends billions each year (and probably far more) on just its global media empire, which includes its RT and Sputnik international broadcasters, and aggressive, inauthentic use of social media, messaging apps, and local media operations via actors it owns, controls, or supports. Overall, PD spending for the State Department and the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), meanwhile, was $2.47 billion in FY 2023, a $26 million decrease, adjusted for inflation, from FY 2022, at a time when rising non-inflation costs increases are also eating away at PD funding. Thus, while very real budgetary limitations exist in the current fiscal and political environment, consistent but modest increases each year until levels reach at least $3 billion would be a wise investment to seriously address U.S. adversaries.
Reach more people in real time: As U.S. adversaries flood the information space with bots, influence operations, and propaganda, it is critical that more officers throughout the Department and at posts worldwide actively and directly reach as many people as possible with accurate information about the United States and its policies in a timely way. The Secretary and Department leadership should set the expectation that Bureau spokespeople and senior officials should frequently engage with reporters, including those working for new media and foreign outlets. PD practitioners should continually explore new ways — in tandem with Global Public Affairs (GPA) and the Foreign Press Center (FPC) — to reach people through new media, including messaging apps and other digital platforms, and they should partner with influencers and digital content creators to reach audiences beyond the bullhorn of American diplomats. GPA should also continue to build out its foreign language spokesperson (FLOX) operations and leverage global Media Hubs.
Invest in AI: The United States must recognize the watershed moment that artificial intelligence (AI) has created. First, the State Department should continue to explore the ways AI can save time and aggressively push these solutions to the field. With GPA’s new Northstar tool, daily press clips and translations can be completed in moments rather than hours, freeing up staff for more high-value work. That high-value work could include more old-fashioned engagement with journalists, opinion leaders, and influencers, as well as better analysis of the enormous amounts of data PD practitioners can access to better understand their audiences.
Improve data-driven research, programming, and monitoring: A number of offices throughout the Undersecretariat for Public Diplomacy conduct research, audience analysis, monitoring, and evaluation. However, the Department needs a centralized repository where practitioners can access existing data and request research, including data analytics, to better understand their audiences, develop better public diplomacy campaigns, and monitor and evaluate them to assess how they are advancing U.S. foreign policy.
Knowledge management and training: To fully harness new AI and data analytical tools, to share best practices, and equip the PD workforce to meet the moment, the Department must continue to invest in knowledge management and training. Different posts use different platforms — or none at all — for tracking their PD Implementation Plans (PDIPs), various PD programs, and campaigns. Data-driven PD research must be centralized and practitioners need to know how to use and access it. Officers need time and training on constantly changing technology and media tools to enhance overall efforts.
Recognize the importance of domestic audience engagement: The Department has a range of domestic outreach units which it should continue to utilize to inform, educate, and get input from Americans about the work of U.S. diplomats to advance U.S. interests; such outreach increases accountability and boosts dialogue with diplomats who represent the American people abroad. Recognizing that foreign governments directly engage with state and local governments, and foreign actors directly reach Americans through media and information operations, the Department should ensure that domestic outreach efforts from GPA and regional bureaus are complementary, and that city and state governments have a central place to help navigate foreign engagement. The Department should leverage longstanding Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) networks that promote U.S. interests through citizen and academic exchanges for broader domestic engagement with communities, businesses, and educational institutions throughout the country.
USAGM Reform: Finally, a note on the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), an integral part of U.S. public diplomacy efforts. USAGM should continue refining its “Impact Model,” to help Congress and the public better understand the agency’s operations and effectiveness. USAGM should use its move to a new building in Washington, D.C., to update its technology and modernize its distribution infrastructure. Finally, it should increase support to independent media in Africa and the Western Hemisphere, where U.S. adversaries are investing vast resources.
The United States can be proud of the innovative and energetic efforts it undertook in the Cold War to ensure the Soviet Union didn’t overwhelm the world with its propaganda. There is no reason it cannot meet the current moment in the same way, harnessing its enormous talent, energy, and ingenuity to confront the information threat seeking to undermine U.S. interests worldwide.
Improving Data Utilization
By Lula Chen, Research Fellow, fp21
The State Department’s modernization agenda included many commendable ways to improve the department’s use of data. The Enterprise Data Strategy aimed to transform how the State Department collected and managed its data, creating a culture of using data to enhance decision-making and diplomacy. Across many metrics, the Department has also largely been hitting its data-informed diplomacy goals, providing training, hiring data scientists and data officers, producing artificial intelligence (AI) use cases, and increasing the number of data assets. These changes help create a foundation that improves data utilization at the State Department and should be continued.
Even with new training, assets, and staff, improvements in both data collection and data practices can still be made. Below are four suggestions to further improve the use of data and data integration into decision-making at the State Department in the Trump administration. These suggestions are not meant to be comprehensive but point at ways to strengthen data utilization moving forward.
Identify key decisions where evidence from data is valuable. Data is most effectively used when it is connected to decisions. Before considering how to use data, policymakers should determine the key decisions that would benefit from data-supported evidence. For example, there may be certain decisions where two or three options seem viable, and data can help clarify which of the options aligns most closely to strategic goals. Identifying the decisions that will benefit from data will help to focus the data collection and ensure its utility for the new administration.
Identify a few, high-quality metrics and indicators that provide compelling evidence for a decision. Compelling evidence is often available through a few key, high-quality pieces of data. Data quality dimensions, such as accuracy, completeness, consistency, and timeliness, help to ensure that the data are reliable for decision-making. The State Department has identified improving data quality as part of its Enterprise Data Strategy, and the new administration can continue to focus on improving the data quality of the department.
High-quality data can be costly; however, having a few, critical, high-quality indicators may be much more useful than having many low-quality, noisy, indicators. Right now, bureaus often tend to collect numerous metrics, as seen in Integrated Country Strategies or programmatic monitoring and evaluation plans, and the quality of those metrics vary widely. An exercise to focus the metrics into a few key indicators collected with quality in mind, including publicly available indicators that have been rigorously validated, will make data collection and use much more relevant for decision-making in the new administration. Good indicators must accurately capture the concept they are measuring. To assess the overall validity of indicators, researchers consider content validity, convergent/discriminant validity, and nomological validity.
Content validity means that a measure includes all relevant elements of a concept and excludes irrelevant elements. Convergent/discriminant validity means a measure correlates statistically with similar concepts but not with dissimilar ones. Nomological validity means a measure is predictive of other things that the measure is expected to affect. This USAID resource and this article provide more information on assessing the validity of indicators. Adopting practices for assessing the validity of indicators can help the new administration ensure that they are sound and relevant for decision-making.
Lower barriers to data access. There is already a lot of data at the State Department; however, their accessibility may be limited. The Department has hit its targets for the number of data assets it has available, but it is unclear the extent to which they are being used. The limited use of these data assets may be due to accessibility barriers, such as a lack of system interoperability and data silos, the preprocessing needed to make data analyzable, and a shortage of technical personnel.
Numerous databases and systems throughout the State Department are not interoperable and do not communicate with each other. In addition, different bureaus have access to different data, and sharing data between bureaus may be difficult due to privacy concerns or other issues. Both situations make it difficult to merge or integrate data from different sources together, which limits the usefulness of data. Another barrier is the form of data assets. Many of the data assets at the State Department require several layers of additional work before the data can be used. For example, PDFs and documents provide a wealth of data, but those documents must be preprocessed, and the data they contain must be extracted and cleaned, before they can be analyzed. Lastly, there is still a need for more data scientists, especially those with subject area expertise, to be available to help bureaus with their data analysis needs. The new administration can lower barriers to data use by increasing interoperability between systems and data accessibility across bureaus, making data assets analysis ready, and providing more technical capacity to bureaus.
Relatedly, AI and machine learning tools are integral for data scientists analyzing data and for those who want to derive actionable data-based recommendations. Tools like NorthStar summarize news stories from over 100 languages, reducing the workload of diplomats. Trainings, tools, libraries, and use cases are available through an AI hub at the State Department, and more tools are becoming available with initiatives like ChatGPT Gov. The new administration should continue integrating AI into the workflow of the State Department, with cautions around when these tools may be biased or hallucinate, and reminders of the practical and ethical boundaries of what these tools can or cannot do.
Interpret data with subject matter experts. Good data utilization requires sound interpretation of the data. Making accurate interpretations requires contextual knowledge and understanding of what the data means for a particular situation. The new administration can create processes that bring together groups of in-house and external experts, including foreign service officers and civil servants, throughout the data and analysis process to improve the interpretation and use of data.
The Enterprise Data Strategy targeted a culture change at the State Department, where evidence from data is routinely part of the decision-making process. Building on existing foundations, these suggestions offer ways to make integrating data use with decision-making more feasible and easier to practice. Adopting these suggestions can enhance the effectiveness of future programs.
Making Efficient Cuts
By Evan Cooper, Research Analyst, Stimson Center
The Trump administration has undertaken an effort to cut the size of the federal government, which includes a substantial proposed reduction to State Department staffing on top of the existing hiring freeze. But rather than making broad, sweeping cuts to the bureaucracy and seeking to limit its resources, the Trump administration should focus on consolidating duplicative positions and deploying the department’s workforce to the most important spots around the world.
The starting point for developing plans for reforming State Department staffing should come in the form of a diplomatic posture review. Working with Congress, the Department should identify the extent of its capacity and outline how it plans to deploy its personnel to the areas of the world that are of utmost importance to US foreign policy. By creating an engagement strategy that connects its abilities with its existing resources, the Department can best work within its means to advance U.S. interests. It can convey to Congress how it is effectively utilizing its staff and how the adjustment of the US diplomatic footprint matches the imperatives of the administration. This will require support from Congress to ensure that a thorough review of capabilities can take place, and oversight to ensure that plans to place staff where they will be most valuable are executed. It will also take clear communication by the White House of what its foreign policy priorities are and identification of where diplomacy will best be used to achieve those imperatives.
As the process of undertaking a diplomatic posture review takes place, the Trump administration should be focused on identifying what positions and offices can be consolidated. The first place to look are special envoys, which have come to be overly relied on by successive administrations. Already the Trump administration has fallen into this trap, appointing special envoys to the United Kingdom and Latin America. These positions are both duplicative and cause bureaucratic and oversight issues. The United States should be using its ambassadors and regional bureaus to manage these diplomatic relationships. Foreign Service officers and officials will still be conducting much of the work of managing ties, but the use of a parallel special envoy risks duplication of functions and mixed messages – which diplomats assiduously avoid. There is also the issue of Congressional oversight, which was raised as an issue by Republicans during the Biden administration, leading to a requirement that special envoys receive confirmation by the Senate. But Republicans have so far avoided resurfacing their complaint over the Trump administration’s similar dependence on special envoys.
There is a role for special envoys. Such positions are particularly useful for handling crisis and conflict negotiations. President Trump has named, and already utilized, Keith Kellogg as special envoy for Ukraine and Russia and Steve Wikoff as special envoy for the Middle East. They are tasked with negotiating the end of the war in Ukraine, and a grand Middle East normalization deal, respectively. Special envoys make sense for such missions as they can act as the president’s personal representative, conveying their views on negotiations and maintaining close dialogue with the executive. But an overuse of special envoys outside of time sensitive and fraught issue areas ultimately undermines the foreign service and its ability to craft and implement longer term foreign policy.
Organizationally, the Trump administration should focus on empowering the State Department to advance U.S. diplomatic interests. This will necessitate eventually removing the hiring freeze and tactically recruiting both new foreign service and civil service officers, as well as carefully selecting the political appointees who will guide the Department. This building back out of the State Department ranks should start with nominating ambassadors for every open position. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has acknowledged that “time is of the essence” to fill vacant foreign service positions. While the Trump administration has demonstrated hostility towards the foreign service, it could solidify its relationships with the remaining senior officers by nominating them for ambassadorial posts, which Congress would likely respond kindly to and quickly move through the confirmations. Even if President Trump ultimately decides to rely on political allies as ambassadors, it is critical to fill the posts to ensure U.S. missions can maintain relations with countries and provide reliable information back to Foggy Bottom and the White House about trends and events that impact U.S. interests. Previous understaffing of key posts in strategically important regions like the Indo-Pacific has limited the ability of the United States to leverage its diplomatic might.
Diplomats are necessary to implement U.S. foreign policy. Drastically reducing the workforce of the already-strained State Department will have consequences for preventing conflicts, capitalizing on opportunities, and ensuring messages from the United States government are accurately heard abroad. While there are redundancies in the State Department that should be eliminated, significantly reducing the overall footprint of the Department would hurt the administration’s ability to enact its foreign policy. By expanding the U.S. diplomatic footprint in the most important regions, appointing ambassadors to speak on behalf of the administration, and removing unnecessary special envoys, the Trump administration can create an agile State Department that is fit-for-purpose.