HomeDeputy Secretary of State for Management and ResourcesRemarks & Releases...“Powering Up Diplomacy in the 21st Century” Remarks by Richard Verma, Deputy Secretary of State for Management and Resources

# 									“Powering Up Diplomacy in the 21st Century” Remarks by Richard Verma, Deputy Secretary of State for Management and Resources							

Remarks

Richard R. Verma, Deputy Secretary of State  for Management and Resources

April 3, 2024

*As Delivered*

Deputy Secretary Richard R. Verma: Thanks, John. Thank you so much. And thank you, John, for the nice introduction. And thank you all for being here. I also want to thank CSIS. I want to thank the American Academy of Diplomacy for doing really incredible work and advocating for the department and all of its personnel. So thank you.

John Hamre told half of the story. I met him over 30 years ago, when I was working for the then-chairman of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee. John was both the comptroller of the Pentagon and he was the Deputy Secretary of Defense over the entire Clinton administration. And when you were in the Murtha office, there was a phrase that was uttered pretty much every day, multiple times a day. And it was: Call Hamre. Call Hamre. (Laughter.)

Whenever there was a problem, an issue, a question, an urgent matter – maybe not even an urgent matter, it was: Call Hamre. That phrase has stayed in my head, John, over 30 years. And I will tell you, there have been times when I have said to myself: Call Hamre. You should call Hamre. (Laughs.) So I’m really glad not only to see you, but I was so grateful for our conversation, as you said, many months ago where you actually asked us, what can we do to highlight some of the needs of the department both from a budget perspective and a personnel perspective? So I’m sorry it took eight or nine months to get here, but I’m really, really grateful to be here.

I want to – if I can, I just want to start with a bit of a brief recap. This week would mark my first year in office as deputy secretary for management. And it has been an honor to return to the department last April; as John mentioned, my previous service in India, the Bureau of Legislative Affairs. This has been an eye-opening experience, in many ways, to see the department from this vantage point.

In my first few weeks on the job we began evacuating Sudan and it has been a whirlwind ever since then. I will say, however, that everything I’ve seen and done since that first day has reinforced for me one key point which I hope you will take away from today and that is the Department of State as ever continues to deliver a tremendous value to the American people at a cost of approximately 1 percent of the national budget. One percent of the national budget.

When you actually ask – there’s a famous Pew poll – when you ask the American people what they think we spend on foreign assistance they say, oh, 20 percent, and when you ask them what they think it should be they say, well, really, it should be about 10 percent. And then they are shocked and surprised when they actually find out it’s 1 percent.

The department today stands at some 77,000 employees spread across nearly 300 embassies, consulates, and domestic operations. The Americans in our workforce come from every state in the union and nearly 20 percent of them are veterans.

As the deputy for management and resources, or DMR as the position is known, I have broad responsibilities for oversight and management of department operations including the department’s budget, foreign assistance programs, diplomatic missions, and our support to Americans overseas. Some describe it as the chief operating officer for the department.

In this capacity and in this first year I visited over 30 of our overseas missions just in this first year, from Kyiv to Baghdad, Jakarta, Comoros, Bogota, to the western Indian Ocean and many places in between and I’ve also visited about a dozen or so of our domestic facilities across the United States.

People have been asking me, why do you travel so much – isn’t your job here in D.C.? But I do think it’s critical to stay connected to the needs of our workforce including our terrific locally-employed staff.

I also come back from every trip inspired and motivated to do the right thing by our team spread across the globe. What you will find when you travel – and I encourage members of Congress and staff to get out there as much as they can – when they meet our teams around the world you find a committed and dedicated workforce serving globally, often in dangerous and difficult conditions.

At the end of the day, we are a national security agency with people serving bravely from Ukraine to Somalia and South Sudan to Iraq and Port-au-Prince and in so many other conflict zones. I could share stories of their creativity and effectiveness and heroism that I’ve seen during all this travel but the main point here is this.

In an age of increased competition, of global interconnectedness, of growing authoritarianism, it is vitally important for America’s diplomats and development professionals to show up everywhere we can to lead, to build, to grow, and to deepen cooperation.

As Secretary Blinken often says the world does not organize itself on its own and without U.S. leadership there often is adverse consequences. This is because the network of global friendships, partners, partnerships, and alliances the United States has built over the last several generations supports the lives and livelihoods of all Americans and billions of others around the world.

This network is one of the United States’ greatest strategic assets and what has and will support our continuing leadership in the world. And our ability to continue to lead is so important because we also know the world is changing, perhaps becoming more dangerous and, some would argue, less free.

We see more countries competing for more resources and more fractured international architecture, renewed great power competition, and a wide range of transnational threats. It was in this context even before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the attacks of October 7th, or the latest instability in Haiti or parts of Africa that President Biden suggested the world is at an inflection point, a point where the decisions America makes now at home and abroad will impact generations to come.

These decisions, of course, include how we approach our competition with the People’s Republic of China or respond to Putin or others. They’re also decisions about how we respond to cybersecurity attacks and information warfare, how we push back the continuing threat of extremist groups, how we prepare for the next pandemic, address the impacts of climate change or integrate artificial intelligence into human endeavor.

They’re about how we address all these challenges that the CIA director, Bill Burns, calls, quote, “problems without passports” – problems that know no borders, problems that can only be solved through greater international cooperation.

We can acknowledge that these challenges have stretched the State Department in unprecedented ways. They’ve meant working in more places on more issues and problem sets than ever before.

And this brings me to the second point I hope you’ll take away today, which is, despite the challenges, the department is not resting on its laurels. We are also responding to the challenges in multiple ways, taking every step possible to make sure that the department remains fit for purpose.

And one main vector for this has been to carry out Secretary Blinken’s robust, multiyear modernization agenda. Now, I could spend the entire hour or more talking about everything we’ve done under the modernization agenda, but let me summarize it briefly, noting highlights from our three main lines of effort.

First, we’ve looked at our critical missions and made sure the department was organized to address these now and for the foreseeable future. We’ve stood up multiple new offices and bureaus and opened new diplomatic missions abroad. We’re now addressing issues like cyber and global health security in a more comprehensive way than we have before.

Second, we’ve taken several steps to invest in our world-class, worldwide workforce across all hiring types. We’ve diversified hiring pathways through paid internships and new authorities, redefined our approach to training and professional development, and established a new retention unit to evaluate factors affecting our employees’ decisions about whether to stay or go.

Finally, we are looking at our policies and safeguards on risk, on technology and innovation, ensuring there is a balance in our decision-making about information and physical security around the world. This is us – this has enabled us to embrace technology in new ways, yes, including AI, where appropriate, and advanced data analytics to aid in our decision-making and efficiencies.

We are also implementing new technology to be more efficient and effective in our traditional work. For instance, the department’s passport agencies and consular sections cleared out an epic COVID backlog last year, processing more than 24 million passport applications and issuing over 10 million visas.

The economic impact of all this incoming and outbound travel is immense. The Commerce Department estimates $1.7 trillion of U.S. economic activity is generated annually by the travel-and-tourism industry, directly or indirectly supporting approximately one of every 20 U.S. jobs. Indeed, 48 percent of Americans now hold a passport, up from 20 percent in 2006.

As Americans and lawful permanent residents travel abroad, State Department personnel all over the world help ensure their safety and support, including during times of crises. For instance, when violence erupted suddenly in Sudan, the department facilitated the safe departure of more than 1,400 private citizens, U.S. citizens, LPRs and others, in a true multinational effort.

After October 7th, we augmented limited local commercial transportation options with more than 7,500 seats on government-chartered transportation. We are also continuing to honor our promise by coordinating special immigrant visa processing for Afghan allies at over 60 posts worldwide. Our evacuation of U.S. nationals from Haiti continues. All told, our consular teams, just in fiscal year ’23, assisted 70,000 Americans across the world in times of crises and, frankly, personal emergencies that are never on the front pages of any newspaper. That’s what we are there to do.

Now, these are some of the demands and activities we’ve taken. Let me now come to what is at the center of my job description, which is: Do we have the resources and people to actually do our jobs?

As many of you know, we released the president’s fiscal year 2025 budget last month with a total request for State and USAID of $58.8 billion. We also now have our full-year FY ’24 appropriation at $56.7 billion, which is nearly 6 percent below our FY ’23 budget. This is a significant cut, but frankly not as bad as the House-passed bill last fall which cut the department’s budget by over 15 percent. Now, I’m grateful that Congress has funded many of our shared priorities, but this number, the FY ’24 number, means the department – we will have to make trade-offs; the dollars are simply unable to stretch as far as we need to meet the moment.

And budget cycles do not always align with the global realities and crises, which is why we critically need the national security supplemental to respond to Ukraine, the Middle East, and the Indo-Pacific, as well as global humanitarian needs. As the White House has said, there is no other pot of money to address these emergencies happening today. Without the supplemental, we are limiting our ability to address some of the most important and difficult challenges of our time. In Ukraine, for example, the stakes are clear: If passed, the supplemental offers hope to a democratic Ukraine and its fight against Putin’s aggression. If we fail to act, we send the wrong signal to authoritarians everywhere. We must act.

And let’s take a look at some of the numbers. If you were to graph the State Department and USAID’s base budget over the period of the last 20 years, you’d see an increase of about $36 billion, from about $22 billion in the year 2000 to about $58 billion in 2023. As a comparator, however, DOD’s budget increased by nearly $600 billion over that same time period, more than 10 times the size of the entire State budget.

Over those same 20 years, some of our most strident advocates have been our friends from across the river at the Pentagon. You’d witness testimony from Defense secretaries about the importance of funding diplomacy and development as complementary pillars of national security alongside the Defense Department. As General Mattis aptly put it, quote, “If you don’t fund the State Department fully, then I need to buy more ammunition.”

We are also constrained by congressional inaction. In FY 2024, as I mentioned, we now have our full-year appropriation, but it is six months into the fiscal year, funding that was unavailable until just two weeks ago. In addition to these delays, we also lack the flexibility. Our annual appropriations bill is more than 300 pages with nearly 500 individual directives that constrain our programming. In fiscal year 2023, over 90 percent of our economic and development assistance was earmarked for specific priorities. All of this dilutes the department’s ability to adapt to real-time emerging crises.

None of this is intended to suggest government agencies can’t be innovative and find efficiencies. We have and we will always strive to do so. But I do, however, want to be candid about our reality and the challenges and the constraints we face. We must also find a way to support our national security priorities by consistently and fully funding the department and USAID for sustained period of time to ensure we can deliver for the American people.

But we should also consider how these resource battles are impacting U.S. competitiveness globally. We know that while the State Department and USAID remain less than fully funded, the PRC has provided some $1.34 trillion in grants and loans over the past 22 years. Last October the PRC and President Xi announced an additional $100 billion more for China’s development banks. That’s on the funding side.

And with regards to our people, the State Department today has a 13 percent staffing gap, on average. We have also failed to send our ambassadors to key posts. Around 15 percent of our nominees remain unconfirmed, with average waits of over a year from nomination to confirmation. Nineteen of our ambassador nominees have been waiting 400 days or more.

I give you some examples. Our nominee for Albania, 432 days. Albania, where we have a significant number of Afghan refugees and a new platform there. Our ambassador to Djibouti, waiting 432 days. Djibouti, where we have several thousand U.S. troops. Our ambassador to Nigeria, the largest country in Africa, waiting 628 days. Our ambassador to Cambodia, waiting 647 days. Our ambassador to the African Union, waiting 654 days. Our ambassador to Ecuador, where there’s been renewed violence and gang warfare, waiting 589 days. I could go on, but I think you get the message.

So these asymmetries between us and some of our competitors matter. We know the United States can present developing countries with better options, but without our ambassadors in the field, without consistent funding authorized and appropriated, we cannot reliably make our best case.

So let me bring this to a close. I started – as I mentioned, I started my career off working on Capitol Hill for Congressman Murtha. Mr. Murtha was a Democrat, and Marine, a Vietnam veteran. He could do battle with the best of them on domestic issues. But I also recall Jack Murtha sitting down each year to work out the defense budget with then-Secretary Weinberger, and following that Secretary Cheney, to hammer out the defense budget that they all agreed was necessary to support U.S. national security around the world.

The same was true when I had the opportunity to work in the Senate leadership post-9/11. And we supported and worked with the Bush administration on the post-9/11 national security architecture, building everything from the Department of Homeland Security to our new national security authorities that we needed in the war on terrorism.

I would argue that the global situation today requires us to come together to find greater unity of purpose and strengthen and advance U.S. interests. Not that we need to agree on everything, but so we can advance what really matters. The State Department is the oldest Cabinet agency in the U.S. government, with a 250-year record of serving American interests. We are ready to continue that course, but we really do need to come together to achieve the president’s vision of a free, open, secure, and prosperous world.

So I look forward to this discussion here at CSIS with the hope that you will help us identify ways that we can get back to the point where partisan politics stops at the water’s edge, and that all our pillars of national security, defense, diplomacy, and development are powered up for the 21st century. Thank you. I look forward to the discussion. (Applause.)

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