While attacks on U.S. diplomatic facilities and personnel abroad are not infrequent, the severity of the September 11, 2012, attack on U.S. facilities in Benghazi, Libya, has caused a reexamination of measures in place to protect U.S. diplomatic personnel and facilities abroad. Ambassador Christopher Stevens was the first sitting U.S. ambassador to have been killed since 1979. Moreover, a concern exists that the attack may reflect a growing danger to U.S. diplomatic facilities—the result of an increasingly diffuse threat from extremists across the Middle East and of Arab revolutions that have decreased the capacity, and perhaps the will, of local governments to protect U.S. interests. Congressional and State Department actions will be critical to responding to this evolving threat and to preventing similar tragedies in the future. Congress has legislated extensive changes to the U.S. approach to securing facilities and personnel in at least two previous instances of attacks on U.S. diplomatic facilities abroad. The 1983-1984 bombings of U.S. facilities in Beirut, Lebanon, led to the adoption of the Omnibus Diplomatic Security and Antiterrorism Act of 1986, which, among other measures, established the State Department's Bureau of Diplomatic Security. Similarly, the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania led to, among other measures, a significant construction funding program under the Secure Embassy Construction and Counterterrorism Act of 1999 (SECCA). After the Benghazi attack, Congress initiated oversight through investigations by several committees and through a number of hearings featuring testimony from officials ranging from the working level to the Secretary of State. Members have also put forward a number of legislative proposals on issues ranging from the composition of Accountability Review Boards to procedures for awarding contracts for local security guards. Two of these measures have been considered and approved by committees. The Department of State undertook several measures in response to the attack, including immediate steps to bolster security at posts around the world; an investigation of the incident through an Accountability Review Board; and longer-term measures implementing the board's recommendations, including requests for significantly greater funding than in recent years. The following summarizes and tracks congressional and State Department efforts to make U.S. embassies and personnel around the world more secure. It will be updated as necessary to reflect further developments and actions on ongoing policy proposals. The protection of U.S. government employees and facilities under chief of mission authority overseas from terrorist, criminal, or technical attack is the responsibility of the Secretary of State. The Benghazi attack prompted the State Department to take several actions. In the immediate aftermath, the department ordered all posts to review their security posture and to take all necessary steps to enhance it if necessary. Shortly thereafter, five Interagency Security Assessment Teams (ISATs) were deployed to 19 posts in 13 countries to undertake urgent reviews of high-threat posts. In order to ensure consistent focus on the most endangered locations, State also reorganized its Diplomatic Security Bureau by establishing a new Deputy Assistant Secretary for High Threat Posts to oversee security arrangements for a number of so-designated countries. While press reports initially suggested the department had designated 17 High Threat Posts, State officials have suggested that this number is not static and that it would be reconsidered annually, at a minimum. As of September 2014, the number of High Threat Posts stood at 30. In addition to the above steps, in the first week of October 2012, then-Secretary of State Clinton convened an accountability review board (ARB) to investigate the Benghazi attack. The board was chaired by former Under Secretary of State Thomas Pickering and included five members, four of whom were designated by the Secretary of State and one by the intelligence community. On December 18, the Benghazi Accountability Review Board published its findings in an unclassified version of its report. The board concluded that, while responsibility for the attack rests solely and completely with the terrorists who perpetrated it, systemic failures in Washington led to key decisions that left the Special Mission in Benghazi with significant security shortfalls. Key leadership failures in the Bureau of Diplomatic Security (DS) as well as in the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs (NEA) led to confusion over decision-making in relation to security and policy in Benghazi; these were likely factors in the insufficient priority given to the Benghazi mission's security-related requests, according to the board. Still, these leadership failures did not amount to a clear breach of duty by any single U.S. government employee, the board found. The board also determined that decisions by the department's senior leadership regarding the nature and extension of Special Mission Benghazi's unclear status left it outside normal procedures for funding and executing security measures, including office facility standards and accountability measures under the Secure Embassy Construction and Counterterrorism Act of 1999 and the Overseas Security Policy Board (OSPB). On the release of the ARB's report, the Department of State accepted the panel's recommendations and pledged to implement them fully. The department formed a task force to implement the board's 29 recommendations, as they were translated into 64 specific action items assigned to bureaus for implementation. In reviewing failures of leadership and management, the department removed four of its employees from the positions they held at the time of the attack. The officials removed from their positions include three officials from the Bureau of Diplomatic Security and one from the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs. The four State Department employees, who had been on administrative leave, were returned to duty on August 20 and reassigned to other positions within the department. Prior to the officials' reinstatement, a number of Members of Congress had sought clarification on their administrative status, in order to assess whether the department had held the appropriate officials to account in a full and fair manner. In addition, while the ARB fixed responsibility for these failures at the level of Assistant Secretary and below, some congressional observers have suggested that more senior department officials should have been held more fully to account. By January 2013, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton reported to Congress that, of the ARB's recommendations, "more than 80 percent are on track to be completed by the end of March, with a number completed already." Later, Secretary of State John Kerry also stated that he is "committed to implementing every single one of the recommendations in the report of the Accountability Review Board and doing more." The department described its progress in implementing the ARB's recommendations in a fact sheet first released on May 20, 2013. The fact sheet has been updated repeatedly; the text of the most recent publicly released update is included is available as Appendix A . The document states that the department had addressed or was addressing all 24 unclassified recommendations. It also indicates that 113 new diplomatic security personnel (including 75 DS agents) had been hired by the Department of State in FY2013, with the remaining 38 expected to be hired in FY2014. On December 10, 2014, Assistant Secretary of State for Diplomatic Security Greg Starr testified that the Department had closed 25 of the 29 ARB recommendations. State has also sought to improve its ability to weigh the balance between risk and reward in high-threat, high-risk areas when beginning, restarting, continuing, modifying, or discontinuing operations at individual posts. The department established a Vital Presence Validation Process, which State officials suggest will offer a "transparent and repeatable process" providing a "documented, systematic, risk-based analysis" to guide decisions on overseas presence. The Department has begun using this process, for example in its decision to return a U.S. diplomatic presence to Bangui, Central African Republic, suspended from December 2012 to September 2014. According to Assistant Secretary Starr, the department "engaged in an analysis that determined that we should and could go back.... We worked with our colleagues at the Department of Defense to assess the security situation on the ground and develop a comprehensive plan for our return.... While we must closely monitor conditions on the ground, our return to Bangui demonstrates that our enhanced risk management procedures are working." In accordance with the Benghazi ARB's fourth recommendation, the department convened a panel of external security experts in April 2013 to identify best practices from other agencies and countries. The so-called Best Practices Panel , chaired by former Director of U.S. Secret Service Mark Sullivan, provided its report to the department on August 29, 2013. The report was released publicly by the department nearly one year later, on August 1, 2014, along with a fact sheet describing the department's implementation of the panel's recommendations. The panel observed that many security-related decisions were in the hands of the Department of State's Under Secretary for Management, a position overseeing what the panel viewed as a too-large number of support functions, creating what it deemed a "span of control" problem. Accordingly, the panel's chief recommendation was the elevation of the diplomatic security function through the creation of an Under Secretary for Diplomatic Security, which would focus all security issues through a single focal point at the senior executive level. While State accepted 38 of the recommendations from the panel and has reportedly implemented 30 of them fully, the department determined that establishing an Under Secretary for Diplomatic Security would be counter-productive. It asserted that such a move would deepen the "stove-piping" that the ARB and other observers lamented in the wake of the Benghazi attacks, and reinforce the perception that Diplomatic Security has full and sole responsibility for security, rather than ensuring that all parts of the department share this priority. Instead, Secretary of State Kerry has instituted a practice whereby the Assistant Secretary for Diplomatic Security has direct access to the Secretary of State to share security concerns "as threats and circumstances require."