Watchdog raises flags about nepotism, incompetence on State Department promotion panels

More than a half-dozen friends and relatives of State Department officials have earned thousands of dollars in recent years serving on panels that choose which diplomats get promoted, landing such lucrative positions through an ethically dubious system, a federal watchdog has found.

In a soon-to-be-public report obtained first by POLITICO, the State Department inspector general’s office further found that dozens of the people placed on the boards did not meet the department’s requirements. It also found inconsistencies in how people were chosen and weak oversight of rules and contracts involved.

The revelations are likely to be followed closely by U.S. diplomats, whose career trajectories depend heavily on the decisions of the panels, known officially as Foreign Service Selection Boards. The promotion system is often compared to the military’s and described as “up or out,” meaning diplomats will eventually be expected to leave if they fail to climb the ranks.

The report also could invite more scrutiny from Congress on the State Department’s overall staffing decisions. Those decisions have drawn criticism in recent years over an array of issues, including low levels of diversity, especially in the upper ranks, to policies that bar diplomats of certain, often non-Western backgrounds, from some assignments.

Most recently, a decision by President Joe Biden’s administration to reduce the role the Foreign Service Officer Test plays in hiring has led to some backlash, but the department has defended the move.

A spokesperson for the State Department declined to comment other than to note that the department has accepted the investigators' recommended next steps in the case. A spokesperson for the inspector general's office did not immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday.

The inspector general’s office’s probe of the promotion panels was prompted by a 2020 whistleblower’s complaint.

Broadly speaking, the investigation did not find evidence of intentional or organized corruption in how people were chosen to serve on promotion boards. Nor did it assert that the decisions made on promotions were affected by the membership of the panels.

Still, the perception of nepotism and cronyism raises ethical alarms, argues the report, which did not name the individuals whose involvement it described.

Many of the problems centered on the Bureau of Global Talent Management’s Office of Performance Evaluation, often referred to as GTM/PE. This office is in charge of filling and overseeing the promotion boards.

Such boards are required to include members of the public along with current State Department officials. Those public members have to meet certain requirements. They can’t be lobbyists for a foreign government, for instance. They also are supposed to have achieved prominence in a profession that is somehow linked to U.S. diplomacy.

Typically, 20 such promotion boards convene every year, for between four to eight weeks during the summer, according to the report. The public members are compensated for the time they spend on the board, with some earning between $20,000 to $30,000 in 2019 and 2020. Each board usually has fewer than 10 members, with one being from the public.

Public members are recruited in two main ways: by sending formal notifications to institutions and organizations, such as universities, and through an informal, word-of-mouth effort, often involving previous board members.

Between 2014 and 2021, at least seven friends or relatives of State Department officials served on the promotion boards or related panels, the inspector general’s office found. Five were relatives of staffers in the Office of Performance Evaluation — including fathers and at least one spouse — and some served two or three times.

“The practice of GTM/PE staff referring and selecting friends and family to receive public member contracts is inconsistent with ethics standards,” the report states.

The report states that in 2017, the person who is now the division chief of GTM/PE, but was a program analyst in the unit at the time, “recommended the sister of an HR specialist in another bureau for a public member position, even though the now-Division Chief knew the individual was unqualified.”

“The resume reviewed by [the inspector general’s office] included several years as a retail store cashier, a fact known and of concern to multiple GTM/PE employees at the time,” the report states. “According to a member of the Foreign Service that served on the board with the HR specialist’s sister, the sister did poorly, demonstrated a lack of comprehension, and would consistently miss the points of the board’s discussions.”

Serving on a promotion board is not a glamorous job, according to former U.S. diplomats, and it can be a challenge to recruit people. The position typically involves going through hundreds of files, seeking ways to differentiate among many highly qualified people eager to move up.

After reviewing the cases of the 59 people who served as public members from 2019 to 2021, the inspector general’s office determined that less than half each year met all the department’s requirements for such roles. Often that was because many did not indicate they had any overseas experience.

The people doing the choosing also “did not use consistent, standardized criteria when selecting public members,” relying on less formal, impression-driven methods, the investigation found.

In the report, the inspector general’s office makes 13 recommendations to the various State Department units involved, all of which the department accepted in its response.

The recommendations included potentially revising parts of the Foreign Affairs Manual that deal with the promotion boards and establishing a better mechanism to track people who apply to serve as public members.