Eric Rosenbach:
Hello, everyone. My name is Eric Rosenbach. As you can see from my nice background, I'm here at the Harvard Kennedy School up in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It's a beautiful fall day, and we are super lucky to have Deputy Secretary Dr. Richard Verma with us. You'll hear me switch back and forth between calling him Mr. Deputy Secretary and Rich; we are good friends, have known each other for a long time, and I feel immense privilege in being able to host him here today to talk about how the Department of State can increase diplomatic power, which I think is a super important topic.
And that may sound strange coming from someone like myself, who's spent my entire career in around the military and the Department of Defense, but I think makes it even more apt and poignant. So here's what I'd like to do: I'm going to start by more formally introducing Deputy Secretary Verma, then we're going to give Dr. Verma a little while to talk about the new strategy and implementation plan that he has authored, then we'll have a Q&A between the two of us and open up to questions for you there in the studio audience. Deputy Secretary Verma, that sound okay to you?
Deputy Secretary Richard R. Verma:
That sounds perfect. Thank you. Thanks, Eric.
Eric Rosenbach:
Great.
Eric Rosenbach:
Y'all, I want you to understand just how special a leader Rich Verma is. This is someone who has an amazing array of experiences in life professionally. Not only is he the Deputy Secretary of State, where, in a two-tiered deputy system at the State Department, he's the equivalent of the chief operating officer with also a significant policy portfolio. When you're the COO of the Department of State, it means you're running operations all around the world. The sun is never setting on the Department of State. So I can only imagine that Rich is probably getting very little sleep to keep everything running, which he's doing extraordinarily well.
Rich also has pretty extensive experience in the private sector, is the first ever Indian American to serve as the ambassador to India, has served as the assistant secretary for legislative affairs on the Hill, worked as the national security advisor for the Senate majority leader. Not only that, he is an Air Force veteran and is one of the most degreed people you will ever meet, even up in the hallowed halls of Harvard. He has a PhD and a JD on top of that.
So, Rich, that's the biography, but what I would like to tell you all is, there's something really special about Rich as a leader. I've been very lucky to see him in action, so to speak. And in particular, when I was chief of staff at the Department of Defense, we, with the secretary, Ash Carter, really liked to go to India to try to work on defense-related issues, and even more so because Rich was the ambassador there, and just so effective in getting things done.
I remember very fondly Rich and I being on the deck of a renovated Russian aircraft carrier that the Indians were just bringing into service, among other things, and that he just had true rock star status in India, where the Indians would literally follow him down the street, because they were so enamored with the U.S. Ambassador to India. So, Rich, we're super lucky to have you here. I think this is a great topic.
Up here at the Kennedy School, I teach a class that's about strategy and execution, and what I always like to say is that strategy without execution is hallucination.
In the government, a lot of people get caught on coming up with the big ideas, but they don't think about how to implement it in the way that you are, and it's just so important that you have a workforce like you do at the State Department that's working on a lot of the things that you've outlined in the strategy. So, again, we're so lucky to have you here. And with that, I'm going to turn it over to you to talk a little bit about the strategy and some of the reforms of modernization that you've made yourself.
Deputy Secretary Richard R. Verma:
That's great. Eric, thank you, and thank you for your leadership, your friendship, your service. You left out of my bio that I was also a senior fellow at the Belfer Center for several years, thanks to you and to Ash Carter. So it's great to be back and have those connections, and the entire team at Belfer and yourself and Meghan O'Sullivan and Joe Nye and Graham Allison. It's an amazing team.
Let me just say a word about Ash Carter, who left us too soon. I call him the modern architect of U.S.-India security relations, and he really was. To have a secretary of defense, when you're the sitting U.S. ambassador in India, to call you on a regular basis to say, "How have we advanced the U.S.-India defense relationship this week and this month and this year?" I took that very seriously, and he really saw the promise and the benefit in that relationship, and I loved every minute of working with him and with you. And your visits were always super stressful, but they were really high-impact, let's just say. Thank you for-
Eric Rosenbach:
The Department of Defense is always high-maintenance, right?
Deputy Secretary Richard R. Verma:
No, not at all. So thank you for giving me... Really, what I want to do is just take a few minutes to talk about what we're calling Secretary Blinken's modernization agenda, which has really been a three-year effort. He launched it three years ago this month at the Foreign Service Institute with a speech to our workforce. And maybe I could just take a step back and unpack what modernization actually means for us.
I think the way I would serve it up is to make sure we are doing the things that matter to the American people, that we are giving our workforce the skill set to address the problems that are actually coming across their inbox each day, and to respond to the incredible change going on in the world, both positive and negative, and, at the same time, make this an even better place for people to come and work each day.
So it was kind of a very tall order, and I'll get into the components of it. But again, maybe hitting the pause button here for a second. You mentioned my job and my job description. As a reminder to people, the State Department, as an institution, we have about 80,000 people in about 300 locations around the world. That's about 14,000 Foreign Service officers, 14,000 civil servants, and the rest, locally employed staff that support our embassies and consulates globally.
We have a budget of about $60 billion, which sounds like a lot and is a lot, but doesn't actually meet the current needs of the day. But we are also living through what the President and Secretary call an inflection point in the world, where more countries are competing for more power on the world stage, where the kind of revisionist powers and malign actors are still very much present, and we see it with Russia's invasion in Ukraine. We see it with our global competition with China. We see the challenge that Iran has posed in the Middle East. We see the threat of terrorism on a regular basis.
But we also, I would say, have entered a period where the transnational threats, and we've had them, but these are the threats, and I like to quote our CIA director, Bill Burns, here. He calls them problems without passports, problems that can't be solved or addressed through military force or intimidation, or they're only problems that can be solved through international cooperation. And I just give you a few examples.
Obviously, the pandemic that we lived through. I don't think any of us ever would have thought that a virus could spread to 135 countries in 30 days and kill 20 million people over three years.
We're living through the impacts of climate change, another transnational threat. We've had the hottest year on record last year. We will break that record this year. We've had the hottest 10 years in our nation's history. I could go on and on. So we no longer talk about the threat of climate change. We talk about how we are managing the impacts of climate change.
And then just look at the advances in technology, something that you are expert in, technology for good that has connected billions of people and brought them into the modern economy, and educated millions more people, lifted people out of poverty. But frankly, technology is a tool that is being used to surveil, harass, monitor, steal, and now, with powerful tools, to misinform, disinform, and, frankly, to create havoc.
I mentioned those three things and the traditional threats and the nontraditional threats to say, this inflection point we're in, this complicated period we're in, we can have an argument about whether this is the most dangerous time, but I would argue it is the most complex time we've lived in. And as a result, the State Department, in particular, is being asked to do more things in more places than ever before. And so, in this job, I have traveled to 46 countries in 21 or 22 months. I've been to 67 embassies and consulates, and what I have seen is this complicated, cascading set of issues and problems, and it directly informs why we launched this modernization agenda three years ago.
So let's get to the heart of that, because that had three tracks. It had a critical missions track, a workforce track, and a technology and risk track.
So the critical missions in particular, this is where the secretary said, "Yes. State Department, you're always going to be doing arms control. You're always going to be doing economic diplomacy." And Eric, I want to make sure I didn't lose you. Can you still hear me?
Eric Rosenbach:
Yeah. I'm still here.
Deputy Secretary Richard R. Verma:
Okay. We're always going to be doing our core elements. But the secretary said, "Look, there are five or six areas where," I think, given the problem set that I described and what we're seeing around the world, "we need a renewed focus." So we stood up a new cybersecurity bureau for the first time to deal with those both threats and opportunities in the cyberspace, led by Ambassador Nate Fick, who's a titan in the private sector, in technology.
We stood up a new global health and security bureau, led by Dr. Nkengasong, again, a titan in the global health space, not only to tackle the existing diseases like tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS and malaria, but also to prevent and respond better to the next pandemic. We stood up a new China house, which is modeled after the Russia house of the '60s and '70s, which is a whole-of-State Department and whole-of-government approach to our competition with China instead of just the bilateral approach.
We have stood up new efforts in climate diplomacy. For the first time ever, we have 20 specific climate officers in key embassies around the world doing climate diplomacy. We have six new courses at the Foreign Service Institute that simply deal in climate change mitigation, adaptation. We have stood up new efforts in commercial diplomacy. And finally, we have stood up new efforts in multilateral diplomacy and subnational diplomacy, which is a fancy word for working more with states and localities and governors, because, again, as the secretary likes to say, foreign policy begins at home.
So critical missions. We've really stood up our capability in these areas. Now, when I first briefed this to members of our senior leadership team over a year ago, they were saying, "Oh my gosh, we're already overworked. We already have a complicated bureaucracy here at the State Department. Why would you be adding to our complication?" And in fact, it's just the opposite, and I think the feedback we've received has been quite good.
It is actually to give our officers, our workforce additional capabilities, additional tools, again, to deal with those issues that are front and center today, because what's coming across their inbox are, "Please come to the next negotiation on cryptocurrency and blockchain. Please come to the next summit on critical minerals and climate adaptation." So we really need to be not only at the table, we need to continue to have our leading role. So that's what the critical missions' modernization piece has been about.
Second, workforce. Again, we are super lucky that we continue to attract and retain the best, really incredible workforce, and we are super lucky because people love this mission. But loving the mission is not sufficient. You've got to be able to do more. And so, I'll give you a few examples of things that we've done. We were losing key people at the 10- to 15-year mark. We formed up a retention unit. They came forward with a set of recommendations, and people wanted greater transparency about their career trajectory. They want a greater incentive structure about, "If I go take a hard assignment, how would that actually serve my career interests?"
So we have actually done a lot on retention. We have done a lot on building out the Foreign Service incentive structure so that people know if that hard assignment is good for them and why they should go do that. We've done a lot on civil service mobility. Our civil servants wanted to go off to embassies. They wanted to take new jobs, and we've now made that possible. People wanted more training opportunities. Colin Powell, 23 years ago, said, "Just like the U.S. military, the State Department should have a training float, where several hundred people are actually pulled out of their regular rotations and go into a yearlong training."
We now have over 350 people in a training float, thanks to the secretary's modernization agenda. And people ask, "Well, if you have a staffing shortage, how can you pull people out and put them on yearlong training assignments?" We can't choose. We've got to be able to send mid-career and senior people to training, and a lot of those one-year training assignments are in those six critical mission areas we talked about.
So they may come do a fellowship at Belfer or at Stanford, or at the private industry, or Capitol Hill, or internationally somewhere, but we're also trying to tie it to cybersecurity, climate, those other areas that I mentioned. So we have a training float. I mentioned our locally employed staff. It is our biggest part of our workforce, 52,000 people. We were dropping desperately behind on their pay and compensation. We have a whole new effort on compensation and benefits and training for locally employed staff.
Diversity, equity, inclusion. We have the most diverse workforce in our history, which is great. We can do better, but diversity on all fronts, all 50 states. We are the second-largest number of veterans, our percentage of veterans serving at the State Department, only second to the Defense Department. So we really believe in this. And also, I'll just say finally on how we recruit and bring people in.
There was an image of the State Department that we were too narrowly focused on certain elite schools and certain elite populations, and this was not a profession that was available to people across the country, and we have definitely tried to shake that up. So for the first time ever, we have paid internships. Right? You think a small thing like that, but so many of those interns now come on to serve as full-time members of the State Department.
We have changed how you take the Foreign Service exam. The test itself is now not a bar for entry into the department if you don't do well enough. And if you make it to the oral exam, lo and behold, you can use technology, and you can do that part of the exam online. Small changes like that. You would be amazed at how much that has increased our reach to populations across the country that would have never thought about serving in the Department of State. So the workforce reforms have been huge. They're important.
Finally, and I'll be really quick so I can get to your questions, on technology and risk. I will say, I never thought I could come to an event like this and say the State Department is leading on technology in the federal government, because if I think back to Colin Powell's modernization speech 23 years ago, where he called for every member of the department to have an internet connection on their desk, that's how far behind we were.
We were one of the first, if not the first, federal agency to have a enterprise-wide strategy on artificial intelligence. We have a chatbot at State, a kind of tool that people can use to test AI tools and how they do their work. We have a new team of data scientists that are using our massive amounts of data to help us make more informed decisions. We borrowed from one of your top people from the Defense Department, Kelly Fletcher, who is now our chief information officer, who has instituted basic changes to make people's lives easier in how we use technology.
And on risk, we are actually trying to lean in, and I'll give you one example, and we are building more flexible embassies and consulates in places that matter. So we've opened five new facilities across the South Pacific and Indo-Pacific. When you go and look at them, they are not kind of traditional embassies, but they are flexible posts where we have people, because we think it's better to show up and engage with the public, and that's what our workforce wants.
So we're trying to be responsible, adopt reasonable amounts of risk, and lean in. And so, that's what the secretary talked about in great detail. You can find his speech on the State website, where he laid out this effort in a very comprehensive speech. I will say, this three-year modernization effort is one of the most comprehensive reforms of the State Department that we've ever had, and I think the impact will be lasting in that critical mission category, in our workforce reforms, and with technology and risk.
And I think the real beneficiary will not only be our workforce and our international partners, but it'll be the American people, because I think we will be able to be more responsive to their needs at the end of the day. I will stop there. Thank you.
Eric Rosenbach:
It's all such great stuff, Rich, and so many accomplishments already since you've been there in particular, which I think has only been two years, right? Not even?
Deputy Secretary Richard R. Verma:
Right. Less, less. Yeah.
Eric Rosenbach:
Less than two years. Yeah. So congratulations on that. I was just going to ask about three things, I think, quickly, and then we'll get to the studio audience. And I'll give an advance note to those of you who are in the audience. If you post your question there in the Q&A, I will be able to see them, and then I will read them out so that Deputy Secretary Verma can take a shot at them.
Rich, the first thing I did want to ask you about, because I've kind of been a cyber guy, is about the cyber bureau. As you mentioned, Nate Fick is there, who has literally the perfect background for that job, between being in the private sector, some time in the military as well, which I think is important to be able to push back on DoD, quite frankly, if you're in the State Department.
And it just seems like he's making a lot of progress in advancing that mission, also in a pretty short period of time. Could just talk to us a little bit about that, and how do you stand up the bureau like that, from nothing to an operational, effective organization?
Deputy Secretary Richard R. Verma:
Yeah. Thank you. And we were lucky to attract Nate and the team members. But I will say, in this area, there has been so much interest. And again, it's not as if the State Department was not working on cybersecurity and personal data protection and, again, cryptocurrency and other issues around the world that we are facing. It's just we weren't doing it in a consolidated, coordinated way with one or two leaders who could help guide the way forward.
So we had a lot of interest, actually, across the department once we announced the formation of a bureau. And you're right. You've got to have a concept for it. You've got to find the funding for it. You've got to get the personnel in, and then you have to build it over time. And I've been able to travel with Nate and participate in a number of the dialogues, and I think about the work that this bureau is doing. It is really about building the architecture internationally to develop the norms and protocols and guidelines in a space that is still very much a free-for-all and very much dependent on which jurisdiction you're in.
If you just look at personal data privacy, you can go from California to New York, to Europe, to India, to Singapore. Take your pick. You have a different regime in each place. Some degree of harmonization is required there. If you look at artificial intelligence, and again, what a powerful tool this is, both for good and for bad. We need to be out there aggressively, with our partners, developing the protocols, the protection of human rights, the protection of democracy, and they've been out there aggressively doing that.
If you look at technology ecosystems and how you go from 5G to 6G and how you do it in a safe, secure way with trusted vendors, not necessarily American vendors, but trusted vendors, our cyber team has done a lot of that. That's on the offensive side, but then also a lot of defensive work, right? Helping us guard against the risks that are coming in. This is one of the most attacked institutions in the world. And so, they've been also helping us understand the threat ecosystem, which, unfortunately, is very real and present. So we're at the beginning of this, and I'm really proud of the work that they've done so far.
Eric Rosenbach:
Okay. Great. So I was just in the State Department yesterday, coincidentally. Deputy Secretary Verma was grinding away, so I wasn't going to distract him since I get to see him today. But I'm just always so impressed with the talent at the State Department and how smart and capable the people are. We, in the conversations I was having, it's on the International Security Advisory Board, some of those were about AI, and I just wanted to compliment you again for what I think is absolutely the truth in being the leader in government for innovating on AI and actually getting AI-based applications up that are working and operational at State.
When I was at the Department of Defense, we tried to do some of that and had the Defense Innovation Unit, which is just a short way of saying that I know how hard it is to innovate in a big, bureaucratic organization, but especially on AI. Give us kind of the secret sauce, Rich. How, for AI in government, where the tech's not great, people are scared about giving access to data, how did you make that happen?
Deputy Secretary Richard R. Verma:
Yeah. Look, again, this comes from having really good people, Matthew Graviss, Kelly Fletcher, so many others. And honestly, the secretary is so interested and committed to this topic. And again, when I think about AI, I think about the international diplomacy part of it that we talked about with our cyber team, but then I think about how to use AI here in the department, again, to make people's jobs better, more efficient.
If you think about the hundreds of lengthy reports we have to write each year, is there a way to use AI to reduce work hours? Absolutely. If you think about, again, making better, increased, more informed decisions based on correlating data here at the department, absolutely, there's a way to do it. And so, this is about a tool that obviously has risks, but we've got to lean in, given that we are being asked to do so much around the world.
Again, if we can use this tool, if we can use advanced data analytics, if we can be smarter and more efficient about our work and use technology, then I think we will be in a much stronger, much more capable place again. So to release that strategy, to have the test, kind of protocol out there for thousands of our employees to use to figure out how they can actually use this tool, it's been really good.
And I think, look, part of what you have to allow for are mistakes. You have to give people the room and the ability to mess up from time to time, and we understand that too, because this has some risk attached to it. I mentioned that Colin Powell speech a couple times now, where he was really lamenting how far we were back on technology. I want to mention one other thing about that speech, because I think it's relevant to how you plan and prepare, and he laid out a pretty comprehensive modernization agenda for the State Department.
What people don't know is that he gave that speech on September 10th, 2001. Less than 24 hours later, the world changed. America was under attack. Our foreign policy changed. Our national security posture changed for the next 15 to 20 years. And so, despite all the planning that you might have... And so, we are also prepared for the unexpected as well. Right?
So as you think about laying out a comprehensive modernization plan and a workforce plan, and critical missions, the world is also a very dynamic and a very dangerous place, and we also have to learn from those past episodes of history and be prepared for that as well. And so, you have to build flex into these modernization agendas and these reform efforts, and maintain your core competencies, and I think we've tried to do that.
Eric Rosenbach:
That's good stuff. I'm just going to ask one last thing, Rich, because I see some really good questions here, including a lot from the State Department itself. So we'll get right to those. But I do want to ask you about the resource question, because so many of the things that you're talking about are really good ideas, but just, quite frankly, don't happen without money. You mentioned the State Department budget is 60 billion, I think you said. Right?
Deputy Secretary Richard R. Verma:
Yeah.
Eric Rosenbach:
And just to put that in comparison so that people understand, that does sound like a lot of money, until you look at the Department of Defense, which is more than $800 billion per year, plus, very often, supplementals that are 10% of that too. It is almost tradition now that the secretary of defense every year says, "We should double, triple, quadruple the State Department budget so that the military spends less time doing things and our diplomats have more resources."
Deputy Secretary Richard R. Verma:
Yeah.
Eric Rosenbach:
I'm waiting for the first secretary who will say, "We're going to give the State Department 40 billion from our budget," which would be the one way to fix that. Right, Rich?
Deputy Secretary Richard R. Verma:
It's funny you mentioned that, Eric. We've tried to do that over the years. And I think, I started my career working for the chairman of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, Jack Murtha from Pennsylvania, who actually tried to move money from the Defense bill to the State bill. And for bureaucratic reasons, it was very hard to do.
Secretary Gates also was very committed to try to move money over to the State Department, also very hard to do. And again, I'll just quote Secretary Mattis here, who has a very famous quote that, "If you don't fully fund the State Department, then you better fund more ammunition for me, because that's what I'll need," because the State Department does such a good job in conflict prevention and diplomacy.
Look, you're right. At least in my career over the last 20 to 25 years, every chairman of the Joint Chiefs, every secretary has really pushed for more resources of the Department of State. And again, just to tell you, in my 67 stops at embassies and consulates around the world, the first thing we do is we'll go into a country team meeting in the morning, and people will be sitting around the conference table, much like I'm sitting at today, and they will present from different elements of the U.S. government, from Commerce, from State, DoD.
I often don't know who is from which agency until they start talking. That's how integrated the teams are. It is only in Washington where one person at that table will get a 10% increase in their budget, and everyone else at that table will get a 10% cut in their international affairs budget. It simply ignores the reality of how we operate around the world, with chief of mission authority, with these integrated national security and foreign policy and commercial footprints, oftentimes in very difficult locations.
And yet, you're cutting the agency, either State or AID or others, that actually try to hold this all together, have to do the diplomacy, manage the teams, host the platform for the interagency, and yet there's some sense that we should be doing more with less resources. You mentioned that $60 billion number. It not only dwarfs the size of the DoD budget, it is one half of 1% of the federal budget.
There is a very famous Pew poll which asks the American people about how much we spend on foreign aid. That's how they think about the State Department, and people... The familiar response is, "Oh, 20%, and it's outrageous, 20% of the federal budget." And when you ask them a second question, how much should we spend? They say it should really be closer to 10%. And when they find out it's really 1% or lower, they are actually quite surprised at that.
And I will say, this is where I think we have to do a better job going directly to the American people and reminding them about what we do and why we do it. Again, in my experience, when our diplomats and civil servants go back to their high schools, when they go to their local communities, to a Rotary club, or another community dinner, there are lines out the door for people to come see them and meet them and thank them for the work that they're doing.
And so, I think our communities really, really do value this work. It's just too bad it doesn't translate as well in our resources, and that's both on us and on our friends in Congress. We got to figure out a way to do this better. I have some ideas. I would argue we should submit one national security budget and think about it in a more holistic way, but that's for another webinar at another date.
Eric Rosenbach:
Okay. Thank you so much. I'm going to go to the Q&A now. I could see, Deputy Secretary Verma, the questions here. So I'll read some of those out to you, and then you can answer. The first one, which you just started on, so maybe you can add just another minute or two on this, given your background on the Hill and understanding the politics there, is from Evan Cooper, who says, "Deputy Secretary Verma, thank you for these insightful remarks. Secretary Blinken mentioned in his remarks yesterday at FSI," Good job, Rich. You got people paying attention to the secretary and you, "that more help is needed from Congress to pass budgets on time and fund the priorities of the department. Any thoughts on what type of changes could be made to improve the department's relationship with Congress? How do we get Congress to consistently invest in the diplomatic tool?"
Deputy Secretary Richard R. Verma:
Yeah. Thank you for that. Again, look, I think the relationship is actually good. It can be better, and I think we try to really go out for the newer members and really make sure they understand what we're doing. But maybe I'll give you a few just practical things that do hamper us. So a lot of our budget people here tell us two-thirds of our budget is not available until two-thirds of the way into the fiscal year. So think about that for a second.
We don't get 65% of our resources until we are more than two-thirds of the way into the fiscal year. If you were a business and your bank didn't actually make your funding available until September of each year, what would you do for the first nine months? Right? It is a real problem. So just getting money out the door on time would be a fix.
Secondly, we are a very earmarked body. I think there are some 400 or so earmarks in the body, I think, in the bill. 90% of some of our accounts are already directed by the time we get it. So we don't have huge flexibility. I'd love to see that number come down and give us greater flexibility to use the money how we think it's best used.
Finally, money that's been authorized and appropriated. We still have to go back to the Hill and actually submit notifications, and then we have to wait until the notification is approved. It's a very strange thing that we do. And so, we sit there until the midnight of the end of the fiscal year still trying to clear hundreds of millions of dollars that are being held, even though it's been appropriated. That should not happen. We need to fix that, obviously, and then fixing the top line, I think.
Again, that's on Congress. On us, we do have an obligation to tell our story better. I think we have an obligation to train our workforce better to really deploy to the Hill in a more kind of aggressive and comprehensive way. As a former assistant secretary of state for legislative affairs, I really believe we could do that better. And then we need some champions on the Hill that can help us through difficult budgetary times. So I hope those additional points are helpful.
Eric Rosenbach:
That's great. Yeah. Thank you, Rich. I always tell my students, "Probably the most important skill you can have in D.C. if you want to move policy initiatives is to be a budget ninja, because if you forget about the money, you're going nowhere otherwise." So good lesson there.
Deputy Secretary Richard R. Verma:
I will say just, Eric, one thing, given our collective experience. I also don't love the Defense-State Department comparisons. I think we should draw some lessons from each other, but we're very different institutions. The size is dramatically different. The budget is different. The mission is different. So I also think we should be careful about trying not to become each other. We are distinct. We are unique, and we are very good at complementing each other at what we do.
Eric Rosenbach:
Absolutely.
Deputy Secretary Richard R. Verma:
Maybe I'd frame it that way. Yeah.
Eric Rosenbach:
I totally agree with that. Thank you for emphasizing that. The next question is from Elizabeth St. Clair Spotts, a good Kennedy School student here, also a member of the Deltas. Clair asks, "How do you enact change in an organization with so much bureaucracy? Adding in administration change," change of administration, capital A, "how do you enact change while keeping the spirit of the organization insistent over ever-changing leadership?"
And you have this special skill as a leader of motivating people, setting an amazingly positive, can-do organizational culture. Talk to us a little bit about that, and particularly now, when you're trying to make sure some of these modernization advancements stay part of the organization.
Deputy Secretary Richard R. Verma:
Yeah. Let me mention two things that I think are important that made this effort, I think, unique. This really was employee-driven. In other words, it was bottom-up. It came from our workforce up. It was not directed down. And here's what I mean by that. Yes, the secretary set a vision for what we were looking for, but then this went to working groups across the department, not just here in Washington, but globally, and those working groups were actually charged with coming back with specific sets of recommendations on how to move forward.
Now, we needed our experts in budget and technology and personnel to help us take an idea to implementation. So I think that employee-centric view, and then we informed it with a lot of expert outside opinions. Our friends from Belfer had a great report. Our friends from ASU had a great report, Truman. I could go on and on through the number of outside folks that also helped us. So that employee being informed by experts.
And third, I would say, we actually posted results for people to see as to what we were able to do and what we were not able to do. So you could go to a SharePoint site. You could see how we were doing in each of these pathways, and people could measure for themselves whether this was real or not. Some of it was quite measurable.
I mentioned our locally employed staff compensation issues. We actually set aside $100 million to get back to a better baseline on locally employed staff. We changed how we pay people, a mandatory 2% increase every year. Some posts were going 14 years without an increase, and we put everyone in the 75th percentile in terms of how we benchmark. So that is very measurable.
And I remember saying to the secretary about a year ago, I was like, "If you look at the results, this modernization agenda is not BS. This is real." And he's like, "Well, maybe we should have a session that says Modernization: It's Not BS," because there are real results posted. And I think then, finally, we communicated as regular as possible about what we were doing, what we were not doing, and got a ton of feedback.
And again, what we have done is not perfect. It is not an A+, but what we have done is good, and we can do more. And the next administration, I hope, will pick up where we left off, add additional elements, and continue on with their own blueprint based on employee feedback.
Eric Rosenbach:
Okay. Good stuff. Rich, when you're talking about having the best possible workforce you can, you mentioned an emphasis on diversity and trying to retain the best possible people you can. There's a question here from Rachel Friesecke, who says, "Hello, Deputy Secretary Verma. I've attended the OSCE HDIM meeting since 2018. I'm concerned that women's rights within the State Department, and through foreign policy, is not being addressed as thoroughly as need be, both through personal security and such as updating the women's peace and security agenda."
So I know, Rich, you don't have the policy lead for women's security policy issues. You're, of course, welcome to comment on that if you want. But could you talk about the challenge of protecting State Department employees who are in dangerous places and making sure that they feel safe and secure so that they want to stay as part of the team? And if you could just talk more generally about some of the women's issues that you see and gender issues, I think that'd be fantastic too.
Deputy Secretary Richard R. Verma:
Yeah. Look, I work with our special envoy on women's issues regularly, who does an amazing job. Let me try to take this from the workforce perspective and then the foreign policy perspective. So on the workforce perspective, I will say the good news is on our recruiting. I would say we have pretty good balance, gender balance at least, of the folks coming in.
And through that first 10 years, we see, again, that balance, and that is a change from prior decades of the State Department life. Where we have to do better is in that 10- to 20-year period with promotions and with retention. And what we were hearing, especially from senior women and senior diverse women, was that they didn't have a good sense of where their career was taking them. They didn't feel like their voice was being heard equally. They didn't feel like there was accountability for bad leaders, frankly.
And so, we've tried to address, frankly, all of those concerns through the retention effort, through standing up greater accountability mechanisms, greater management training. So we're working on all of that. We also understand it's a competitive economy, and we're going to lose some folks. So it's not only a matter of recruiting, it is a matter of retaining and promoting.
And especially then in our senior, our chiefs of mission, our deputy chiefs of mission, we want more women in more senior leadership positions, and the secretary, president are committed to that. That's on the internal piece. On the external piece, absolutely. I mean, look, the threat to women and girls in particular in certain parts of the world, and I'll just go back to a place, Eric, you know well, Afghanistan.
It is the one place in the world where women above the sixth grade cannot go to school. It is, frankly, an abomination, and it has a devastating impact on women and girls. I see in the question a reference to Ukraine and what's happening to civilians and, frankly, the kidnapping of children, being taken into Russian detention facilities. So, again, a real impact on civilian populations, but on women and women's safety in particular.
I mentioned climate change. We forget sometimes the impact just of climate change on women and women's livelihoods as well. And so, look, this is a huge focus of our department. It is a huge focus of the secretary. You can't just kind of not be super focused on it. You have to call out this particular issue set of what's happening to girls, what's happening to women across the world in particular, and this will continue to be a top priority, I know, of this administration going forward.
Eric Rosenbach:
Great. Thank you, Rich. This is a question from Alexandra, who is an HKS alum, or a Harvard Medical School alum and had studied at HKS too, says, "Deputy Secretary Rich Verma, how could the role of Foreign Service medical officers, FSMOs, be expanded to enhance our global pandemic response and international collaboration? And thank you so much for this webinar."
Deputy Secretary Richard R. Verma:
Yeah. I love that question. And again, let me, again, try to take a step back a little bit and look at how we did on our pandemic response, and especially the international part of our pandemic response. I think if you were to grade how the international community did, you would not pass Professor Rosenbach's class, let's say.
We had different rules across the world on testing. We had different rules on travel. We had different rules on making personal protective gear available. We had different rules on who could go into the workplace, different rules on vaccine availability. It was, in a way, a complete breakdown of the international system. Now, we got it together, and I really appreciate President Biden's leadership on this, and Secretary Blinken and others working intensively with our partners to try to get back on track.
But we have also been doubling down on what happens when the next pandemic strikes, and I think we can't be naive to say this is a one-and-done issue. We want to be ready. And so, we are currently negotiating with our international partners on the Pandemic Accord. We are raising money for a pandemic fund so that resources are available. We are negotiating protocols about what happens when a pandemic is declared.
And so, those norms and those rules have to be developed and agreed to, and we're working aggressively on that, on the diplomacy. But absolutely, we also need the medical expertise. I'd encourage the person who asked the question, if she hasn't been in touch directly with our Global Health Bureau, to see if there's a role that she might play in the future, either with us or in civil society, or in someone else who's working on pandemic response. We need all the help we can get and all the experts who are willing to serve in this area.
Eric Rosenbach:
All right. Alexandra, you heard it right there. Okay. Rich, this will be the last question, and it's a perfect one to kind of set you up to bring it all to a glorious close here since we have four minutes left. This is from Sarrah Qureshi here at the school. "In this time of global challenges, what do you see as America's role being in today's world, and how has the modernization agenda contributed to strengthening American leadership?"
Deputy Secretary Richard R. Verma:
Thank you. That actually is a great way to kind of perhaps conclude this. When we talk about an inflection point, I mentioned some of the things happening in the world. I also think about what would happen in the world without U.S. leadership and without U.S. values and without the United States showing up, not because we are somehow better or smarter, but the world really does count on us to show up, counts on us to help bring people together, wants to hear our voice on critical issues, and we've got to be present.
Now, it also means working with partners and alliances and upcoming nations, again, that want to have a greater say and a greater role in international affairs. We should be a part of that. We can't turn our back from certain parts of the world, certain issues that are just too difficult. And so, being present, taking a leadership role. So how do you do that?
You do that through the institution that, since the founding of the Republic, has been front and center for the United States globally, and that's empowering the department. And that's what this modernization agenda was really all about. It was making sure we had the tools to be forward-leaning, to be forward-deployed, to tackle some of those issues, draw those straight lines back to the American people, and explain what we're doing.
Now, I've mentioned serving the American people several times. And when I go home, again, to my home in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, I can talk about what we're doing to strengthen supply chains. I can talk about what we're doing to open up international markets and how that benefits them. I can talk about what we're doing on getting a passport through online passport reform easier, and that makes sense to them, and what we're doing to increase the number of foreign students and international visitors to the economy. All of that makes sense.
There are some things that we do that maybe I can't draw a straight line back to my community in Western Pennsylvania. The fact that we are supporting, taking care of refugees in Sudan or the Rohingya in Bangladesh, I'm not often able to draw a straight line back. But you know what I know and love about the American people is they are proud we are doing that mission too.
And so, they know what's right. They have a very good instinct and good feel for where this department should be and how we should be positioned. And so, I trust them and their instincts too. And when I think about the challenges in the world and what this modernization agenda has been about preparing us to do, I feel like we're better equipped today than where we were three-and-a-half years ago to address a lot of those issues.
Eric Rosenbach:
That's great, Rich. Thank you for bringing it all together, putting a little bow on it. Thank you for making time to help all the people on the webinar learn. Thank you for pushing the modernization agenda forward and making it all happen. And mostly, just thank you for your service. You've done so much for the country, and I mean it when I say that Rich Verma is a national treasure. So we're just very lucky to have you there, and wish you all the best with everything you're working on.
Deputy Secretary Richard R. Verma:
Eric, thank you so much. I wish I was a student in your class, because, right back at you, I think you're a great role model and great teacher, and a really good friend. And so, I've been lucky to have this partnership and friendship with you over so many years. And maybe I would just offer, I know we didn't get to a number of other questions in the chat. Maybe I'll ask my team to kind of cut and paste them into a document for me, and then we'll send you responses back, if that's okay.
Eric Rosenbach:
That sounds great. Yup. Absolutely. Thank you again, Rich. Thank you so much to Rich's team and the team here at Belfer for making it all happen, and for y'all for showing up.
Deputy Secretary Richard R. Verma:
Oh, and Eric, sorry, I didn't plug our Belfer Center report, which-
Eric Rosenbach:
That's the report. Exactly.
Deputy Secretary Richard R. Verma:
... is coming out today. Thank you.
Eric Rosenbach:
Yes.
Deputy Secretary Richard R. Verma:
And so, this goes into more detail as to what we talked about, and thank you to you and to Belfer for letting us put this report out. We greatly appreciate it.
Eric Rosenbach:
Oh, yeah. Our pleasure. So everyone who's on the audience, we will push that out. You'll be able to find a Belfer web page. We're going to push it out through LinkedIn too, try to get everyone the opportunity to see all the good work that's been done there.
Deputy Secretary Richard R. Verma:
Great.
Eric Rosenbach:
Okay. Thank you so much, Rich.
Deputy Secretary Richard R. Verma:
Okay. Thanks, Eric.
Eric Rosenbach:
See you, everyone.
Deputy Secretary Richard R. Verma:
Okay. Take care.
Eric Rosenbach:
Bye.
