American Foreign Policy Decision-Making at the Agency Level: The Department of State as Exemplar?
By: Jeff Jager | November 13, 2023
Image produced using Freepik
As the lead US foreign policy agency, the Department of State plays a critical role in foreign policy decision-making. Much has been written about the formal and informal processes used by various presidents to manage this process via the National Security Council (NSC). Still, gaps exist in the literature on agency-level processes, particularly about State.
In general terms, State develops and coordinates foreign policy via a mechanism that tends not to lead to optimal policies. This mechanism – known internally as the “clearance process” – involves internal coordination to determine State’s position on a given topic, as well as external coordination with other executive branch agencies. It relies on adversarial consensus-building via a document editing and approval process, sometimes supported by meetings or phone calls.
Three significant challenges arise from this mechanism. First, adversarial consensus-building can produce sub-optimal results despite research suggesting collaborative decision-making can yield superior outcomes. Second, State’s bureaucratic organization, centered on regional and functional bureaus, often creates tension instead of synergy, although processes exist to manage issues when bureaus cannot reach consensus. Third, the mechanism facilitates an aversion to the use of quantitative data, though State is pursuing efforts to address this issue.
The National Security Council
To understand Department of State decision-making, one must first understand the NSC, which has taken on outsized importance in recent decades.
Presidents have structured their foreign policy decision-making on a hierarchical system of meetings at the NSC since the passage of the National Security Act of 1947, and the process has been regularized since 1988 (Auerswald 2017, 48). At the highest level, the statutory NSC manages foreign policy. This group is composed of the President, Vice President, and the Secretaries of State, Defense, and, since 2007, Energy, although presidents often invite other non-statutory members to NSC meetings. Ideally, lower-level meetings achieve consensus on issues, such that relatively few matters reach the level of the NSC for presidential decision (Whittaker et al. 2008, 119). The Principals Committee (PC), which meets at the level of cabinet secretaries, is the NSC forum directly below the NSC. The PC strives to establish consensus on matters that reach its level, those on which lower-level committees could not achieve consensus.
Below the PC is the Deputies Committee (DC), composed of deputy secretaries, and below that are Policy Coordination Committees (PCCs), sometimes called Interagency Policy Committees (IPCs); each administration uses a different name for these committees. PCCs/IPCs, from a White House perspective, are “the main day-to-day fora for interagency coordination of national security policies” (Trump 2017). Each administration has had a different mix of regional and functional PCCs/IPCs, which have broadly included the major world geographic regions and a wide array of cross-cutting issues, for example, arms control and counter-terrorism (Biden 2021; Whittaker et al. 2008,103-104; Trump 2017). With agency secretaries attending NSC and PC meetings, deputy secretaries attending DC meetings, and under or assistant secretaries attending PCCs/IPCs, mostly a president’s political appointees comprise the group in which consensus is achieved. While political appointees can often defend the positions of their agencies, the fact that they owe their position directly to the president seems likely to increase their willingness to join consensus, particularly for presidential initiatives.
Much interagency coordination also occurs below PCCs/IPCs. Sub-PCC/IPC meetings are often attended by the NSC staff responsible for a given issue to prepare for upcoming PCCs/IPCs. Many regional and functional issue interagency working groups, often hosted by State, exist to manage the day-to-day conduct of national security and foreign policy. The office responsible for the given topic will convene office-level interagency counterparts routinely to begin the consensus-building that the higher-level meetings strive to achieve. For example, offices within State’s arms control bureau host interagency policy working groups, sometimes referred to as backstopping meetings, every month to coordinate issues. Participants in these lower-level meetings are generally not political appointees but civil servants, foreign service officers, and military members with deep expertise in their portfolios.
From meetings of the statutory NSC down through lower-level policy coordination meetings, representatives of the participating executive branch agencies are virtually always charged to defend the position of their home agency. This produces a “system (that) is adversarial, and the results are generally better if each agency weighs in with its equities, interests, and red lines” (Skocz 2008, 389). If these representatives cannot achieve consensus on a given issue, they elevate it to the next-highest meeting, up to the statutory NSC, for a presidential decision.
Figure 1. The NSC Hierarchy
The Policy Process at State
How this process occurs at State is instructive, given that State is “the lead foreign affairs agency” and “has the primary role in…(l)eading interagency coordination in developing and implementing foreign policy” (Whittaker et al. 2008, 137). Ambassador (retired) Marc Grossman has derided how State manages policy, arguing that the clearance process represents a “legacy habit, (in which) hundreds of people at State write ‘talking points’ that move up the system as if the senior leadership of the department can solve foreign policy problems by reciting these lines in public or to foreign leaders” (2017, 85). Grossman is correct to highlight this legacy process, as it remains the primary method State uses to coordinate policy development and implementation, both internally and in coordination with other executive branch entities.
The Policy Coordination Process
State uses the clearance process mechanism to coordinate the Department’s position on policy issues, for example, to prepare senior leaders for NSC meetings, such as for the Deputy Secretary to participate in a DC meeting on an arms control issue. This mechanism is initiated when State receives an invitation from the NSC to attend a DC meeting, which can be a routinely scheduled meeting or a specially-called one; both cases generally provide a relatively short timeline between receipt of the invitation and the meeting date. The task of drafting the various documents required for a DC meeting generally flows down from State’s Executive Secretariat to the relevant under-secretariat, bureau, office, and finally to the office lead for the DC meeting topic.
In an arms control example, the Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security receives the task from the Executive Secretariat and passes it to the Bureau of Arms Control, Verification and Compliance (AVC), which passes it to the AVC office responsible for the issue (see Figure 2). The bureaucrats in the given AVC office will draft the required documents and then begin coordinating with the other AVC offices, senior advisors, deputy secretaries, and the assistant secretary. Next, AVC will coordinate the documents with other State stakeholders. Because AVC is a functional bureau, this will likely include one or more regional bureaus and a plethora of functional bureaus and their subordinate offices, including, for example, legal and policy planning. For complicated, cross-cutting issues, the number of entities coordinating on each document can reach several dozen or more (see Figure 3). Participants will generally provide comments and edits and provide their approval, or “clearance” in State lingo, generally at the specialist, office, and deputy assistant secretary level. Clearance is typically conditional on accepting edits to the original document that defend or advance each office’s interests and expertise.
This clearance process generally occurs over email via electronic documents using tracked changes. By the time the original drafts have been cleared and are ready for submission back up through the chain to the Executive Secretariat, hundreds, if not thousands, of edits and comments will have been made and adjudicated. Often, phone calls and meetings will be required to address the resulting conflict about the final document. If State entities cannot reach a consensus, a “split memo” option exists, in which bureaus submit their preferred option, and the Secretary decides between them. By the time of the DC meeting, State bureaucrats will have sent a long trail of emails and held numerous meetings and phone calls. Also, prior to a DC meeting, the process described above will have occurred for PCCs, sub-PCCs/IPCs, and interagency working groups, involving an immense amount of preparation via document drafting and clearing.
State uses the same mechanism to coordinate among State entities and their non-State interagency counterparts for more normal or ordinary issues. Continuing the arms control example, the US Mission to the 57-member Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) requires frequent interagency coordination to manage, among other things, conventional arms control under the auspices of the Vienna Document (VD). The OSCE Forum for Security Co-operation (FSC) oversees VD activities and convenes a series of weekly and monthly meetings in doing so. A US representative will give a statement to the convened FSC during each meeting. Based on the topic under consideration, a given office at State will draft the statement and circulate it for clearance among State stakeholders, using the process described above, and then seek clearance from interagency partners. Often, such documents are cleared at a lower level, generally up to the deputy assistant secretary level of the stakeholder bureaus, or perhaps at one level below that, which is generally the office or directorate director level, without the involvement of the Executive Secretariat or the Under Secretariat.
For this arms control example, these include, at a minimum, AVC, the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs, and the Office of the Legal Advisor. Depending on the topic, clearance can also include any number of other bureaus and bureau-level equivalents. Often, multiple offices from within the same bureau may want to clear. Generally, State will seek non-State clearances once it achieves a State-cleared statement. For FSC statements, non-State clearances will generally include the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Staff, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, the NSC, and others, depending on the given topic, and often several offices within each of these entities will provide clearance. Often, many more people review, edit, and comment on documents cleared with interagency partners than on documents only cleared internally at State.
This process occurs for virtually every meeting, public statement, internal memorandum, and all other similar activities, for State’s approximately 51 bureau-level entities and the more than 250 US embassies and consulates. Imagine if each of these more than 300 entities cleared just ten products per week using the process described above: This would equate to more than 10,000 clearance processes per month, representing a significant amount of policy coordination activity, and generally each office at State is working on many clearance processes simultaneously.
Figure 2. Visualizing the State Department clearance process with an arms control issue example
Figure 3. Sample clearance page for the above arms control example. A single document may require dozens of clearances across the department.
This process has both advantages and disadvantages:
Process Advantages
The text-based, laborious mechanism described above offers substantial benefits that critics such as Grossman overlook or de-emphasize. To the chagrin of those who view State as the dominant US foreign policy agency, State simply “does not dictate foreign policy for the US Government” (Whittaker et al. 2008, 138). Instead, the president makes critical foreign policy decisions, including on those issues on which the NSC-led process fails to produce consensus. This means that State has strong incentives to coordinate and collaborate with other executive branch entities via the mechanism described above. Coordinative and collaborative approaches help reduce the risk of “duplication,” “contradiction,” and “displacement” (Peters 2018, 3-4) and ensure that policy development remains responsive to evolving situations and both horizontal and vertical policy integration.
The clearance process recognizes the cross-cutting nature of most policy matters; one is hard-pressed to identify a single foreign policy issue wholly managed by a single US government entity. The inclusivity helps ensure that the many experts in the given topic employed by the US government have an opportunity to apply their knowledge to the problem at hand. As those responsible for creating the policy are often those responsible for implementation, these inclusive mechanisms can translate to higher levels of successful policy integration (Peters 2018, 3-4; Skocz 2008, 379-380). In diplomacy, words matter, and the many (many!) sets of eyes under which a given document or statement passes before it is presented in an NSC meeting, public or semi-public form, on the internet, or at an international organization—and the iterative nature of the mechanism—helps to facilitate policy coherence and consistency.
Process Disadvantages
At the same time, however, this mechanism is hampered by multiple issues. These include:
Suboptimal time management that impedes substantive analysis;
Prioritization of rapid clearance acquisition over quality;
Exacerbation of policy turf battles;
Reinforcement of qualitative evidence status quo;
Enhancement of cognitive biases; and,
Diminution of State’s position in the interagency.
Such high levels of coordination often occur under tight deadlines; it is not uncommon for the person responsible for delivering the final version of the cleared statement or document in a meeting or in some other forum to receive it with just minutes to spare before delivery is required. These tight timelines can make for rushed policy development, even for high-level strategic issues for which deliberate, clear-headed analysis is preferable; in essence, the process becomes the policy, subordinating policy development to a policy clearance process. They also involve an immense amount of work and consume a concomitant amount of time. Furthermore, making foreign policy by consensus decision-making runs the risk of producing a “lowest common denominator” policy and can result in “very little progress in actually solving the problem” (Peters 2018, 6). Rushed decision-making processes invite damaging cognitive biases such as the availability bias, in which one will overestimate how likely something is to occur based on how easy it is to remember the same thing happening previously (Kahneman 2011).
The clearance process invites a bevy of other challenges, prominently including turf wars (Peters 2018, 4-5), such as the aforementioned conflict between regional and functional bureaus at State. These conflicts have been described as “significant impediment(s) to collaboration” (Grossman 2017, 86). The effectiveness of the policy process suffers when offices focus on what is best for their office rather than the policy most likely to achieve US objectives.
Further, the perceived ineffectiveness of the formal process often leads to informal processes, rendering the formal process redundant or, worse, irrelevant. As Auerswald shows, much executive branch decision-making is conducted by small groups of elites (2017, 36) convened by the president, relegating formal processes to performative rather than actual policy-making. The effect is to diminish the State Department’s authority in a decision-making process dominated by more well-resourced agencies such as the Department of Defense.
Finally, the dearth of quantitative data in decision-making at State hampers the policy development process, a product of both State culture and the policymaking-by-document-clearance process described above. Grossman notes that State culture views diplomacy as more of an art than a science (2017, 87), and while State employs many highly educated people, the mechanism described above generally does not include any quantitative analysis. Instead, State depends on a qualitative approach, or, worse, shoot-from-the-hip policy making. Furthermore, the clearance process time pressures leave little capacity to develop and incorporate new tools and skills. While both qualitative and quantitative approaches can reflect equally rigorous methods, the institutional preference for purely qualitative analysis generally means that, even for issues well suited to quantitative analysis, such analysis is omitted. Critics have argued that State foreign policy decision-making is “ad hoc and subjective” (Spokojny 2023). The qualitative nature of State decision-making is demonstrated by the fact that, currently, only seven of the approximately 51 bureau-level State entities employ a chief data officer (“Bureau Chief Data Officer” 2023; “Department of State Organizational Chart” 2022). Anecdotally, the author, in fifteen years of service in US diplomacy, never once witnessed a decision-making process that relied on, much less centralized, the use of quantitative data.
Possible Ways Forward
State is taking steps to address some of these issues. For example, it has established a new Center for Analytics (CfA) in the Management bureau as “the Department’s enterprise data management and analytics capability empowering data informed diplomacy,” which houses the Department’s first Chief Data Officer (Center for Analytics 2023). State has hired (and is hiring more) additional chief data officers to complement existing offices like the Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization’s Office of Data Analytics to promote “evidence-based and data-driven processes to enhance policy formulation and execution” (“Data Analytics” 2018). This clearly responds to calls for “more science and less art” (Spokojny 2023) and is a welcome development.
Separately, a COVID-era trend in using collaborative drafting and editing tools, such as tracked-changes in shared Word or Google documents, has, in some instances, helped reduce the burdens of the bureaucratic processes described above. State could institutionalize the use of collaborative tools for at least its internal processes at all levels of classification on all systems.
Beyond these steps, State must invest more analytical time and power into important policy decisions rather than simply relying on consensus. One step could be to enhance the data literacy of its workforce and the use of decision-making based on quantitative data by expanding its data training offerings. Despite State’s recent attention to data-driven processes in policy-making, its in-house training facility, the Foreign Service Institute (FSI), which teaches hundreds of courses, offers little on data literacy. No decision-making or analytical training is provided to new Foreign or Civil Service Officers. At least one course exists for higher-level managers: PS313: Data Literacy for Managers, provides a basic overview of data-based decision-making and could be made a requirement for State employees in policy-making management or supervisory roles. FSI offers a handful of other courses that are more-or-less tangentially related to the topic at hand including PT144: Mitigating Unconscious Bias; PT331: Navigating the Interagency; PS850: Beginning Excel; PS851: Intermediate Excel; PA240: Measuring Performance; PA890: Principles of Management; and PT203: Washington Tradecraft, for example (“Training at the Foreign Service Institute,” 2022). FSI lacks data literacy courses for non-managers and senior leaders. It should add such courses as part of the overall push to improve foreign policy decision-making.
State should also increase the capacity and authority of its analytical offices. Both CfA and CSO’s Advanced Analytics office typically play a marginal role in the policy process, often relegated to little more than a gut check on policymaker’s existing intuitions. Their analysis is too easily ignored when it conflicts with a policymaker’s intuition.
To its credit, State’s Enterprise Data Strategy (EDS) (2021) establishes a framework for transforming how State uses data in decision-making, inclusive of expanding data literacy and data-based decision-making, and, according to biannual progress reports, State has made significant progress towards accomplishing EDS’ goals and objectives (Graviss 2023).
Figure 4. US Department of State Enterprise Data Strategy
Conclusion
Although State is a central actor in US foreign policy decision-making, the fact remains that State does not dictate these processes and therefore must coordinate and collaborate with other entities in the national security enterprise. To do so, State leverages a policy coordination mechanism that relies mainly on adversarial consensus-building via an archaic document clearance process that can prioritize consensus over ideal policy outcomes, create conflict among State entities and between State and other executive branch entities instead of coordination and collaboration, and prioritize ad hoc, qualitative processes over formal, data-based decision-making. While State has taken initiatives to address some of these challenges, the overall NSC-led system for managing foreign policy and State’s deeply embedded culture and management practices suggest this mechanism, and its benefits and challenges, will endure.
Jeff Jager, a retired U.S. Army FAO, served multiple FAO tours on the USEUCOM-CENTCOM seam, including as an attaché in Cyprus, a U.S. Army TRADOC LNO in Turkey, and a Foreign Military Sales Officer and ODC Chief in Lebanon. He also served as a military advisor at the Department of State. He is currently a Ph.D. student in Salve Regina University’s international relations program.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of Defense or the U.S. Government. The appearance of external hyperlinks does not constitute endorsement by the United States Department of Defense (DoD) of the linked websites, or the information, products, or services contained therein. The DoD does not exercise editorial, security, or other control over the information you may find at these locations. Review of this material by DOPSR does not imply Department of Defense endorsement of factual accuracy or opinion.
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