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WASHINGTON -- The U.S. State Department has begun examining ways to strengthen its arms control bureaus in order to better implement President Barack Obama's nonproliferation agenda, according to Washington's top diplomat (see GSN, March 11).
(Mar. 17) -
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, shown yesterday, last month said the State Department would restructure its arms control offices to help advance President Barack Obama's nonproliferation goals (Mandel Ngan/Getty Images).
Foggy Bottom is "undertaking a focused reorganization of the Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation and the Bureau of Verification, Compliance, and Implementation," Secretary of State Hillary Clinton wrote in a Feb. 23 open letter to department staff and management.
"The goals of this reorganization are to realign the missions of the VCI and ISN bureaus to better leverage their support for key national security objectives and to create dedicated organizational advocates for (1) arms control and verification and compliance, and (2) nonproliferation," according to Clinton.
The Verification, Compliance and Implementation Bureau is responsible for providing policy oversight and resources for all matters relating to the certification of other countries' compliance or noncompliance with international arms control, nonproliferation and disarmament agreements.
The agency is headed by Assistant Secretary of State Rose Gottemoeller, the lead U.S. negotiator in the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty follow-on talks taking place in Geneva (see related GSN story, today). Its duties include preparing reports on proliferation activities by Iran, North Korea and Syria and supporting intelligence activities regarding WMD programs in other nations.
The International Security and Nonproliferation Bureau is charged with managing a broad range of diplomatic efforts designed to promote international consensus about the threat posed by the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
The division has led efforts to negotiate new arms control agreements, such as the 2002 Moscow Treaty which required the United States and Russia to each limit their nuclear arsenals to between 1,700 and 2,200 operationally deployed strategic warheads by 2012.
Those offices -- along with the Political-Military Affairs Bureau, which would be left unchanged by the new process -- make up the State Department's Arms Control and International Security Bureau, and are commonly referred to as the "T" bureaus or family. The department has about 600 employees in the three divisions.
The restructuring "will make arms control the centerpiece of the newly named Bureau of Arms Control, Verification and Compliance and concentrate the focus of the Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation on the proliferation challenges we face," Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Ellen Tauscher, who oversees the three divisions, wrote in a Feb. 24 entry on the department's blog .
The bureaus were reshuffled in 2005 after a review by the department's inspector general found that their organizational structure did not meet existing needs and was marked by unclear lines of authority and irregular workloads. The review also concluded that the three bureaus had too many managers, resulting in poor promotion prospects for staffers and difficulty attracting foreign service officers.
That reorganization merged the previously distinct Arms Control and Nonproliferation bureaus into the new International Security and Nonproliferation Bureau and expanded the functions of the existing Verification and Compliance Bureau, renaming it the Verification, Compliance and Implementation Bureau.
The moves were touted as a streamlining measure that would refocus the bureaus on new proliferation threats -- including actions by nonstate actors -- rather than the previous threat of nuclear confrontation with the former Soviet Union.
However, a 2009 Government Accountability Office report concluded that Foggy Bottom was never able to fully demonstrate that the alterations produced any benefits. That analysis also found the reorganization appeared to have been conducted in an "unsystematic fashion," with little involvement from staff or established strategic goals.
"This targeted reorganization is not just bureaucratic reshuffling" and will address the management goals recommended in the accountability office report, Tauscher wrote last month.
Those suggestions included having Clinton "formally delineate" the roles and responsibilities of each bureau in the Foreign Affairs Manual and modifying that document to direct that the key practices and steps associated with successful organizational mergers are incorporated into subsequent bureau reorganizations.
The new evaluation will take about two months and will receive input from department staff as well as Congress, Tauscher said.
Aside from restoring arms control to a bureau title, the final shape of the reorganization remains unclear. A State Department spokesman did not respond by deadline to questions submitted earlier this week about the restructuring, though he stressed that no final decisions had been made.
News of the possible reorganization prompted Senate Foreign Relations Committee ranking member Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) to send Clinton a letter March 1 voicing concerns about the shake-up.
"To the extent that your proposed reorganization contemplates addition of new missions for the VCI Bureau, I will support only those that do not continue to blur the line between officials who negotiate agreements and those who verify them," the Indiana lawmaker wrote after noting he supported the 2005 restructure. "Otherwise, future treaties could be presented to the Senate on the basis of testimony offered by the same official on both the negotiation and verifiability of such agreements."
He added that there should be a "clear wall of separation" between negotiators and verifiers to insure the credibility of treaties and agreements presented to the Senate.
Lugar also pointed out that the White House has yet to submit a nominee to lead the International Security and Nonproliferation Bureau. The agency is managed by acting Assistant Secretary Vann Van Diepen.
"At present, it is not clear if the administration intends to submit a nominee ... before it takes any action to reorganize the ISN Bureau," the senior lawmaker said.
A spokesman for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee did not respond by deadline to a request for comment submitted yesterday.
The proposed shake-up was greeted with mixed reactions by those familiar with the department's arms control bureaus.
The recent announcement is a "very positive development, one that repairs a considerable amount of the damage that was done during the Bush administration," including the departure of a number of staffers who worked in the arms control divisions, said John Holum, the former head of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency and undersecretary of state for arms control and international security affairs.
The process will restore proliferation concerns within the State Department to an "appropriate level," he told Global Security Newswire yesterday in a telephone interview.
Holum also derided the 2005 bureau reorganization as "incoherent" and for not giving "intelligent attention" the missions of the agencies.
"I feel sorry for the people who work in those bureaus," Christopher Ford, a senior fellow and director for the Center for Technology and Global Security at the Hudson Institute, said this week.
"It's hard to have to do an important job while being reorganized and doubly hard to have to do it so often -- especially since this new effort seems largely to be a political pose, designed to put the words 'arms control' back on some bureau's letterhead," according to Ford, who served as a principal deputy assistant secretary of state during the Bush administration and helped oversee the 2005 reorganization.
"In practice, what happened is that the verification bureau got involved in negotiating strategic agreements in the second term of the Bush administration," Ford told GSN. "Now the Obama people seem to want to codify that informal arrangement of having the verification bureau take the lead."
Ford said he understood Lugar's perspective about the possible reshuffle but added: "All the same, no verification official will give uncleared testimony, so one wouldn't want to overmake that argument: both verifiers and negotiators work for the same president. I'm more concerned about ensuring that verification equities get a proper hearing in internal debates during negotiations."
Holum agreed that "there doesn't have to be a clear line" between verification and compliance.
"Voices can and always will be heard within the interagency process and inevitably there will be strong input by the intelligence community on negotiation stances," he told GSN.
Ford did agree with Lugar's concern that the administration should submit someone to run the international security bureau, saying "getting the personnel right is fundamental. Without good people in place, a great org chart won't save you."
He predicted that there would be internal discontent with any new reorganization similar to that aroused during the 2005 restructuring.