by Lisa Heller
In the halls of the American Foreign Service Association (AFSA)’s Foggy Bottom headquarters, framed excerpts from The Foreign Service Journal stretch back a century. Walk past them in order and you can watch the US Foreign Service reinvent itself: new policy crises, new technology, and—slowly—more women and more people of color joining the white, male officer corps of the early photographs.
Yet one question recurs in those headlines, whether the year is 1925, 1957, or 1974: what should the Foreign Service be? You can’t answer it without first asking what the Service has become—and a thirty-year span, roughly the length of a diplomatic career, is the right unit of measure. AFSA has been asking that question for a century, and from where we sit, the forces that matter most are rarely the ones in the headlines—rather, they are the currents underneath, the ones our members live through one assignment at a time.
Lately, though, the weather over that water has changed. No reader of this journal needs the past year’s wreckage recounted — the dismantled agencies, the mass firings, the silenced union. We will come to that storm. But it made landfall on water that was already moving, and the currents beneath are where the story starts.
Consider an officer who joined in 1996. She is wrapping up her career now, having watched thousands of colleagues come and go and the institution transform around her. Some of the currents that first developed during her first tours are still rippling outward today.
The First Current: Technology
As it has with many other professions, technology has arguably changed the daily work of diplomacy more than any other force of the past three decades. When our officer arrived in 1996, the Internet was a novelty and only a small, but growing, number of employees had email—and reading it meant going into the office. Communications ran on cables, faxes, and late-night calls placed from the embassy. Bid lists arrived as printed cables with no description of the duties or the posts. Cables themselves were composed on typewriters and then Wang computers; our Foreign Service officer crossed her fingers that the cable reader wouldn’t swap a word for some embarrassing cognate.
Thanks to Secretary Powell, the Internet reached State Department desks in the early 2000s. BlackBerrys, then smartphones, took email and cables out of the office; apps and new systems connected employees to Washington and then to one another in ways unimaginable when she typed her first cable. In 2026, she can only begin to imagine what the full impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on the conduct of diplomacy will be.
The day she retires, our officer will read her last cable on her phone.
The Second Current: Societal Norms
Following the civil rights movement of the 1960s and the feminist advances of the 1970s, the landscape of American society was changing, but open discrimination was still a fact of life for many members of the Foreign Service in the 1990s. The LGBTQ+ affinity group, Gays and Lesbians in Foreign Affairs Agencies (GLIFAA), was formed in the early 1990s, but definitive progress on gay rights would still be almost 20 years away. Additionally, women still faced numerous career obstacles: the Palmer lawsuit–a landmark class-action gender equality case brought against the department in 1976–was not settled until 2010.
By the late 2010s and early 2020s, there was a sense that the Department understood the challenges facing minority groups and was willing to address them openly with the creation of the Secretary’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Office and the adoption of fairness policies like standardized bidding questions.
More recently, however, the progress on equity in the workforce has come into question.
In 2025, employee organizations (previously known as affinity groups) were banned from the State Department, while a disproportionate number of women and members of underrepresented groups have been removed from their posts, according to AFSA’s data. What’s more, even the very word “diversity” is banned from official use inside the Department, restraining not only language, but programs and cultural outreach. These developments raise doubts about the Department’s long-term commitment to inclusion.
The Third Current: The Global War on Terror
The rise of terrorism by non-state actors defined much of our officer’s career. The 1998 embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, which killed 224 people, were the first time many Americans heard the name Al Qaeda. Three years later came September 11th and, with it, the Global War on Terror. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq drew both personnel and money toward conflict zones and mega-embassy construction at the expense of posts and regions everywhere else. American diplomacy on the ground was reshaped accordingly.
The quieter change may have been the lasting one.
Stricter visa rules after 9/11 required increased consular staffing and more complex operations: unprecedentedly large cohorts of entry-level officers, the creation of consular Limited Non-Career Appointments (LNAs), and a requirement that first- and second-tour officers spend substantial time on visa lines. By her third tour, our officer might have been supervising more entry-level officers than her own intake class had contained. The uneven hiring waves of that era still ripple through the workforce structure today—a stone dropped in 2002, visible on the surface in 2026.
The Fourth Current: The End of Bipartisanship
The most consequential change of the era may well have been the erosion of bipartisan cooperation in Washington. The mid-1990s marked the start of a more confrontational political era: before the 26-day shutdown of November 1995 to January 1996, government shutdowns had lasted a day or two. Shutdowns are now routine; a tool politicians reach for to advance partisan goals.
Over the same period, the old idea that politics stopped at the water’s edge has faded. The signs are easy to check. Public statements that once passed through layers of clearance are now issued raw, and their tones track the polarization of domestic politics. Congressional votes on foreign affairs follow party lines. The bipartisan congressional delegation is far less common than it was 30 years ago. While the Department has always carried a top-heavy contingent of political appointees, never have political leaders reported to duty with such open distrust of career staff. It is now the rare career officer who is nominated to fill a chief-of-mission vacancy.
The cost falls on the work itself. In contrast to her successors of today, when our officer began her career, she could tell foreign counterparts that an American commitment would outlast the administration that made it. Foreign governments increasingly discount US positions as four-year promises, hedge their bets accordingly, and wait out negotiators whose instructions may reverse with the next election. A diplomat whose word is provisional is a diplomat working at half strength.
The Fifth Current: Agency Restructuring
Institutional restructuring bookends this 30-year span, and the contrast is instructive. The 1999 merger of the US Information Agency and the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency into the State Department was imperfect, but it was planned with detailed transition frameworks preserving the continuity of both mission and staff.
The recent round was not. When the Department of Government Efficiency dismantled USAID and fired almost all Foreign Service, Civil Service, and Foreign Service National staff in 2025, it made no attempts to understand what the organization did or how it operated. When the administration belatedly realized that essential functions had stopped, some were hastily pulled back into the State Department with no plan for staffing or implementation; the hiring that followed paid little regard to credentials or experience. At the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM), a parallel drama is, as of this writing, still unresolved.
Through It All
We chose these five currents because they are the ones our members still feel — in how they bid, how they staff, how they are heard in Washington, and how their word is received abroad. Set side by side, they show an institution that has always changed slowly, from underneath, one assignment at a time. Change at that pace can be absorbed; a career learns to ride a current.
What has happened since January 2025 is a typhoon.
USAID is gone. USAGM is a shell. The State Department has been hollowed out, and AFSA’s standing as the union of the Foreign Service has been stripped away — though we continue to challenge these actions in the courts, as we have defended the Service for more than a century. Our officer, who spent 30 years working toward the senior assignments that cap a career, now watches many of them filled by political appointees with questionable credentials. Experience and professional expertise, once the institution’s foundation, have become suspect qualities.
Which returns us to the question The Foreign Service Journal has been asking for a hundred years: what do we want our diplomatic corps to be — a body that turns over with the political winds, or a durable instrument of the nation? Our officer will carry that question into a retirement she may not have chosen at this moment. Those who follow her will have to answer it, as the country decides whether nonpartisanship, professionalism, and public service can endure — and what kind of Foreign Service it means to build.
Lisa Heller is the director for professional policy Issues at the American Foreign Service Association, which she joined after a 34-year career in the US Foreign Service. She spent much of her career in China (Beijing, Shenyang, Taipei, and Guangzhou), concluding as the Consul General in Guangzhou. She also served in Kyiv, Seoul, and Islamabad, as well as Washington, DC. Prior to joining the Foreign Service, Ms. Heller worked at the Environmental Protection Agency and NASA. She holds degrees from Princeton University, the University of Minnesota, and Virginia Theological Seminary.