From Strategy to Action: Rethinking How the State Department Works

The State Department is filled with some of the most knowledgeable foreign policy experts in the world, yet its impact is diluted by bureaucratic inefficiencies and lack of focus.

Check out my newest article in War on the Rocks, coauthored with Peter Lohman, who just finished a tour at the National Security Council (check out the original link; the folks at WOTR do great work and deserve your support). I know that some folks in the national security arena may not be in the mood to discuss reform at this time, but I am convinced that experts need to drive the conversation about the future of our foreign policy institutions. Simply defending the status quo is insufficient. During a time of increased pressure on public servants, I recognize the challenges and risks here. I hope this article will be received in its intended spirit: as a constructive proposal for improving the quality of US foreign policy. As always, I welcome your thoughts on what we may have missed here.

From Strategy to Action: Rethinking How the State Department Works

By Peter Lohman and Dan Spokojny | February 21, 2025

Image: Josh Lintz via Wikimedia Commons

U.S. diplomacy faces a paradox: The State Department is filled with some of the most knowledgeable foreign policy experts in the world, yet its impact is diluted by bureaucratic inefficiencies and lack of focus.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in his initial guidance to employees, called for a “more innovative, nimble, and focused State Department.” He lamented the department’s relegation to a “secondary role” in U.S. foreign policy, as other agencies are perceived to move faster and more effectively. Several studies in recent years have identified similar shortcomings.

The State Department’s perceived shortcomings stem from an organizational culture that for too long has relied on educated guesswork and ad hoc implementation. In fulfilling its core duty of advancing U.S. interests overseas, the department has often emphasized the art of foreign policymaking at the expense of disciplined methods. While recent modernization efforts have prioritized expanding staff and expertise, continued gaps in diplomatic tradecraft and culture hinder turning that expertise into policy action.

Suggestions to add rigor to the State Department’s work often collide with two practical realities: First, each new presidential administration brings differing views of U.S. interests. Second, every new challenge to U.S. national security carries unique tradeoffs of risks and benefits.

Yet, the variability of the ends and contexts of U.S. foreign policy should not excuse a lack of structure in its design and implementation. The State Department should treat policymaking — the practice of applying specialized knowledge to the practical solution of public problems — as the discipline that it is: One that includes clear methods for design, implementation, and adaptation. The department should adopt, teach, and refine this method of “policy engineering” and use it to harness the workforce’s tremendous expertise to more effectively advance U.S. interests abroad.

The Gap Between Planning and Doing

The State Department’s traditional method for policymaking is heavy on planning but light on coordinated action. Consider the department’s Managing for Results framework, which mandates every regional and functional bureau, and embassy, outline its high-level goals every four years — what the department calls “strategic planning.” Department staff spend hours poring over the latest National Security Strategy and other strategic guidance to craft over 200 individual plans for virtually every country and transnational issue in the world. The resulting plans provide general direction but fail to incite specific, coordinated action for pursuing U.S. interests.

Take, for example, the fact that very few of these strategic plans influence the department’s day-to-day expenditure of time and resources. While the Managing for Results framework includes recommendations for how to communicate long-term objectives and design foreign assistance programs, it provides little structure for how staff should achieve these long-term goals. Ultimately, the work of following through on the department’s myriad plans is largely ad hoc and voluntary, with limited accountability for progress.

We have experienced this problem firsthand through successive tours in Washington and abroad. Searching for ways to help prioritize among seemingly infinite daily demands, we and our colleagues regarded the department’s formal plans as too amorphous to provide value.

Lacking guidance, staff often defaulted to the most immediate task rather than ones tied to achieving long-term goals. Policy work devolved into a handful of initiatives working at small scale and often cross-purposes — an approach insufficient to tackling the biggest challenges. Resources were misallocated using a “spread-the-peanut-butter” approach whereby time, expertise, and funding went to many problems with the goal of satisfying as many bureaucratic stakeholders as possible.

This ad hoc approach serves as a tax on the department’s already overburdened staff, time, and resources. Absent prioritization, every challenge appears “underfunded,” and few are solved. Congress and presidential administrations become frustrated with the department’s inability to deliver. Worse yet, other parts of the federal government less adept at diplomacy are asked to step in, increasingly marginalizing the State Department over time.

The result is a paradoxical situation whereby the department’s vast foreign policy expertise serves more as a burden than a blessing. Without a method of translating expertise into action, department staff are overwhelmed with information and pulled in divergent directions, challenging everyone’s ability to focus on the most important tasks.

Harvard Business School Professor Frances Frei has a term for large organizations that struggle to prioritize among competing demands, expend enormous staff time focused on inward-facing tasks like email correspondence, and leave their workforce suffering from a general sense of fatigue and aimlessness: “exhausted mediocrity.” She argues that a workforce focused on doing everything rather than the most important things will exhaust itself and disappoint its customers. In our experience, this aptly describes what ails the State Department.

Policy Engineering: Turning Ideas into Action

One effective way to cure the department’s exhausted mediocrity is to fill the space between the formal planning process and the department’s day-to-day work. We call this policy engineering, building on former State Department Counselor Philip Zelikow’s efforts to draw lessons from the field of engineering, which similarly applies specialized knowledge to complex problems. Policy engineering is an iterative method for policymakers to ensure big picture goals connect to action in the field. It is meant to upgrade what Zelikow calls the “software” of public policy: the methods and routines the department uses to solve problems. The U.S. Army’s doctrine for the operations process also provides a useful model.

Policy engineering at the State Department would begin with policy design. Rather than the department’s existing planning process, which burdens staff with writing four-year plans with vague, long-term goals, policy engineering starts with prioritizing action, in coordination with the National Security Council and relevant agencies. Working from direction provided by the National Security Strategy and other high-level plans, bureaus and individual embassies would specify a limited set of near-term objectives that, if pursued over the next 6–12 months, would help achieve the administration’s long-term foreign policy goals. These near-term objectives must be proximate, concrete definitions of success paired with key results that could be reasonably assessed and achieved. The intent of policy design is to keep staff focused on forward-looking objectives amid the demands of the daily grind. In addition, the design phase would involve assigning teams to lead implementation, identifying resources and tools of implementation (i.e., programs, engagements, events), and setting deadlines for review. The policy design phase is largely absent in the State Department’s current organizational culture.

The department’s bureaus and embassies would turn design into action through policy implementation. This entails delivering demarches, negotiating treaties, implementing new projects, or other activities specified in the design stage. With clear policy designs guiding their work, diplomats in the field would be empowered to solve problems that arise during implementation. During implementation, staff would detail their efforts and gather evidence, including objective and subjective judgments, to evaluate progress. Written staff work —primarily in the form of cables from the field, memos to department leadership, and State Department input into interagency meetings — would communicate these judgments, including whether resources are adequate to accomplish the stated policy goal.

These observations would feed continuous policy adaptation, when bureaus and embassies would guide department and interagency changes in design and implementation. Key questions include: What policy interventions have been tried and what has been learned? Should assumptions change? Is the policy sufficiently maximizing the strengths of the United States and its allies and partners while exploiting competitors’ weaknesses? Does design and implementation adequately capture not just the risks of action but also of inaction? Most importantly, how should policy design, implementation, and resourcing change to incorporate these lessons?

The three steps outlined above are intended to serve as a framework rather than formal stages in a sequenced process. Rarely in the messy practice of foreign policymaking do policy responses advance neatly from design to implementation to success, making iterative moves during policy adaptation critical.

Getting Started: Benefits and Recommendations

State Department staff can implement these techniques and begin improving the organization’s policymaking immediately. However, to firmly integrate policy engineering into the culture and practice of the department, institutional upgrades will be needed.

Adopting a standard, department-wide method for policy engineering would be a good starting point (one might call this a cornerstone of “diplomatic doctrine”). The secretary’s Office of Policy Planning could serve as a hub for this work, refining the method over time. The Foreign Service Institute could include classes on policy engineering as part of its new core curriculum, using historical case studies to teach staff foreign policy design, implementation, and adaptation in different contexts and at different levels of the organization.

Policy engineering could also improve accountability and learning. Here, a pilot, perhaps run by the Office of Policy Planning, could work with a small group of bureaus and embassies to test structured semi-annual or annual assessments. These assessments could identify priorities and proximate objectives, lessons learned from implementation, and recommendations for further action, including requests of department leadership to help resource and scale successful policies. Congressional appropriators, in particular, might appreciate the department’s attention to identifying and weeding out poorly performing efforts.

Finally, policy engineering will only reach its full potential if it is a high-level priority. The secretary of state could model prioritization by announcing his or her own proximate objectives each year, including how the department will know if it is making progress in meeting them. Additionally, the secretary could preside over an annual award to recognize the department’s best policy engineering efforts. A future secretary might also link policy engineering with the department’s budget process and use the learning it generates to justify resource requests.

Effective foreign policymaking does not merely spring from the department’s wealth of knowledge and experience. While recent modernization efforts have rightly focused on helping the department develop, acquire, and retain expertise, that expertise needs an organizational culture which prioritizes action. Translating expertise into action is a craft that goes beyond what one can reasonably learn on the job. It should have basic prescriptive steps that can be taught and refined over the course of one’s career.

In a recent report, former Deputy Secretary of State for Management and Resources Richard Verma admits that the department must continue “looking for ways to become more efficient and capable through better strategic planning [and] training… ” We agree. In today’s age of unprecedented peril, with limited resources and in long-term competition with determined foes, the State Department must focus on the handful of initiatives that can make a real difference. Advancing a method for policy engineering is the right next step in service of this endeavor.

Peter Lohman is a State Department foreign service officer. He has served in Chennai, Jerusalem, Jakarta, and Washington. His most recent assignment was as the director for Southeast Asia on the National Security Council. He was a cavalry officer in the U.S. Army before entering the State Department.

Dan Spokojny is the founder of fp21, a nonprofit dedicated to improving the State Department. He previously served in government for more than a decade as a foreign service officer and a legislative staffer in Congress. He teaches U.S. foreign policy at George Washington University, is a member of the Editorial Board of The Foreign Service Journal, and is a former member of the Governing Board of the American Foreign Service Association.

The opinions expressed here are those of the authors and do not represent the views or positions of the U.S. government.