President Trump has made no secret of his plans to dramatically reduce both the budget of the State Department and the size of its workforce. The department is now preparing for those eventualities with some innovative and unconventional ideas, including “crowd sourcing… via the Internet” and “harnessing the efforts of students and faculty experts at colleges and universities across the U.S.”
On May 23, the president formally submitted his 2018 budget request totaling $37.6 billion for the Department of State and U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), a 30 percent cut from 2017 levels. Three days later, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s Office of Global Partnerships put out a request for information from private sector contractors for:
The State Department says it began this effort “in response to sequestration, tightening federal budgets and uncertainty about future commitments.” But with the submission of President Trump’s new budget and pledge to make the State Department “leaner, more efficient, and more effective,” the effort to retool has been renewed. The department anticipates “there will likely be a shift in personnel and staffing resources” that may require “public-private partnerships” and other solutions to make up the slack.
The department’s request for information includes some corporate jargon-laden suggestions to contractors looking to meet its needs:
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“[C]rowd source research and innovation related to foreign policy challenges by harnessing the efforts of students and faculty experts at colleges and universities across the U.S.”
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“Big Thinks: A knowledge forum that helps organizations find smarter ideas faster by catalyzing conversations around topics most critical to business success.”
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“Challenges, Competitions, Prizes: Mechanisms that allows the public to solve problems for an organization and receive awards for the best solutions.”
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“obtaining information or input into a task or project by enlisting the services of a large number of people, either paid or unpaid, typically via the Internet,” also via crowd sourcing.
The document goes on to suggestion replacing “government think” with “group think” in order to carry out “global priorities and initiatives during lean budgetary times to promote our diplomacy mission”:
Other ideas include “Hackathons” (collaborative computer programming), popularized in the Obama White House; roundtables (“facilitated discussion with members from outside the Department that generates ideas on a common subject”); and “Incubators: Spaces that specifically target and help new and startup companies to address their needs and develop their business ideas to transform them into sustainable realities.” The department expresses a desire to “[r]each beyond the ‘usual suspects’ to increase the number of solvers tackling a problem and to identify novel approaches, without bearing high levels of risk.”
Asked for an update on the project and for more details on what the department hoped to accomplish specifically through internet crowd-sourcing and college student and faculty involvement, a state department spokesperson told THE WEEKLY STANDARD:
“We are working to determine the Department’s best path forward for providing the services described in the Request for Information, which seeks to gather innovative ideas from American thinkers, businesses, and academia on ways to modernize the way the State Department engages the world and accomplishes its mission.”
At this point, Congress still needs to pass a 2018 fiscal year budget, and the new budget year begins on October 1, 2017, less than two months away. Only then will the State Department know for sure how much money will be available to reshape the flagship department for U.S. diplomacy according to the vision of President Trump and Secretary Tillerson.
Jeryl Bier is an accountant and freelance writer.
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