House-passed legislation (HR-2410) that now moves to the Senate would make several significant changes in the mission of foreign affairs agencies including an expansion of personnel and increases in compensation.
The bill would authorize USAID to hire 350 additional foreign service officers each year in 2010 and 2011, consistent with the President’s request for 2010 and the goal of the agency’s Development Leadership Initiative to double its foreign service workforce by hiring 1,200 by 2012. Similarly, the measure would allow the State Department to hire another 750 officers each of those two years, also reflecting the President’s request.
The bill further would increase compensation for FSOs who are not members of the Senior Foreign Service and are posted overseas. Under current law, officers based in the United States receive comparability pay in addition to their base pay, to reduce the disparity between federal and nonfederal workers, but those who are posted overseas do not receive those amounts. Under the bill, FSOs who are posted overseas would be paid the same comparability pay received by FSOs posted to Washington, D.C.—currently about19 percent of total basic pay. The increase would be phased in with the full annual amount starting in fiscal year 2011. The increase in basic pay also would lead to an increase in other benefits paid to FSOs, such as life insurance, health insurance, hardship pay, and danger pay.
The measure also would: grant the department greater flexibility in rehiring foreign service annuitants on a temporary basis for positions that are hard to fill; establish a two-year pilot program allowing the department to hire up to 200 contractors (at any one time) to meet new or urgent needs; establish a Public Diplomacy Reserve Corps at the Department of State of former mid- and senior-level FSOs or other individuals with public diplomacy experience in the private or public sector, who would be posted overseas for periods of between six months and two years; require the department to appoint 10 attaches to U.S. diplomatic missions to support enforcement of intellectual property rights; and increase the death gratuities payable to the surviving dependents of foreign service employees who die as a result of injuries sustained in the performance of their duty overseas.
