State Department’s Pentagon liaison office inspection finds management flaws

Diplomats in the State Department’s primary office for coordinating with the Pentagon regularly complain of “unfairness, favoritism and lack of transparency” in the hiring process, according to a government watchdog report released Wednesday.

The State Department inspector general’s report also faulted the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs for the failure to prepare top officials to deal with emergencies that may occur in the U.S.*, and for “strained” relations between bureau employees and the department’s executive office.

However, the review released Wednesday also praised the bureau’s leaders for acknowledging internal problems while attempting to execute such difficult policy initiatives as helping nations in the Middle East fight the Islamic State group during an era of tight U.S. foreign aid budgets.

“With foreign assistance levels relatively static,” states the report, Undersecretary for Arms Control and International Security Rose E. Gottemoeller and others are “focused on setting global, rather than country-specific priorities for security assistance allocations.”

During last year alone, the bureau provided some $675 million in foreign military financing to the governments of Iraq, Lebanon and Jordan, and expedited an additional $650 million worth of “counterterrorism-related” weapons sales to Iraq, the report said.

The inspector general’s office review praises Assistant Secretary of State Puneet Talwar for stressing “fairness and transparency” since taking over the key liaison office in April 2014.

But the inspectors also said the “bureau’s leadership acknowledges that some employees perceive unfairness, favoritism and lack of transparency in hiring,” and specifically recommends that “all senior- and mid-level employees” be required to take “mandatory Equal Employment Opportunity and diversity-awareness training.”

The recommendation was made roughly a week after the State Department inspector general’s office released a report highlighting significant increases in the number of harassment complaints by department employees in recent years.

Last week’s report, which reviewed the department’s Office of Civil Rights, said formal harassment claims nearly tripled under the leadership of Hillary Rodham Clinton and John F. Kerry, and noted that the department still does not have mandatory harassment awareness training for all employees.

On a separate front, the inspector general’s report Wednesday asserted that the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs’ “front office and office directors are not sufficiently engaged in emergency planning” for unexpected developments that may occur in the U.S.

Emergency planning has been a politically heated issue in the wake of questions of how the department handled the deadly September 2012 attack on the U.S. diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya.

But the report homes in on the bureau’s preparedness for managing unexpected crises inside the United States. Although the bureau’s role in such instances may not be critical, the document suggests it is unprepared.

“The bureau emergency action plan contains names of personnel who no longer work in the bureau because it has not been updated regularly,” the inspector general found.

*Owing to an editor’s error, the location of the emergencies examined in the IG report was misstated. The article has been corrected.