Foreign affairs professionals: Honoring our commitment to Americans worldwide

For 55 years, the Department of State, along with the broader foreign affairs community, has honored the contributions of our nation’s foreign affairs professionals on the first Friday in May. Foreign Affairs Day is an occasion to recognize the work that our diplomats and foreign affairs employees do at home and in more than 190 countries across the globe to advance America’s security, prosperity and values.

This year’s salute is especially poignant. Our foreign affairs corps has risen to the unprecedented challenge posed by a global pandemic. From Peru to Pakistan, our team is working around the clock to help bring American citizens home safely — more than 72,000 of them to date.

Our foreign affairs professionals are coordinating with colleagues across the U.S. government and running interference in scores of overseas capitals to ease global supply-chain bottlenecks so that our health professionals and essential workers have the personal protective equipment they need to treat infected individuals. And they are helping other countries respond to COVID-19 so we can collectively come out of this global crisis as a stronger community of nations.

Closer to home, our people continue recruiting and hiring the next generation of foreign affairs professionals because, as the pandemic reminds us, the business of diplomacy never stops. Nations, like people, always have interests and needs — and diplomacy is one of our principal tools for securing them. Unfortunately, like many organizations, the Department of State was forced to postpone in-person onboarding as part of our broader COVID-19 mitigation measures. But even as we hit “pause” in the interest of the health and safety of our employees and the wider public, we continue to think creatively about how to welcome future employees.

Thanks to our imaginative, committed colleagues, along with new flexibilities granted by the Office of Personnel Management and the Office of Management and Budget, the department is now able to carry out virtual oaths of office, virtual onboarding and virtual training for foreign service officers and specialists starting in May and continuing this summer. 

These new recruits will include candidates from the foreign service classes postponed in March and April. And I am pleased to report we already have virtually onboarded three civil service cohorts.

This ongoing effort is a testament to the department’s commitment to our workforce — current, former and future. A commitment that is unwavering — because it is the women and men of the U.S. Department of State who continue to safeguard America’s interests and protect American citizens in good times and bad.

After a 32-year foreign service career, I continue to stand in awe of my colleagues’ service and sacrifices — but never more so than I do today. The extraordinary work of my department colleagues over the past two months — their innovative approaches to seemingly intractable challenges, and their resilience in the face of personal hardship — is worthy of the oath we all affirm as public servants: to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States” and all that it represents.

Our foreign affairs professionals represent the best of America. On this Foreign Affairs Day, I dare say that our predecessors — Benjamin Franklin, our first diplomat, and Thomas Jefferson, our first Secretary of State — would be proud.

Carol Z. Perez is director-general of the U.S. Foreign Service and director of global talent for the U.S. Department of State.