GAO Studies Language Proficiency in the Foreign Service

This Wednesday we had a guest speaker in our seminar, Patrick Dynes, an Ohio State Ph.D. and Senior Analyst at the U.S. Government Accountability Office, who talked about a GAO study of foreign investment in the United States generally and sovereign wealth funds in particular. Patrick is living proof that it's possible to survive thirty years of producing policy papers for a living.

By coincidence, another GAO report was the subject of the "Federal Diary" column in yesterday's Washington Post. The Post's Joe Davidson reports that the GAO has done a study of foreign language proficiency in the U.S. diplomatic corps, and that the results are quite disturbing. In a policy forum sponsored by the American Foreign Service Association, diplomats conceded that the incentive structure in the foreign service does not always encourage language proficiency. One of America's top diplomats, John Negroponte (pictured above) argued that inadequate language proficiency was only the most serious of a number of challenges facing the Department of State and other agencies that pursue the U.S. diplomatic mission. See Davidson's article here.