Foreign Service Morale, Effectiveness Plunged Under Tobias

On Friday, Randall Tobias, the Bush administration’s senior foreign aid coordinator, stepped down after revealing that he had “been a customer of a Washington, D.C. escort service whose owner has been charged by federal prosecutors with running a prostitution operation.”

On Saturday, the Washington Post reported that one person close to Tobias said, “I’m sad today. … The president loves him and Condi absolutely loves him.”

But that love was not shared by the employees who worked under Tobias at USAID. A Dec. 2006 poll of 368 USAID foreign service officers found that just “21 percent thought Tobias had been doing a good job in getting resources for the agency and its workers”:

The agency also suffered under Tobias’s leadership. Zero percent said morale was “excellent” under Tobias, and just 12 percent said it was “good.” Sixty-eight percent said that overall conditions for the foreign service are worsening:

Tobias also oversaw a controversial policy advocated by the religious right that required any U.S.-based group receiving anti-AIDS funds to take an anti-prostitution “loyalty oath.” Aid groups bitterly opposed the policy, charging that it “was so broad — and applied even to their private funds — that it would obstruct their outreach to sex workers who are at high risk of transmitting the AIDS virus.”