Another brief take on a recent story:  last week, Carolyn O’Hara at Madame Secretary reported that a shuffle of offices on the seventh floor has caused some grumbling in the foreign service:

Bill Burns, State’s widely admired No. 3, has been bumped from his offices to make way for Jacob Lew, one of Hillary’s two new deputies, sources say. Lew, who was director of the OMB in the Clinton White House, has been tasked with getting State more cash.

Proximity to the Secretary is everything on the 7th floor of the State Department building, and we hear that the much-respected Burns, the under secretary for political affairs (or “P”), and his staff have been bumped from the relatively central office suite normally reserved for P and unceremoniously reassigned to the less-desirable “G” suites down the hall.

The folks in the G offices (normally for the under secretary for global affairs) are apparently being bumped even farther down the hall to the “R” offices, normally occupied by the under secretary for public diplomacy. Where the R folks are going is anyone’s guess, but it’s presumably the far-from-coveted 6th floor — hardly a good message to send about the importance of public diplomacy under a new administration.

We hear rank-and-file foreign service officers (FSOs) are none too happy with the move, which is considered a slight to Burns, a career diplomat who is the highest-ranking FSO in the country.

First of all, the foreign service — or at least those FSOs whining to O’Hara — need to get over themselves.  Yes, proximity is power, and yes it’s nice to be close.  But it’s far more important to have the ability to influence power than it is to have the office next to it.  There are plenty of Undersecretaries over the years who have had seventh floor suites and first floor access.  Burns will be no more or less influential because he’s moved down the hall.

I’ve heard a few things along these lines (and my sources largely confirm O’Hara’s report), some contradictory.  One is that R will move into the space now occupied by the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, (DRL) one of two Bureaus still on the 7th Floor (the other is the Bureau of Oceans, Science and Environment, or OES).  DRL will then move out of the building to space in the Red Cross building two blocks away.  I presume that OES will face a similar fate, but I’ve not heard that for sure.

Another rumor is that all Assistant Secretaries will have offices on the seventh floor.  That doesn’t make sense, in part because there are too many A/S positions to fit them all there and in part because separating bureau leaders from their troops seems like a bad idea.

If it turns out that the seventh floor becomes Undersecretaryland, I’m not that concerned.  What worries me a lot more is the decision to move DRL out of the building.  For far too long, DRL has been regarded as the “NGO inside the building,” particularly by the regional bureaus.  To exile DRL to a building whose owner is an NGO would send a signal to the rest of the Department that it no longer matters.   And given the dramatic decline of DRL during the Bush Administration (who wants to hear about human rights in an administration dedicated to violating them?), this could mean complete obscurity.

Now it’s very possible that all of these moves are a product not of politics but of the incredibly slow renovation of the Department that has been underway for almost a decade.  One of the reasons DRL has to move is that its corner of the building is slated to be renovated next.  If this is a temporary relocation, then I don’t think that it’s a concern.  But if the renovation is used as a pretext for exile, then there are serious problems. (And for the record, a similar argument could be made about OES, given the priority the Administration has given to addressing climate change.)

What I hear is that David Kramer, who was the last Bush-era Assistant Secretary for DRL, was under tremendous pressure to relocate — pressure coming not just from the building, but also from those parts of his own bureau already outside the building (mainly that part of DRL responsible for producing the annual Country Reports on Human Rights Practices).  Kramer’s decision to cave agree to the move was one of the last decisions of his tenure, and has seriously damaged morale in the bureau.

When I was at State, one of my responsibilities was to manage what is known as press guidance — the talking points produced each day for the spokesman.  I learned early on that press guidance was policy — that if you got the spokesman to say something, then it was the official policy of the U.S. government.  We thus became far more aggressive in our efforts to play a role in press guidance, and were able to change a number of statements that otherwise would not have taken human rights issues into consideration.

I raise that now because office space also is policy.  Those working at State call themselves “the building,” demonstrating just how seriously location is taken — and the degree to which those laboring at one of a dozen annexes are regarded as second-class citizens.  The reality is that not everybody can be on the seventh floor, or even in the main building, but Hillary needs to be careful that her (or more likely her advisors’) decisions about who sits where does not end up having a very real impact on policy.

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