In addition to adding 1,000 new diplomats to the State Department, the President's new budget calls for 300 new USAID Foreign Service Officers and 250 people for the Active Response Corps – a group of pre-vetted civilians to respond to emergency situations.
As someone who may one day want to take one of these new jobs, this makes me happy (although the active response corps will remain hopelessly small, if we believe the estimates of required personnel in this RAND monograph). The diplomatic capacity of the country has been in doubt for a while, and both agencies have been slowly ramping up.
The most recent, call for increased manpower for US development and diplomacy came from the Secretary of Defense. His lecture at Kansas State was fantastic, and well worth reading if you missed it the first time around.
