The Diplomat's Year

When I ran planning and budgeting for public diplomacy at State, one number followed me around: a fully loaded overseas position costs more than $700,000 a year. The harder question was what those dollars buy. A diplomat's year starts at 2,080 paid hours, and leave, language training, moving, paperwork, and internal meetings all take their share before any diplomacy happens.

This model does that arithmetic in the open. It follows the paid year down to the hours of substantive work that remain, then divides the cost of the position by those hours. Every assumption is adjustable, and every control shows where its number comes from: a regulation, a report, research on office work, or a practitioner's account. No time-use study of the Foreign Service exists, so a model like this has to be assembled from pieces, and the badges say which piece is which.

The presets cover a first-tour consular officer, entry-level and mid-level political officers, a section chief, a public diplomacy officer with a grants portfolio, a Washington desk officer, an Army major at home station and in Germany, and an ordinary office job for comparison. A second mode assembles a whole embassy section, one donut per officer, and lets you test management changes, like moving status reporting out of the weekly meeting, against evidence for what each change actually returns.