[Congressional Record Volume 148, Number 85 (Monday, June 24, 2002)]
[Senate]
[Pages S5949-S5951]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




    PROMOTING FOREIGN LANGUAGE PROFICIENCY IN THE FEDERAL WORKFORCE

  Mr. AKAKA. Madam President, I rise today to urge the passage of two 
bills vital to our Nation's ability to combat terrorism, S. 1799, the 
Homeland Security Education Act, and S. 1800, the Homeland Security 
Federal Workforce Act. These bills are designed to assist our nation's 
national security agencies in recruiting individuals fluent in crucial 
foreign languages and skilled in other areas of critical concern. I 
fear that the lack of foreign language-speaking employees has 
contributed to one of the worst security lapses in the history of our 
great Nation.
  The information that has surfaced in recent weeks about our 
intelligence agencies' inability to articulate a complete intelligence 
picture in the weeks and months preceding September 11 underscores the 
need for language-proficient professionals throughout Federal agencies 
to decipher and interpret information from foreign sources, as well as 
interact with foreign nationals.
  In the article by Katherine McIntire Peters from the May 1, 2002, 
Government Executive Magazine, entitled ``Lost in Translation,'' she 
demonstrates explicitly how a critical shortage of Federal employees 
with foreign language skills is hurting national security. According to 
the article, the Army has a 44-percent shortfall in translators and 
interpreters in five critical languages, including Arabic, Korean, 
Persian-Farsi, Mandarin-Chinese, and Russian; the Department of State 
lacks 26 percent of its calculated need in authorized translator and 
interpreter positions, and the FBI has a 13-percent deficiency in the 
staffing of similar positions.
  With such a startling lack of workers with proficient foreign 
language skills throughout the Federal Government, enacting S. 1799 and 
S. 1800 is essential for our national security. The 107th Congress must 
act now to alleviate these grave deficiencies to recruit personnel 
possessing vital skills. To do this, we must promote the pursuit of 
language skills at all levels of education.
  S. 1799 strengthens national security by assisting in the expansion 
and the improvement of primary through graduate-level foreign language 
programs. This bill gives a boost to the foreign language programs 
taught in our Nation's schools by promoting concentrated and effective 
language study and by providing intensive professional development for 
teachers. Language study from a very early age will open students' 
minds to the opportunities and benefits of learning foreign languages. 
These benefits, combined with an across-the-board strengthening in 
science and engineering programs, will ensure an educated and 
competitive citizenry while providing a qualified applicant pool for 
national security positions.
  S. 1800 provides incentives for accomplished university students to 
enter governmental service. The bill provides an enhanced loan 
repayment program for students with degrees in areas of critical 
importance and also provides fellowships to graduate students with 
expertise in similarly sensitive areas. These incentives will result in 
the recruitment of the highly-trained, dynamic young individuals our 
Nation needs to assist in the war against terrorism.
  Our security organizations will benefit tremendously from an influx 
of proficient foreign language speakers. In addition to increasing the 
number of security personnel entering the Federal service with language 
proficiency, the legislation encourages current employees to improve 
their language ability and to hone other skills. We must provide 
training to improve foreign language skills of our present Federal 
workers and invest in the next generation of employees to ensure a 
dedicated and capable workforce that will contribute to our national 
security. The legislation I and the other sponsors have proposed would 
accomplish this.
  I urge my colleagues to support S. 1799 and S. 1800.
  I ask unanimous consent that the Government Executive Magazine 
article to which I referred be printed in the Record.
  There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in 
the Record.

         [From the Government Executive Magazine, May 1, 2002]

                          Lost in Translation

                     (By Katherine McIntire Peters)

       When then-CIA field agent Robert Baer served in Tajikistan 
     in the early 1990s, he saw a golden opportunity to collect 
     information that might prove vital to U.S. interests. 
     Thousands of refugees were pouring into Tajikistan from 
     Afghanistan, where civil war was raging. The refugees 
     represented a gold mine of intelligence from a nation at the 
     crossroads of American interests in the region. But Baer, who 
     spoke Arabic and Russian, didn't speak Dari or Pashto, the 
     language predominant among the refugees. So he contacted CIA 
     headquarters and asked the agency to send Dari and Pashto 
     speakers to debrief the refugees. The CIA couldn't--there 
     weren't any, according to Baer. The refugees continued to 
     come, and the United States missed an opportunity to get a 
     life-saving glimpse into the brewing threat of radical Islam 
     in Afghanistan.
       Baer related his experiences in See No Evil (Crown 
     Publishers, 2002), his memoir of a 21-year career in the CIA. 
     During his two decades of service, the agency grew 
     increasingly reliant on satellite technology and electronic 
     intelligence-gathering at the expense of maintaining the 
     language skills and regional expertise of its field officers. 
     When Baer was transferred out of Tajikistan in 1992, his 
     replacement spoke neither Tajik nor Russian, essentially 
     crippling the agency's human intelligence-gathering efforts 
     there, an assessment confirmed by another U.S. government 
     official who served in Tajikistan at the time.
       Baer's experience is hardly unique. Across government, 
     countless opportunities are squandered every day for want of 
     personnel who speak and understand foreign languages. While 
     Baer was lamenting the CIA's lack of people with language 
     skills in Central Asia, the FBI was sitting on its own gold 
     mine of information back in New York--if only the agency had 
     had the eyes and ears to recognize it. Only after terrorists 
     bombed the World Trade Center in February 1993, did agents go 
     back and translate previously taped phone conversations and 
     confiscated documents, all in Arabic, that offered vital 
     clues to the bombings. But the FBI missed those clues because 
     it didn't have enough translators to get through the material 
     when it might have been useful in preventing an attack, 
     instead of understanding the attack after the fact.
       More than 70 federal agencies require employees with 
     foreign language skills, which are vital to national defense, 
     law enforcement and economic security. In March, Susan 
     Westin, managing director of international affairs and trade 
     issues for the General Accounting Office, told the Senate 
     Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on International Security, 
     Proliferation and Federal Service that shortages of language-
     qualified personnel have hindered operations in a range of 
     areas:
       The Army doesn't have enough linguists to support its 
     current war plans or meet intelligence-gathering 
     requirements.
       Intelligence agencies lack the staff to translate and 
     interpret thousands of technical papers that detail foreign 
     research and development in scientific and technical areas.
       Without more timely translation of Spanish conversations, 
     the assistant U.S. attorney in Miami in charge of health care 
     fraud investigations soon will have to turn away

[[Page S5950]]

     cases. The implications are significant: Medicare and 
     Medicaid losses in the region top $3 billion.
       The FBI holds thousands of hours of audiotapes and pages of 
     written material that never have been reviewed or translated 
     because the agency lacks qualified linguists. FBI officials 
     told GAO the situation has hindered criminal prosecutions and 
     limited the agency's ability to arrest and convict violent 
     gang members.
       Lack of proficiency in foreign languages among State 
     Department personnel has hindered diplomatic readiness, 
     resulting in ineffective representation and advocacy of U.S. 
     interests abroad, lost exports and foreign investments, and 
     lost opportunities combating international terrorism and drug 
     trafficking.


                             poor planning

       It is impossible to know the full extent to which a lack of 
     language expertise hurts American interests. The Office of 
     Personnel Management doesn't maintain comprehensive records 
     of the number of federal employees with foreign language 
     skills, or the number of positions that require such skills. 
     OPM's records indicate that the government employs fewer than 
     1,000 translators and interpreters--a specially designated 
     job series in the federal workforce. But tens of thousands of 
     additional positions across government require language 
     skills.
       In January, GAO reported in ``Foreign Languages: Human 
     Capital Approach Needed to Correct Staffing and Proficiency 
     Shortfalls'' that the lack of competence in foreign languages 
     has hindered U.S. commercial interests, military operations, 
     diplomacy, law enforcement, intelligence operations and 
     counter-terrorism efforts (GAO-02-375). To assess the 
     situation broadly, GAO auditors reviewed operations at four 
     agencies where language skills are critical: the State 
     Department, the FBI, the Army, and the Foreign Commercial 
     Service, which is part of the Commerce Department.
       The Army, State Department and FBI all reported significant 
     shortages in translators and interpreters, positions that 
     tend to require the highest levels of skills. The Army 
     reported, on average, a 44 percent shortfall in translators 
     and interpreters in five critical languages--Arabic, Korean, 
     Mandarin-Chinese, Persian-Farsi and Russian. The State 
     Department had a 26 percent shortfall in authorized 
     translator and interpreter positions, and the FBI had a 13 
     percent shortfall. (The Foreign Commercial Service does not 
     have designated translator and interpreter positions, but 
     hires locally for those jobs.)
       All four agencies reported shortages in other positions 
     requiring language skills:
       The Army has about 15,000 positions requiring proficiency 
     in 62 languages. Last year the service had 142 unfilled 
     positions for cryptologic linguists in Korean and Mandarin 
     Chinese, and 108 unfilled positions for human intelligence 
     collectors in Arabic, Russian, Spanish, Korean and Mandarin 
     Chinese.
       The State Department has 2,581 positions requiring some 
     foreign language proficiency spanning 64 languages. State has 
     acknowledged its lack of Foreign Service officers who meet 
     language requirements, but it doesn't have reliable data to 
     show the extent of the problem--two different agency reports 
     put shortfalls at 50 percent and 16 percent.
       The Foreign Commercial Service had significant shortfalls, 
     55 percent overall, in staff with the required proficiency in 
     Mandarin-Chinese, Russian, Japanese, Indonesian, Korean and 
     Turkish.
       The FBI had 1,792 special agents with skills in 40 
     languages, adding tremendously to the agency's ability to 
     interview suspects and develop connections with informants. 
     However, the FBI does not set staffing goals for special 
     agents with foreign language skills, making it impossible to 
     determine shortfalls.
       In many cases, the problems agencies have with hiring and 
     keeping personnel with language skills stem from deeper 
     management challenges. For example, budget cuts at the State 
     Department throughout the 1990s left the Foreign Service with 
     about 1,000 vacancies by the time Secretary of State Colin 
     Powell took office in January 2001. ``These are positions 
     that existed that we had no bodies to fill,'' says John 
     Naland, president of the American Foreign Service 
     Association. ``The people we did have had to be rushed to 
     post. In a lot of cases language training had to be shortened 
     or not provided at all. That's a huge problem and a legacy of 
     the lack of hiring in the 1990s.'' One of the first things 
     Powell did was request an increase in resources, in both 
     staffing and operating funds, to fill the personnel deficit 
     and hire enough extra Foreign Service officers over the next 
     three years to maintain a ``training float''--a reserve of 
     employees assumed to be in training at any given time. If 
     Congress continues to fund the plan, ``We'll be able to put 
     someone in two years of Arabic training or Chinese training 
     and there won't be a vacancy in Cairo or Beijing while 
     they're in training,'' Naland says. But even if State and 
     other agencies were fully staffed, they wouldn't necessarily 
     have enough people with the right skills to meet their 
     language requirements. Advances in technology and wider 
     access to foreign language publications have tremendously 
     increased the need for employees who can read and understand 
     non-English materials.
       Of the four agencies that GAO focused on, only the FBI has 
     a staffing plan that links its foreign language program to 
     its strategic objectives and program goals. GAO found that 
     the FBI plan identified strategies, performance measures, 
     responsible parties and resources the bureau needs to fill 
     its language deficit. None of the other agencies had a 
     comprehensive strategy for resolving shortages.


                           No Easy Solutions

       Military deployments in recent years have revealed 
     shortages of personnel skilled in languages few Defense 
     planners anticipated needing. When U.S. troops were deployed 
     to Somalia in 1992, for instance, the Defense Department 
     found itself desperately seeking hundreds of Somali 
     interpreters. Many had to be recruited from the ranks of new 
     immigrants found driving taxi cabs in New York and 
     Washington. The current deployment to Afghanistan is 
     presenting similar challenges. The languages of Afghanistan 
     include Pashto, Dari, Azgari, Uzbek, Turkmen, Berberi, Aimaq 
     and Baluchi--languages few Americans even recognize, let 
     alone speak. The war on terrorism virtually ensures that U.S. 
     troops will be operating in regions where language skills 
     will be in short supply.
       It's a problem that's become familiar to the faculty at the 
     Defense Language Institute in Monterey, Calif., the largest 
     language school in the world and the source of 85 percent of 
     language training for government personnel, primarily 
     Defense. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the 
     Cold War, U.S. military language requirements have expanded 
     dramatically, and the DLI has responded. Unlike colleges and 
     universities the DLI produces students with the skills the 
     Defense Department and military services demand.
       ``We don't put out a class list and then hope people will 
     enroll,'' says DLI Chancellor Ray Clifford. ``The enrollments 
     take place first. As enrollments shift, we adjust our faculty 
     and teaching strength.''
       Last year, 2,083 students graduated from basic language 
     training in 20 languages. Depending on the difficulty of the 
     language, training lasts from 25 weeks to 63. In 2001, more 
     than half of DLI students were enrolled in four of the 
     toughest languages for Americans to learn: Arabic, Chinese-
     Mandarin, Korean and Persian-Farsi. (Several hundred more 
     students completed intermediate and advanced training as 
     well.)
       Neil Granoien, a former Russian instructor and former dean 
     of the DLI's Korean school, now oversees a special task force 
     to provide support to Operation Enduring Freedom in 
     Afghanistan. The DLI recently has added new courses in 
     Pashto, Dari and Uzbek, and plans to add courses in Basha 
     Indonesian, Urdu and Turkic languages.
       There are considerable challenges in creating language 
     courses for some of the more obscure languages now needed, 
     says Granoien. In many cases, instructors must first develop 
     grammar where none exists. ``People have been writing Spanish 
     grammar for a couple hundred years, French even longer. If 
     you take a language like Uzbek, there's much work to be done, 
     or [Pashto], for example, where there's very little work 
     that's been done, and most of that was done in Victoria's 
     reign.'' That's Queen Victoria, who ruled Britain from 1837 
     to 1901, when the British controlled much of the area that is 
     now Afghanistan.
       ``We've got considerable expertise in the applied 
     linguistics area so we're able to [develop the grammar], but 
     it's not something that happens overnight and it's not 
     something you pull off a shelf,'' Granoien says.
       Finding enough qualified instructors is another major 
     challenge. ``The faculty we need to find are not being 
     produced for us by U.S. colleges and universities,'' says 
     Clifford. Ideally, instructors will be qualified teachers as 
     well as native speakers able to function linguistically at a 
     professional level. Typically, the Defense Language Institute 
     recruits foreign students doing graduate work in the United 
     States in the field of teaching English as a second language, 
     but the institute can't find instructors for some of the more 
     obscure languages for which the school is now recruiting. 
     Granoien recently found four Turkmen instructors through a 
     friend who was traveling in Turkmenistan. The DLI has found a 
     few other instructors through contacts with South Asian 
     relief agencies.
       Once faculty are recruited and trained--the DLI has a one-
     month intensive training program for native speakers with 
     little or no teaching experience--building a curriculum and 
     developing testing programs is another challenge. The 
     language programs are based on real-world instruction, making 
     it difficult to teach languages that are rarely published in 
     newspapers, magazines and the like.
       The DLI is accredited, and students completing the 
     intensive basic program in any language receive 45 semester 
     hours of college credit. To successfully complete the 
     program, students must pass a battery of tests that measure 
     their proficiency in speaking, reading and listening. 
     Proficiency levels range from Level 1 (elementary), in which 
     an individual can speak well enough to get his or her basic 
     needs met and demonstrate common courtesy, to Level 5 
     (functionally native), in which an individual has the 
     proficiency of an articulate, well-educated native speaker.
       The institute's basic training program is designed to get 
     students to Level 2 (limited working ability), in which they 
     can handle routine social demands and deal with concrete 
     topics in the past, present and future tenses. ``It doesn't 
     enable them to go on to hypothetical areas or be able to read 
     between the lines,'' Granoien says. To achieve proficiency at 
     Levels 3 and 4, the general and

[[Page S5951]]

     advanced professional levels, students generally need 
     practical experience, he says.
       The school also maintains an extensive field program, and 
     develops programs to meet the specific needs of military 
     personnel in the field. Last year, the DLI provided 20,000 
     hours of instruction in far-flung locations, broadcast from 
     the Monterey campus.


                         long-standing problems

       Most of the attention on language skills shortfalls has 
     centered on Arabic and languages used in and around 
     Afghanistan, but just as worrisome for Defense officials is 
     the shortage of personnel with language and regional 
     expertise in Asia.
       In a recent study of the Defense Department's preparedness 
     for dealing with emerging security issues in Asia, 
     researchers at DFI International, a Washington research and 
     consulting firm, found that language training outside the 
     intelligence field was a low priority in the military 
     services, mainly because of limited resources. Compounding 
     the problem is the absence of a Defense strategy for 
     identifying critical language requirements and providing top-
     down guidance to the services on meeting those needs. 
     Instead, each service independently defines its language 
     requirements and determines its policy for rewarding language 
     skills with bonus pay. The payments generally are not high 
     enough to provide troops with sufficient incentive for the 
     difficult task of maintaining language skills. Also, most 
     services don't differentiate between critical languages in 
     which the services are experiencing shortages, and those more 
     commonly spoken, such as Spanish and French.
       Only the Army has embraced the concept of training regional 
     specialists. Through its career-track Foreign Area Officer 
     Program, officers develop regional expertise and language 
     skills. DFI noted that the Air Force and Navy FAO programs 
     are underdeveloped and ineffective, which is of particular 
     concern in Asia, where those services predominate.
       In its final report Sept. 30, ``Focusing the Department of 
     Defense on Asia,'' DFI also noted that only a small 
     percentage of regional policy positions at the U.S. Pacific 
     Command were filled with qualified personnel. Navy and Air 
     Force regional headquarters offices each have five ``country 
     desk'' billets in their policy and planning directorates, but 
     ``only one of the five incumbent officers in these billets 
     has any regional experience or expertise.'' The Marine Corps 
     had only a single desk officer for the entire Asia-Pacific 
     area. ``As security challenges in the Asia-Pacific theater 
     rise, so do intelligence requirements. However, a shortfall 
     of properly trained analysts and Asian linguists is creating 
     backlogs in the analysis of gathered [intelligence],'' 
     according to the DFI report. ``China poses a particular 
     problem: Officials at the Joint Intelligence Center Pacific 
     noted that, even if they dedicated all of their all-source 
     intelligence analysts to China, they would still not have 
     enough analysts to handle China intel/analytical requirements 
     alone.''
       The shortage of language-qualified personnel in government 
     and its harmful effects on national security are not new--nor 
     is concern about language deficits. DLI's Clifford says the 
     United States has a long history of ambivalence about the 
     value of foreign languages: In 1923, the U.S. Supreme Court 
     had to overturn laws restricting the teaching of foreign 
     languages in 22 states. In 1940, a national report on high 
     schools determined that ``overly academic'' programs were 
     causing too many students to fail. The report recommended 
     eliminating foreign language instruction. By the late 1950s, 
     however, concern about being outpaced by the Soviet Union 
     resulted in the 1958 National Defense Education Act, which, 
     among other things, was designed to produce more foreign 
     language teachers and programs. But enthusiasm was short-
     lived. The 1979 Presidential Commission on Foreign Language 
     and International Studies found that ``Americans' 
     incompetence in foreign languages is nothing short of 
     scandalous, and it is becoming worse.''
       In many ways, the problems of federal agencies with 
     recruiting and training language-competent employees reflect 
     the failure of our public education system. According to data 
     compiled by the Center for Applied Linguistics, the vast 
     majority of elementary schools don't teach foreign languages, 
     and while 86 percent of high schools offer foreign languages, 
     few high schools offer instruction in languages beyond 
     Spanish or French. According to 1998 survey data from the 
     Modern Language Association, a New York-based professional 
     group, about 8 percent of college students are enrolled in 
     foreign language classes. And as anyone who has studied a 
     language in high school or college knows, taking classes does 
     not necessarily result in proficiency.
       ``To build the kind of expertise the government needs in 
     intelligence and defense and economics, we have to recognize 
     that language learning is long-term, serious, and 
     difficult,'' David Edwards, executive director for the Joint 
     National Committee for Languages, said at a January briefing 
     on language and national security sponsored by the National 
     Foreign Language Center and the National Security Education 
     Program.
       ``As most other nations of the world already know, we have 
     to begin the process in the elementary schools and continue 
     it the whole way through graduate school if we're to do it 
     well,'' Edwards said.
       ``We cannot address the government's language needs without 
     addressing the nation's language needs,'' Edwards added.

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