A few weeks ago, I watched the confirmation hearing for assistant secretary of state for African affairs nominee Frank Garcia. It was not especially substantive, though that was hardly his fault. Sitting on a panel with four other ambassadorial nominees, he received four questions—really, comments—before the hearing concluded. It sent me down a rabbit hole: when it comes to U.S. policy toward Africa, what is the true purpose of the confirmation process? And is there a better way?
A few caveats upfront. I’ve never worked in Congress, and I’ve never been through a confirmation process. (As a State Department intern, though, I did sit in on an internal “murder board” for the ambassadorial nominees to Guinea, the Gambia, and Tanzania in 2001. I’m not sure that counts for much.) In other words, I come to this topic earnestly, with more questions than answers.
There are several parts to the confirmation process. After the president submits a nomination to the Senate, the designee engages in informal consultations with key senators and staff, submits a written statement, appears at a committee hearing, and then faces committee and full-Senate votes. This fulfills the Constitution’s Appointments Clause by ensuring that ambassadors are appointed by the president only “by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate.” For the purposes of this post, I’m less interested in parsing what that means in a legal sense than in how the process is actually performed for Africa policy positions. To that end, I reviewed more than three dozen nominee statements, hearing transcripts, and oral histories from ambassadors and assistant secretaries of state for African affairs.1 My hot take: there is a lot of posturing, not enough policy.
Policy Discussions
At its best, the confirmation process facilitates a genuine examination of U.S. policy toward the region. Through written statements and responses at the hearing, a nominee can present a strategic vision for Africa’s importance and identify key priorities and challenges. It is more than congressional vetting; it is an opening to communicate the Administration’s goals to a wider audience.
Several assistant secretary nominees used their statements to lay out overarching priorities, including Chester Crocker in 1981, Susan Rice in 1997, and Jendayi Frazer in 2005. Johnnie Carson, in 2009, affirmed that “If I am confirmed, I will focus on four key areas: strengthening Africa’s democratic institutions and adherence to the rule of law, working with African countries to prevent conflict and to build local peacekeeping capacity, fostering sustained economic development and growth, and finally partnering with Africa to combat threats like health pandemics, climate change and narcotrafficking.”
A handful of nominees, especially those with deep expertise in African affairs, also used the hearings to demonstrate a substantive command of the issues. Assistant secretary nominee Joseph Palmer II in 1966, for example, held forth on the reasons for an uptick in coups, while assistant secretary Hank Cohen in 1989 delivered a detailed update on dynamics in southern Africa. Assistant secretary nominee Linda Thomas-Greenfield in 2013 addressed the balance between humanitarian and development assistance: “We need to do both. We cannot stop doing humanitarian assistance when people are dying…at the same time, we have to take a much more long-term view and again help African countries build the capacity so that they can deal with their health initiatives and then we can work with them on building their infrastructure so that they can encourage investments and push for opportunities for their people.”
Some nominees also used the process to preview forthcoming policies and initiatives. Assistant secretary nominee Walter Kansteiner in 2001 noted that the Administration planned to host a U.S.-sub-Saharan Africa Trade and Economic Cooperation Forum to focus African leaders on the importance of good governance and economic reform. Assistant secretary nominee Tibor Nagy in 2018 pledged to address human rights abuses in South Sudan: “I promise you I will look for every pressure point possible, including the ones that have not yet been pushed, to make sure that those who are complicit in these tragedies have to pay.”
This is also true of some senators presiding over confirmation hearings. Their engagement isn’t perfunctory; it is laser-focused on major issues and concerns. In those moments, at least, the goal seems less about political point-scoring than probing a nominee on difficult or contentious policy choices.
California Senator Alan Cranston in 1981 asked Crocker to describe “how we are going to follow balanced policy there, seeking to improve relations with South Africa, which I gather is part of the agenda, but recognizing the dangers of taking steps that would alienate us from black Africa. How are we going to walk that tightrope?”
Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold in 2009 noted that “Ethiopia is an important partner of the United States. We do have shared interests, but I’m concerned by growing reports of repressiveness by the Ethiopian government.” He asked nominee Carson how the Obama Administration planned to strike a more balanced partnership with Ethiopia centered on genuine democratic progress.
Idaho Senator Jim Risch in 2021 raised the conflict and suffering in Cameroon’s Anglophone regions. Noting that the international response had not matched the seriousness of the crisis, he asked assistant secretary nominee Molly Phee what role the United States should play.
In my view, the gold standard is when a nominee tries to elevate the debate rather than fall back on platitudes. In his testimony, Crocker argued that “while we are neither a dominant external power in Africa nor Africa’s key economic partner, we are, nevertheless, a critical, and often indispensable actor on a continent where our strategic, political, and economic interests are growing.” In 2005, Frazer walked the committee through the Bush Administration’s step-by-step effort to erase Africa’s massive debt burden, finally putting an end to the “unending cycle of lend and forgive, lend and forgive.” She did not settle for a simple answer; the issue was too important to paper over the details of a landmark policy decision.
Political Theater
Unfortunately, some of the hearings I reviewed lacked seriousness. They slipped into irrelevance or plain ignorance of the issues at hand. In perhaps the most unbelievable example, North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms asked Wesley William Egan, the U.S. ambassadorial nominee to Guinea-Bissau, about the NCAA tournament in 1983. Egan later recalled the exchange in an oral history interview:
Senator Helms’s first question to me was, “Mr. Egan, could you explain to the committee how it is possible that the North Carolina Tar Heels have dropped from number one to number 11 in the NCAA rankings?” You can imagine the odd expression that passed over the face of the Guinea-Bissau ambassador. He was having trouble following the discussion in English, but to have this first question be about a basketball team was confusing. I said, “Senator, I can’t explain why they’ve dropped from number one to number 11, but I will give you my personal guarantee that by the time of the NCAA finals, they’ll be in the top eight.” Helms sort of sat back and said, “Well, that’s fine with me, no further questions.”
Most of the interactions I reviewed aren’t this absurd, but confirmation hearings do routinely miss an opportunity to inform the broader public about U.S. objectives in the region. In certain cases, they reveal how shallow the nominee’s or senator’s grasp of the issues can be.
Some nominees were remarkably candid about how little they knew. In 1961, assistant secretary nominee (and former Michigan governor) G. Mennen “Soapy” Williams said, “I certainly do not pretend to be an African expert.” Assistant secretary David Newsom in 1969 was similarly transparent, admitting that he had not “plunged into all the intricacies of our present programs and policies in Africa.” When asked about Rhodesia, he conceded that he had not “gotten into the details of this sufficiently to make a truly intelligent answer to that question,” and added that he had already made up in his mind “a little list of problems” he would have to examine quickly if confirmed.
Senators were not always more probing. In 1966, Vermont Senator George Aiken asked Palmer about the number of assistant secretaries at the State Department, wondering how “we got so many assistant secretaries.” In 1977, Alabama Senator John Sparkman asked Cohen, then ambassadorial nominee to Senegal, “what do you think about the general situation in Africa? There has been a good bit of stirring around, guessing, prognosticating, and so forth.” Dennis Jett later recalled that senators asked only “generic questions, nothing in particular about me or about Mozambique” at his 1993 hearing.
The most problematic exchanges are openly political, designed to validate a partisan position or press a nominee to concede authority they do not actually possess. A senator may ask every nominee the same question, regardlessly of the relevance to their potential position, because it has partisan value.
Several senators and members of Congress attacked Nathaniel Davis’s nomination for assistant secretary in 1975 because he had previously served as U.S. ambassador to Chile during the overthrow of Salvador Allende. Davis defended himself, asserting “I might say that in my career in the Foreign Service, whether this be in Chile or whether it be elsewhere, I have done my best to serve my country with such integrity, such truthfulness, and such honor as I have been able to uphold.”
Illinois Senator Charles Percy used the confirmation hearing for assistant secretary nominee Richard M. Moose in 1977 to air his concerns about UN Ambassador Andrew Young’s independence. Moose tried to deflect, emphasizing the need to distinguish between Ambassador Young’s personal views and the Carter Administration’s official policy.
Or Just A Formality
But perhaps I’m being too harsh—or just very naive. The overriding goal of the hearing may simply be to fill the seat. After all, much of the vetting is happening behind the scenes, chiefly during consultations with senators and their staff. The point of the hearing, in contrast, is confirmation. As Senator Chris Coons recently said of the current assistant secretary nominee: “Africa is incredibly important, and this is a critical post. It’s been well over a year vacant, and I’m concerned about the urgency and the importance of sending someone capable to lead our Africa engagement in the State Department.”
In recent years, nominees have submitted relatively short statements, often just two to four pages. Their answers are serviceable, but they often seem designed to avoid taking a substantive position. They agree with the premise of nearly every question, layering on inoffensive clichés. Hearings also now tend to bundle multiple nominees together, ensuring that each receives only a handful of questions. Maybe that makes sense as an expedient way to move through a backlog of nominees waiting to begin their jobs. To be sure, it is already an awfully long process from nomination to confirmation. But too often, substance is sacrificed for speed.
A Side Note on QFRs
I’ve intentionally left out one final part of the confirmation process: Questions for the Record (QFRs). Following a hearing, senators often submit follow-up queries for the nominee. While they only become part of the official transcript after some time, QFRs are another venue for substantive policy discussion. Many of these questions address specific and important topics. For example, senators asked Phee about the political transition in Somalia, endemic corruption in Nigeria, Russian influence in the Central African Republic, and elections in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, among other subjects.
That’s not to say that QFRs can’t be ridiculous either. Crocker recalled receiving 108 questions from Helms’s staff, including: “do you believe that the South African government should ever have to negotiate its future with black opposition groups that are wedded to violence?” and “do you think that the Soviet Union is seeking to control the Cape sea route?” Crocker later said they were “very leading questions…some of them could only have been written in Pretoria. You knew that they were plants, in effect.”
But the importance of QFRs is twofold: they are eventually accessible to the public, and they are drafted by the bureaucracy, not just the candidate. Congress, consequently, receives an official response, not a nominee’s hedged answer to a difficult question about resources. In almost every assistant secretary hearing since the 1960s, senators have asked how a short-staffed Africa Bureau could implement such a broad agenda with limited resources. Nominees tend to promise aggressive advocacy for more resources or exhibit the kind of leadership that might “reinvigorate the sense of public service,” but it is almost impossible for them to deliver on those assurances. In contrast, when the same question is answered through the QFR process, the response carries more weight because it has presumably been cleared by senior levels of the State Department.
Post-Strategy
I am convinced that the confirmation hearing is an opportunity to seize, not just an obstacle to overcome. I recognize that what I am suggesting may not be possible given our partisan politics and the intricacies of moving nominations through Congress—a reflection of how both political parties and both branches of government approach this process. At the same time, I can’t escape the fact that it is rare for U.S.-Africa policymakers to have access to a public platform as important as the U.S. Congress. We should strive to use this moment to engage in a constructive policy discussion and educate the broader public about Africa’s importance to U.S. interests. We can also commit ourselves, in front of the American people, to doing more and doing better with our African partners. Or, as Susan Rice noted in her statement, if “we engage actively and, yes, even take a few risks, the American people stand to reap substantial and lasting benefits.” The confirmation hearing should be the starting point, not a detour, on the path to more effective policy.
Unless there is an embedded link, all transcripts and statements were accessed via the ProQuest U.S. Congressional Collection.
Great article, Judd! Perhaps confirmation hearings could also have been (and be) used to elevate the American public's awareness of the value of foreign aid as a strategic investment tool, and not just charity.