On Feb. 4, 2021, U.S. President Joe Biden traveled the short distance from the White House to Foggy Bottom to address a beleaguered government department. His goal was to help restore self-belief and resource to the State Department, which had endured a torrid four years under then former President Donald Trump:
Investing in our diplomacy isn’t something we do just because it’s the right thing to do for the world. We do it in order to live in peace, security, and prosperity. We do it because it’s in our own naked self-interest.
On Feb. 4, 2021, U.S. President Joe Biden traveled the short distance from the White House to Foggy Bottom to address a beleaguered government department. His goal was to help restore self-belief and resource to the State Department, which had endured a torrid four years under then former President Donald Trump:
Investing in our diplomacy isn’t something we do just because it’s the right thing to do for the world. We do it in order to live in peace, security, and prosperity. We do it because it’s in our own naked self-interest.
Biden’s speechwriters were smart in characterizing diplomacy as a means to advance “naked self-interest.” In terms of public messaging, stripping altruism from U.S. diplomacy made the State Department appear vital and ruthless, the nation’s first line of defense. But the president’s primary purpose was therapeutic: to reassure that State would be accorded respect and reenergized under his watch.
Trump’s first term was brutal for the State Department. Because of sharp proposed budget cuts—mitigated to some extent by Congress but injurious to morale—a hiring freeze, and career professionals bolting for the exits, the department experienced a 10 percent staff reduction during Trump’s presidency. Indignity was piled on indignity, with little respite across the four years. Before he was even inaugurated, Trump’s transition team communicated that all of President Barack Obama’s noncareer ambassadors (mainly Democratic fundraisers) had to vacate their embassies by Inauguration Day, breaking with the tradition of affording ambassadors a grace period.
Trump’s first secretary of state, former ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson, introduced a hiring freeze and commissioned a management consultancy, Insigniam, to help realize efficiencies. The private firm distributed a questionnaire that invited State Department employees to assist in their own defenestration: “To optimally support the future mission of the Department, what one or two things should your work unit totally stop doing or providing?” Unsurprisingly, Tillerson and Insigniam did not receive the response rate they were hoping for.
That many conservatives viewed State principally as an antagonist to Trump’s agenda, rather than an instrument to advance U.S. interests, was illustrated in an interview that Fox News’s Laura Ingraham conducted with the president in November 2017. Ingraham asked, “Are you worried that the State Department doesn’t have enough Donald Trump nominees in there to push your vision through?” before adding that “other State Departments, including [President Ronald] Reagan’s, at times, undermined his agenda. … And there is a concern that the State Department currently is undermining your agenda.”
Trump replied, accurately, that “I’m the only one that matters. Because when it comes to it, that’s what the policy is going to be. You’ve seen that. You’ve seen it strongly.” He also highlighted the merits of simply leaving posts vacant, for it was better to have no one in roles than the wrong ones: “So, we don’t need all the people that they [State] want. You know, don’t forget, I’m a businessperson. I tell my people, ‘When you don’t need to fill slots, don’t fill them.’ But we have some people that I’m not happy with there.”
Though Mike Pompeo, who succeeded a humiliated Tillerson in April 2018, lifted the hiring freeze, significant problems persisted. Key ambassadorships and assistant secretary of state roles—described by former Secretary of State Colin Powell, a retired four-star general, as tantamount to “battalion commanders”—went unfilled. Across Tillerson’s and Pompeo’s tenures, diplomats were targeted for “wrongthink” under previous administrations.
As seasoned diplomat and outgoing CIA Director William Burns wrote in 2019, “Most pernicious of all was the practice of blacklisting individual officers simply because they worked on controversial issues during the Obama administration, such as the Iran nuclear deal, plunging morale to its lowest level in decades.” Assessing the damage that the Trump administration’s staffing cuts and hiring freezes had wreaked on the State Department, Antony Blinken, who succeeded Pompeo as secretary of state following Biden’s 2020 election victory, said in an interview before taking office that that “penalizes you in all sorts of ways that will go on for generations, not just for a bunch of years.”
So, what does Trump’s second term mean for the State Department? The obvious answer is more misery. But let’s begin with a potential positive so far as departmental leadership is concerned. Trump’s pick for secretary of state, Marco Rubio, will fly through the Senate confirmation process, and he does not appear to regard the department he will soon lead as part of the so-called deep state. Rubio was a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has been consistently interventionist, subscribes to former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s notion that the United States is the one “indispensable nation,” and has a track record of flagging human rights causes. Rubio is about as establishment-friendly a Republican as currently exists.
But this almost guarantees that Rubio will experience significant frustrations, as his internationalist worldview and Trump’s America First is split by a chasm. If Trump’s first term is any guide, Rubio will have to bow as low as Pompeo if his tenure stands any chance of going the distance. In being nominated as secretary of state, Rubio has demonstrated that he possesses some of those self-abnegating traits. But it will be much more challenging to sustain the necessary pliability and loyalty while in office, as Rubio’s counsel trails off into the void and Trump starts unloading on social media. It does not augur well that Tammy Bruce, Trump’s pick to become State Department spokesperson, once described Rubio as “the kid waving frantically in the back of [the] room trying to prove relevance.”
It is, of course, also possible that Trump placed Rubio at State as he has no intention of meaningfully using the man, and the department he leads, as a shaper of foreign policy. But there are precedents for ignoring State and running foreign policy from the White House. Does the name William P. Rogers ring a bell? The likelihood it doesn’t reveals something about how President Richard Nixon viewed the State Department: as an unwieldy, leak-prone obstacle to bold policy initiatives. Secretary of State Rogers was shut out almost entirely from the Nixon administration’s most significant foreign-policy achievement: the opening to China. (Rogers’s humiliation was a foretaste of the marginalization of the State Department to come.) The difference between Nixon and Trump is that the former drew upon Henry Kissinger, of course, and the latter will likely draw upon his instincts—which his closest advisors will cheer on regardless of their quality and utility.
Beyond the individual who leads the State Department, there might also be a seismic change in the way diplomats are hired and fired. Three months before the end of his first term, Trump issued Executive Order 13957, which allowed him to convert certain federal civil service jobs—namely, all “career positions in the Federal service of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating character”—to “excepted service” under the classification Schedule F. This would have effectively allowed the president to fire civil service employees and hire replacements without following the usual civil service hiring and placement procedure; they would effectively be political appointees. Trump bluntly expressed his broader purpose in his very first 2024 campaign event: “Either the deep state destroys America or we destroy the deep state.” Schedule F did not go into effect because Biden rescinded it as soon as he assumed the presidency. But in an executive order signed late on Inauguration Day, titled “Initial rescissions of harmful executive orders and actions,” Trump revoked Biden’s order as the first step to reinstating Schedule F and defeating what he regards as an implacably hostile federal bureaucracy. Trump has ominously referred to the “Deep State Department,” and it is firmly in his crosshairs.
If Trump succeeds, the implications for State are dire. Meritocratic principles will be ditched in favor of loyalty to the president’s agenda. The threat of losing one’s job for perceived disloyalty might also have a stultifying effect on the quality of advice dispensed by State employees. Why risk flagging human rights abuses in a nation that happens to be in the president’s good books at any given moment?
But Trump’s reforms will not be easy to achieve. In April 2024, Biden introduced a regulation—“Upholding Civil Service Protections and Merit System Principles”—that served to “reinforce and clarify longstanding civil service protections and merit system principles.” Trump would have to issue and finalize a new regulation, which would take time. Congress would almost certainly perform a role as a brake to presidential action. There is at least some bipartisan consensus that competence is a trait worth having in a diplomat. Given the profound nature of the potential change, contrary to the meritocratic purpose of the 1883 Pendleton Act that created the modern U.S. civil service, Schedule F would likely end up in the Supreme Court. And then Trump will discover whether his appointments to the bench are truly as loyal as he expects them to be. Guardrails will be severely tested, and it is impossible to say whether they will hold.
Whatever happens next, Foggy Bottom is in for a rough ride. The State Department is a perfect representation of the Professional-Managerial Class, a category term coined by Barbara and John Ehrenreich, so reviled by the Trump movement. State is populated by staff educated at elite universities and military academies, professes to hold true to a bipartisan objectivity in a manner that triggers the partisan, and has crafted foreign-policy initiatives pertaining to alliance building and free trade agreements that jar with Trump’s America First beliefs. If you were to overleave a political map of the United States with the states from which the foreign service principally recruits, there would be scant overlap between red and blue. Why should Trump voters care about an institution culturally alien to them and that appears to have been complicit in expending vast resource on unnecessary wars and foreign assistance?
The longer history of the State Department’s decline is of course vitally important, too. Over the past 40 years, State has been fighting a losing battle for influence in the executive branch, as the Pentagon and a beefed-up National Security Council pushed this faded heavyweight around. And it is worth remembering that the department has suffered austerity at the hands of Republican and Democratic presidents alike: Bill Clinton-era budget and personnel cuts, stemming from a misguided desire to realize a post-Cold War peace dividend with a sharp contraction in diplomatic resources, were devastating.
But the threat posed by Trump is ideological, premeditated, and of a different order of magnitude. This vast repository of expertise will find Trump’s second term even harder to bear than the first, and this is dismal news for the United States and the world. As Gen. James Mattis, before his stint as Trump’s defense secretary, warned in 2013, “If you don’t fund the State Department fully, then I need to buy more ammunition.”
The post The Misery of Trump’s Second State Department appeared first on Foreign Policy.
