America’s professional diplomats feel demoralized and ignored, with fully 98 percent saying in a new survey that workplace morale has fallen since the Trump administration took over in January.
The findings are contained in a forthcoming report from the Foreign Service Association of America, or A.F.S.A., that warns that “America’s diplomatic capacity is being decimated from within” as seasoned diplomats are laid off or choose to leave government.
“The Foreign Service is in crisis,” said John Dinkelman, the association’s president. “Damage is being done to America’s diplomatic service that we will be paying for for decades to come.”
The report, which will be officially released on Wednesday, paints a grim portrait of the diplomatic corps that is consistent with countless anecdotal complaints from both Foreign Service officers, trained professionals who work in embassies and consulates abroad, and the civil servants who mainly staff the State Department’s headquarters in Washington.
Most of the survey’s more than 2,100 respondents said they were managing tighter budgets and greater workloads amid the Trump administration’s spending cuts, including drastic reductions in U.S. foreign aid. Eighty-six percent said it had become harder to carry out U.S. foreign policy. Just 1 percent reported an improvement.
The State Department did not respond to a request for comment.
Most likely fueling the dissatisfaction is a sense among current and former U.S. officials that, under Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the department has become more political and less relevant. Although Mr. Rubio initially assured department workers that he valued their expertise and wanted the department to play a greater role in foreign policy, numerous officials insist the opposite has happened.
Diplomats sense that their input is not welcome, especially if it diverges from President Trump’s views. They have watched from the sidelines as much of America’s most sensitive diplomacy is conducted not by Mr. Rubio but by Trump insiders such as Steve Witkoff, a real estate mogul with no prior diplomatic experience, and Mr. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. Mr. Witkoff and Mr. Kushner traveled to Moscow this week to meet with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.
Mr. Rubio, who also serves as Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, spends much of his time at the White House and has traveled less frequently than other recent secretaries of state. He does not plan to attend a meeting of NATO foreign ministers on Wednesday in Brussels, for instance, a break from recent practice that is especially notable amid a flurry of high-stakes diplomacy between Russia and Ukraine. (A senior State Department official said that Mr. Rubio had attended dozens of meetings with NATO allies and that it would be “completely impractical” to expect him to attend every meeting.)
Contributing to a sense of declining influence, the department has stopped holding daily televised briefings for the news media. They ceased after the departure of the department’s last spokesperson, Tammy Bruce, in August.
Ms. Bruce, a former Fox News commentator with no background in foreign policy, has been nominated to be deputy U.S. representative to the United Nations. If confirmed by the Senate, she would replace Dorothy Shea, a career foreign service officer and former U.S. ambassador to Lebanon who has also served in Israel, Tunisia and Egypt.
The foreign service association estimates that about a quarter of America’s active Foreign Service officers have left government service this year. Nearly one third of the survey’s respondents said they had changed their career plans since January.
Among those who said they were considering leaving the Foreign Service, 75 percent cited declining morale as a factor in their thinking; more than half cited political influences in the workplace.
The State Department has a strong ethos of nonpartisanship, and many career officials have blanched at the appointments of relatively inexperienced ideological conservatives to senior positions. Mr. Rubio in turn has asserted that he inherited a department infected by “left-wing activists.”
The sense of a more politicized workplace has led diplomats to self-censor their observations and advice, Mr. Dinkelman said. And he added that orientation training for new workers no longer taught them about the State Department’s venerable “dissent channel,” which was created in 1971 in response to concerns that unwelcome opinions about the Vietnam War that proved accurate were ignored or suppressed.
“If I’m not telling you everything I know because I fear that you might not like the answer to the question, then what is the value of diplomacy?” Mr. Dinkelman said.
The report lands as the group protests the State Department’s decision on Tuesday to follow through with some 1,300 layoffs it first announced in July and scheduled for November. The government shutdown prevented the logistical steps required to carry out those layoffs.
The association and many Democrats insist that the job cuts were rescinded by language in last month’s spending agreement in Congress that ended the government shutdown. The Trump administration disagrees with that interpretation. The matter is likely to be headed for the courts.
Michael Crowley covers the State Department and U.S. foreign policy for The Times. He has reported from nearly three dozen countries and often travels with the secretary of state.
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