The Trump administration has ordered nearly 30 ambassadors in embassies around the world to return to the United States within weeks, a move that would leave a large gap in the American diplomatic corps even as President Trump has said he wants to resolve conflicts through diplomacy.
Many of the ambassadors were told in recent days to leave their posts by mid-January. They are all foreign service officers who had been appointed to their positions by the Biden administration and confirmed by the Senate. A standard tour is three to four years.
The union representing career diplomats said this was the first time that such a mass recall had taken place of career diplomats serving as ambassadors or chiefs of mission.
“Those affected report being notified abruptly, typically by phone, with no explanation provided,” said Nikki Gamer, a spokeswoman for the union that represents career diplomats, the American Foreign Service Association. “That method is highly irregular.”
“The lack of transparency and process breaks sharply with longstanding norms,” she added.
Ms. Gamer said that after checking its archives, the union “can say definitively that such a mass recall has never happened since the founding of the Foreign Service as we know it.”
Candidates for ambassador are nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate. There are two types of ambassadors: career diplomats and political appointees. The latter are often donors or friends of the president, and they are expected to offer their resignations at the start of a new administration. That was the case when Mr. Trump took office in January, and he immediately accepted the resignations.
However, that is not the norm for career diplomats, who often serve for years into a new administration. The Trump administration did not give a reason for the recalls and has not publicly announced them.
“This is a standard process in any administration,” the State Department said in a statement, when asked about the recalls. “An ambassador is a personal representative of the president, and it is the president’s right to ensure that he has individuals in these countries who advance the America First agenda.”
Ms. Gamer said that the union did not have an exact count of the number of ambassadors to be recalled, and that it was trying to piece together the full picture. Politico reported on the recalls on Friday.
An unofficial list circulated among diplomats on Monday. It showed ambassadors being recalled from every part of the world, with about a dozen being told to leave posts in sub-Saharan Africa. Several diplomats said the list was fairly accurate.
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Mr. Trump has not chosen nominees for a number of vacant ambassadorships in sub-Saharan Africa. Around the world, scores of U.S. embassies have vacant ambassador slots. In those cases, the deputy chief of mission, usually a career diplomat, is serving as the chief of mission.
China has surpassed the United States in the number of diplomatic missions in the world, and maintains a consistent rotation of ambassadors through each one.
The mass recall could further damage morale among career diplomats working under Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
Earlier this month, the union released results of a survey of its members showing that 98 percent of respondents said that workplace morale had fallen since Mr. Trump’s second term began in January.
Most of the survey’s more than 2,100 respondents said they were managing tighter budgets and greater workloads as the Trump administration cut spending, including a drastic reduction in U.S. foreign aid. Eighty-six percent said it had become more difficult to carry out U.S. foreign policy. Only 1 percent reported an improvement.
Mr. Rubio presided over what he called a “reorganization” of the department this year. The department announced about 1,300 layoffs in July, with 264 foreign service officers among them. In many cases, the diplomats when they were laid off were on a rotation in Washington before another posting abroad. They happened to be working in an office that was getting excised from the department.
At one point this year, about a dozen senior career diplomats who, before the start of the Trump administration, had gotten assignments to be deputy chiefs of mission overseas were told they would no longer have those jobs. Most of them were women or people of color.
Edward Wong reports on global affairs, U.S. foreign policy and the State Department for The Times.
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