The US has lost more than half its career ambassadors and a significant proportion of other senior diplomats since Donald Trump took office, the head of the foreign service association has said.
Barbara Stephenson, a former ambassador to Panama and charge d’affaires in London, said that the top ranks of US diplomacy were being “depleted at dizzying speed”, and the state department was under “mounting threats”.
Stephenson pointed to a hiring freeze that has reduced the intake into the foreign service from 366 in 2016 to an expected 100 in 2018, and a cut in the number of promotions. She said the number of career ambassadors (professional diplomats rather than political appointees) was down 60% since January, while the number of career ministers, one rank below, has declined from 33 to 19.
“Were the US military to face such a decapitation of its leadership ranks, I would expect a public outcry,” Stephenson wrote in a message to members of the American Foreign Service Association (AFSA). “The talent being shown the door now is not only our top talent, but also talent that cannot be replicated overnight. The rapid loss of so many senior officers has a serious, immediate, and tangible effect on the capacity of the United States to shape world events.”
The depletion in the strength of US diplomacy has been highlighted during Trump’s Asia trip. Despite the urgency of the looming confrontation on the Korean peninsula, the administration has yet to nominate an ambassador to Seoul.
The administration has announced it wants to cut the state department and international aid budget by nearly a third. Congressional leaders have rejected that proposal and ordered spending to be sustained at last year’s levels. But the secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, has gone ahead with his retrenchment plans, describing the reorganisation of the 35,000-employee department as “the most important thing I want to do during the time I have”.
He has hired consultants to help the “redesign”, and imposed a hiring freeze until that is completed at the end of the year.
In her letter as AFSA president, Stephenson said that interest in joining the foreign service was “plummeting”, with half the number of applicants taking the entry examination compared with 2016.
Meanwhile, the administration has filled less than half the 152 politically appointed positions at the state department, according to the Partnership for Public Service.
The majority of those positions are currently filled by career officials in a temporary capacity, including Susan Thornton, the acting assistant secretary for east Asian and Pacific affairs.
However, such senior acting officials frequently lack the clout that White House nomination and Senate confirmation confer. Their authority could be further undermined by the Vacancies Act, which only allows career officials to carry out top-ranking roles for a maximum of 300 days. That deadline is now looming for some high-ranking officials.
“You can just put another acting in place when the clock runs out, even if it’s not the ideal solution,” a state department official said.
A state department spokesman disputed some figures put forward by AFSA and questioned the significance of others.
He said 63 diplomats were waiting for congressional approval of their promotions and when that happened there would be 1,039 senior foreign service officers, only slightly below the total at the same point in 2016.
The spokesman also argued that the claim of a 60% reduction in the number of career ambassadors was misleading as applied to only a small number of individuals. There were only five of them at the beginning of the year and three had retired.
“The goal of the redesign has always been to find new ways to best leverage our team’s brains, ingenuity and commitment to serving our nation’s interests,” he said. “AFSA and other employee groups are important partners in the redesign effort. As has been said many times before, the freezes on hiring, promotions, are only temporary while we study how to refine our organisation.”
