Morale has hit rock bottom at Foggy Bottom, as American foreign service officers languish and Rex Tillerson builds a mini-empire.
Employees at the State Department couldnt help but notice the stacks of cubicles lined up in the corridor of the seventh floor.
For diplomats at the department, it was the latest sign of the empire being built by Secretary of State Rex Tillersons top aides. The cubicles are needed to accommodate dozens of outsiders being hired to work in a dramatically expanded front office that is supposed to advise Tillerson on policy.
Foreign service officers see this expansion as a parallel department that could effectively shut off the secretary and his advisors from the career employees in the rest of the building. The new hires, several State officials told Foreign Policy, will be working for the policy planning staff, a small office set up in 1947 to provide strategic advice to the secretary that typically has about 20-25 people on its payroll. One senior State Department official and one recently retired diplomat told FP that Tillerson has plans to double or perhaps triple its size, even as he proposes a sweeping reorganization and drastic cuts to the State Department workforce.
Veterans of the U.S. diplomatic corps say the expanding front office is part of an unprecedented assault on the State Department: A hostile White House is slashing its budget, the rank and file are cut off from a detached leader, and morale has plunged to historic lows. They say President Donald Trump and his administration dismiss, undermine, or dont bother to understand the work they perform and that the legacy of decades of American diplomacy is at risk.
Current and former senior foreign service officers say the Trump administration is hollowing out and marginalizing the State Department, with a dismissive attitude to diplomacy and the civil servants who execute it. They say the diplomatic corps is facing an unprecedented crisis. When Tillerson has tried to defend his ailing department, he has gotten stonewalled and outmaneuvered by the White House.
The policy planning staff has become the backroom staff for the secretary. This shuts out bureaus it shuts out new and interesting ideas. It leaves no forward thinking or fresh ideas, said Max Bergmann, who spent six years at the State Department, including time on the policy planning staff, before leaving in January at the end of the Barack Obama administration.
The plans to bolster the policy planning staff reflect Tillersons reliance on a close coterie of advisors, closing himself off from the rest of the department. Top among them are his enigmatic chief of staff, Margaret Peterlin, and his director of policy planning, Brian Hook, a mainstream Republican who worked in the State Department and the White House during the George W. Bush administration.
The seventh floor has walled itself off with Brian Hook, Margaret Peterlin, and some others, a senior foreign service officer told FP, speaking on condition of anonymity. Some people get through the wall, but its few and far between.
As the department builds word clouds and expands the policy planning staff, the Trump administration has shown little urgency in filling an array of senior State positions, including crucial ambassadorships in the Middle East and regional assistant secretaries who oversee Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. When Colin Powell served as secretary of state under President George W. Bush, he referred to his assistant secretaries as battalion commanders. But only one assistant secretary has been nominated so far, A. Wess Mitchell for European and Eurasian affairs.
He has yet to be confirmed and start the job.
Career officials are stretched thin covering the positions as acting assistant secretaries in the interim but confide to colleagues that they dont have the clout of political appointees from inside the department or outside of it. The lack of senior leaders has grinded the gears in decision-making and further damaged morale, career diplomats said.
One example officials pointed to was Tillersons front office sitting on memos that would unlock $79 million for the departments Global Engagement Center to counter Islamic State messaging and narrative. Bureaucratic rules required that Tillerson simply write and sign two memos one for $19 million from Congress and one for $60 million through the Defense Department saying State needed the funds. But he hasnt, leaving some career officials at a loss.
But other key decisions remain stalled. Last I checked, there are over 150 action memos stuck in the secretarys office, a mid-level official told FP. Decisions that otherwise would take hours to process are just languishing, said the official.
Because no ones been empowered to make decisions, theres no longer a back-and-forth exchange of information in a routine way, another recently departed official said.
Yet foreign embassies have also taken notice of the leadership vacuum. More than a dozen foreign diplomats told FP that they often do not know whom they should speak to in the administration to convey messages from their governments.
Some ambassadors found their phone calls to Tillersons front office never returned, while diplomats have sought to bypass the tottering State Department, instead delivering messages to the White House or Trumps son-in-law, Jared Kushner, or daughter Ivanka.
One European diplomat said his embassy has had limited contacts with the [State Department] leadership in general since Trump took office, because Tillerson does not seem very involved and because we don't feel State is where policy is really decided.
More than six months into the Trump presidency, career diplomats worry that the administrations assault on the State Department will cause lasting damage to the workforce.
Tillersons controlling front office and its focus on squeezing the budget threatens to slow the hiring and assignment of new foreign service officers to positions around the world. All the while, numerous top career officials with decades of experience have quit, leaving a vacuum of talent and institutional knowledge in their wake.
While the State Department hemorrhages its own talent, it has also cut itself off from new talent by ending several distinguished fellowship programs to recruit top university graduates during its redesign.
The cumulative effect of a marginalized State Department, coupled with a freeze on hiring and budget pressures, could mean the next generation of diplomats will wither on the vine, current and former officials warn.
Tillerson himself appears to be exasperated by the job, caught between ideologues in the White House, competing congressional interests, and shell shock after jumping from the private sector, where he ran the U.S. oil giant ExxonMobil as a powerful executive in a highly centralized organization.
He doesnt have the same authority as a CEO, one Trump insider told FP. I know the White House isnt happy with him and he isnt liking the job.
http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/07/31...paign=New Campaign&utm_term=*Situation ReportI think he hates the job and wont stay long, the aide said.
