Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s life just got waaaayyy more difficult.
According to the Washington Post, an entire team of senior management officials at the State Department quit on Wednesday. The resignations are "part of an ongoing mass exodus of senior foreign service officers who don’t want to stick around for the Trump era," the Post reported. All of those who left have served at the State Department for years, under both Democratic and Republican administrations. "It’s the single biggest simultaneous departure of institutional memory that anyone can remember, and that’s incredibly difficult to replicate," David Wade, who worked as the State Department chief of staff under Secretary of State John Kerry, told the Post. "Department expertise in security, management, administrative and consular positions in particular are very difficult to replicate and particularly difficult to find in the private sector." Most of those who resigned are career foreign service officers who are in charge of overseeing thousands of overseas diplomatic posts and taking care of Americans and U.S. diplomats based abroad. According to the Post, it's typical that some restructuring happens under the new administration, which works with senior officials to decide who should stay in their roles. But now the exodus is making that almost impossible. "You don’t run foreign policy by making statements, you run it with thousands of people working to implement programs every day," Ambassador Richard Boucher, who worked as State Department spokesman for Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, told the Post. "To undercut that is to undercut the institution." The vacancies are particularly alarming given that Sec. Tillerson has no previous government experience, and in light of some of the comments made by President Trump on foreign policy during his campaign. Only time will tell how the new administration will tackle the voids left behind.
According to the Washington Post, an entire team of senior management officials at the State Department quit on Wednesday. The resignations are "part of an ongoing mass exodus of senior foreign service officers who don’t want to stick around for the Trump era," the Post reported. All of those who left have served at the State Department for years, under both Democratic and Republican administrations. "It’s the single biggest simultaneous departure of institutional memory that anyone can remember, and that’s incredibly difficult to replicate," David Wade, who worked as the State Department chief of staff under Secretary of State John Kerry, told the Post. "Department expertise in security, management, administrative and consular positions in particular are very difficult to replicate and particularly difficult to find in the private sector." Most of those who resigned are career foreign service officers who are in charge of overseeing thousands of overseas diplomatic posts and taking care of Americans and U.S. diplomats based abroad. According to the Post, it's typical that some restructuring happens under the new administration, which works with senior officials to decide who should stay in their roles. But now the exodus is making that almost impossible. "You don’t run foreign policy by making statements, you run it with thousands of people working to implement programs every day," Ambassador Richard Boucher, who worked as State Department spokesman for Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, told the Post. "To undercut that is to undercut the institution." The vacancies are particularly alarming given that Sec. Tillerson has no previous government experience, and in light of some of the comments made by President Trump on foreign policy during his campaign. Only time will tell how the new administration will tackle the voids left behind.