The State of Trump's State Department
Anxiety and listless days as a foreign-policy bureaucracy confronts the possibility of radical change
THE ATLANTIC
· MAR 1, 2017
·
· The
flags in the lobby of the State Department stood bathed in sunlight and
silence on a recent afternoon. “It’s normally so busy here,” marveled a
State Department staffer as we stood watching the emptiness. “People
are usually coming in for meetings, there’s lots of people, and now it’s
so quiet.” The action at Foggy Bottom has instead moved to the State
Department cafeteria where, in the absence of work, people linger over
countless coffees with colleagues. (“The cafeteria is so crowded all
day,” a mid-level State Department officer said, adding that it was a
very unusual sight. “No one’s doing anything.”) As the staffer and I
walked among the tables and chairs, people with badges chatted over
coffee; one was reading his Kindle.
“It just feels empty,” a recently departed senior State official told me.
This week began with reports that
President Donald Trump’s budget proposal will drastically slash the
State Department’s funding, and last week ended with White House adviser
and former Breitbart head Stephen Bannon telling the
attendees of the annual Conservative Political Action Conference that
what he and the new president were after was a “deconstruction of the
administrative state.” At the State Department, which employs nearly
70,000 people around the world, that deconstruction is already well
underway.
In
the last week, I’ve spoken with a dozen current and recently departed
State Department employees, all of whom asked for anonymity either
because they were not authorized to speak to the press and feared
retribution by an administration on the prowl for leakers, or did not
want to burn their former colleagues. None of these sources were
political appointees. Rather, they were career foreign service officers
or career civil servants, most of whom have served both Republican and
Democratic administrations—and many of whom do not know each other. They
painted a picture of a State Department adrift and listless.
Sometimes,
the deconstruction of the administrative state is quite literal. After
about two dozen career staff on the seventh floor—the State Department’s
equivalent of a C suite—were told to find other jobs, some with just 12
hours’ notice, construction teams came in over Presidents’ Day weekend
and began rebuilding the office space for a new team and a new concept
of how State’s nerve center would function. (This concept hasn’t been
shared with most of the people who are still there.) The space on
Mahogany Row, the line of wood-paneled offices including that of
the secretary of state, is now a mysterious construction zone behind
blue tarp.
With the State Department demonstratively shut out of
meetings with foreign leaders, key State posts left unfilled, and the
White House not soliciting many department staffers for their policy
advice, there is little left to do. “If I left before 10 p.m., that was a
good day,” said the State staffer of the old days, which used to start
at 6:30 in the morning. “Now, I come in at 9, 9:15, and leave by 5:30.”
The seeming hostility from the White House, the decades of American
foreign-policy tradition being turned on its head, and the days of
listlessness are taking a toll on people who are used to channeling
their ambition and idealism into the detail-oriented, highly regimented
busywork that greases the infinite wheels of a massive bureaucracy.
Without it, anxiety has spiked. People aren’t sleeping well. Over a long impromptu lunch one afternoon—“I can meet tomorrow or today, whenever!
Do you want to meet right now?”—the staffer told me she too has trouble
sleeping now, kept awake by her worries about her job and America’s
fading role in the world.
“I
used to love my job,” she said. “Now, it feels like coming to the
hospital to take care of a terminally ill family member. You come in
every day, you bring flowers, you brush their hair, paint their nails,
even though you know there’s no point. But you do it out of love.”
Some
try to conduct policy meetings just to retain the muscle memory and
focus, but, said another department employee, “in the last couple
months, it’s been a lot more sitting around and going home earlier than
usual.” Some wander around the streets of Foggy Bottom, going for
long, aimless lunches. “I’m used to going to three or four interagency
policy meetings a week,” the employee added, referring to the meetings
in which policy is developed in coordination with other government
departments. “I’ve had exactly one of those meetings in the last five
weeks.” Even the torrent of inter-department email has slowed to a
trickle. The State Department staffer told me that where she once used
to get two hundred emails a day, it’s down to two dozen now. “Not since I
began at the department a decade ago has it been so quiet,” she said.
“Colleagues tell me it’s the same for them.”
A
lot of this, the employee said, is because there is now a “much smaller
decision circle.” And many State staffers are surprised to find
themselves on the outside. “They really want to blow this place up,”
said the mid-level State Department officer. “I don’t think this
administration thinks the State Department needs to exist. They think
Jared [Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law] can do everything. It’s reminiscent
of the developing countries where I’ve served. The family rules
everything, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs knows nothing.”
Right
now, those I’ve spoken to in the department seem to know very little
about what’s going on. The staffer told me that she finds out what’s
going on at State from the news—which she spends all day reading
because, after years of having her day scheduled down to 15 minute
blocks, she has nothing else to do. And even the news itself isn’t
coming from official sources. There hasn’t been a State Department press
briefing, once a daily ritual, since the new administration took over
five weeks ago—though they’re scheduled to resume March 6. These
briefings weren’t just for journalists. They also served as a crucial
set of cues for U.S. diplomats all over the world about policy
priorities, and how to talk about them.
With no daily messaging, and
almost no guidance from Washington, people in far-flung posts are flying
blind even as the pace of their diplomacy hasn’t abated.
“Meetings
are happening,” said one American diplomat stationed abroad, “but it is
noticeable that we’re not having press briefings, which makes it hard
for ambassadors waiting to take cues. We’re able to echo what Mattis,
Tillerson, Pence say. But we’re still not there in aggressively
promoting president’s agenda.” Other American diplomats, especially
those in geopolitically sensitive posts, find themselves going on old,
Obama-era guidance because no new guidance has been issued. But “the
diplomacy goes on,” said another American diplomat abroad. “People
notice every little change in our position,” the diplomat said. “And we
don’t always know where the administration is or is going to be, so you
operate on old guidance until Washington takes a new position. We’re
largely taking our cues from the president, vice president, and
Secretary Tillerson’s remarks and from reading the Spicer briefings,”
referring to the daily briefings of White House press secretary Sean
Spicer. “We are watching the news and seeing how quickly we can get our
fingers on the [Spicer] transcripts,” the diplomat said.
When
Rex Tillerson finally arrived in the building, members of the
department I spoke to had very high hopes for him. People wanted to like
him. But his remarks to the staff left many cold, and confused. “He
only spoke of reform and accountability,” said the State Department
staffer. “He offered no vision of America and its place in the world.”
He also spoke of protecting missions abroad, which some read as a
gratuitous reference to Benghazi. “It landed like a thud,” said the
staffer. “There are all these people whose sole focus is protecting
missions abroad. What do you think we’ve been doing for all these
years?”
The
fact that there hasn’t been a deputy secretary of state nominated, and
that many undersecretary slots sit empty, is also unnerving to a
bureaucracy used to relying on a strict hierarchy to get things done.
“Not having a deputy ... is going to become a problem real soon,” the
staffer said. “The world has been pretty quiet but it won’t stay that
way.” She and others I spoke to worry about the optics of Tillerson
flanked by empty seats during his meeting in
Bonn, Germany, with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who was
accompanied by a dozen aides. All these details send signals that other
countries’ leaders and diplomats pore over for indications of potential
policy changes. “With the Chinese, protocol is policy,” said the
mid-level State officer. “We’re sending signals that are potentially
damaging the relationship in ways we can’t anticipate.”
It
also worries some State employees that Tillerson was unable to name his
own deputy. His choice of the neocon Elliott Abrams was vetoed by the
White House because Abrams had criticized Trump,
and many in Foggy Bottom saw it as yet another signal that they and
their secretary were being downgraded. “It’s troubling that his first
battle with the president, he lost,” said the State employee. “If he
couldn’t even bring in his own staff member, it’s concerning for future
issues.”
On Tuesday, Trump confirmed their fears, telling Fox and Friends that
there was a reason he wasn’t filling certain government posts: “in many
cases, I don’t want to fill those posts. … They’re unnecessary.”
But
while senior State appointees have yet to be appointed, other staff has
been showing up. The Office of Policy Planning, created by George
Kennan after World War II, is now filled not just with Ph.D.s, as it
once was, but with fresh college graduates and a malpractice attorney
from New Jersey whose sole foreign-policy credential seems to be that
she was born in Hungary. Tillerson’s chief of staff is not his own, but
is, according to the Washington Post,
a Trump transition alum named Margaret Peterlin. “Tillerson is
surrounded by a bunch of rather mysterious Trumpistas,” said the senior
State official who recently left. “How the hell is he supposed to do his
job when even his right hand is not his own person?” One State
Department employee told me that Peterlin has instructed staff that all
communications with Tillerson have to go through her, and even scolded
someone for answering a question Tillerson asked directly, in a meeting.
Peterlin
did not respond to request for comment, but former Newt Gingrich aide
and State public affairs senior advisor R.C. Hammond clarified that the
malpractice attorney was the White House liaison to State, and denied
that Peterlin had issued such instructions or admonishments, or that the
State Department was slow and listless. “The place is humming,” he
said.
He
and his staff pointed me to, among other people, Christiaan James, who
is the Arabic-language spokesperson for State’s bureau of Near Eastern
Affairs. He is busy; he spends a lot of time fielding questions from the
Arabic-language press. “Even though we haven’t had a press briefing
since January, we still get a lot of inquiries,” he said. “There’s still
a lot going on, and we have to respond.” In the absence of a press
briefing, staffers are now winging it, trying to interpret for their
questioners what the American president meant when he seemed to toss
overboard the idea of a two-state solution. “This actually came up
yesterday,” James said. “An Egyptian channel wanted me to go on air and
talk about this.” So, using the “two pages of guidance” put out by the
press officer on the Israel-Palestine desk, James told them that,
whatever the two sides agree on, “the United States is committed to
finding a solution to this, that we’re going to be involved in the
process. It’s about telegraphing that the U.S. is committed and not
getting into the nitty gritty, and talking in more general terms until
something more specific gets developed.”
Michelle
Bernier-Toth, who runs overseas services for American citizens abroad,
meanwhile continues to monitor the world for crises that might affect
U.S. citizens and make consular services for them even more efficient,
but she told me that she didn’t need guidance from the White House or
even the Secretary of State. “What we do, we just keep on doing it,” she
told me. “We’re very much a heart that keeps going. The consular side
is law-based, so that’s our guidance.”
A
State Department public-affairs officer was on the line with us when we
talked. Another public-affairs officer was also on the line when I
spoke to Paco Palmieri, a career foreign service officer and the acting
assistant secretary for Western Hemisphere Affairs. Palmieri has had
plenty to keep him busy, from Tillerson’s meeting with the Brazilian
foreign minister in Bonn, Germany to his trip to Mexico, but he is an
acting assistant secretary and he doesn’t know how long it will take for
a political appointee to take his place. “Sometimes as an
administration gets started, it takes some time to get a definitive
answer but that just means you work harder to get to it,” he told me.
“Every transition is unique.” Then the public affairs officer hustled
him off to his next meeting.
According
to the other people I spoke to, though, Tillerson seems cut off not
just from the White House, but from the State Department. “The guidance
from Tillerson has been, the less paper the better,” said the State
Department staffer. “Voluntary papers are not exactly encouraged, so not
much information is coming up to him. And nothing is flowing down from
him to us. That, plus the absence of undersecretaries and assistant
secretaries means there’s no guidance to the troops so we’re just
marking time and responding.”
Many
in the State Department openly acknowledge that the department is
bloated, that it is at times inefficient and redundant. But they don’t
understand why the culling is being done in such a crass and
indiscriminate manner. “They didn’t talk to anyone, they didn’t ask them
what they did, they just told them to look for other jobs,” said the
mid-level officer of the seventh floor dismissals. “Nothing will make
you a libertarian faster than working in the federal government,” said
the State staffer. “There are inefficiencies, there needs to be reform.
They certainly have a right to staffing, or lack of staffing,” the
staffer said of the new administration. “But doing it without an
analysis of where the inefficiencies are, the cutting just won’t be
rational or effective. It just creates ill will.” The last month, the
staffer said, “has been a very deliberate stress test.” “There seems to
be no effort to benefit from the knowledge and expertise of people who
are here, who just want to help,” said the mid-level officer. Instead,
they see the White House vilifying them as bureaucrats no one elected,
and it all seems, the mid-level officer said, “symbolic of wanting to
neuter the organization.”
“This
is probably what it felt like to be a British foreign service officer
after World War II, when you realize, no, the sun actually does set
on your empire,” said the mid-level officer. “America is over. And
being part of that, when it’s happening for no reason, is traumatic.”