The Right-Wing Plan for Trump to Root Out the “Deep State Department”
In the Room with Peter Bergen - June 11, 2024
Confirmation
hearings in the US Senate are rarely funny enough to make it onto the
late night comedy shows, YouTube or even the news. But, in 2014, a guy
hoping to get a job as America’s ambassador to Norway made it happen.
ARCHIVAL:
Jon Stewart: “Why on Earth did President Obama nominate an Ambassador to Norway who’s never been to Norway in the first place?
FOX News Newscaster: George Tsunis, raised nearly $850,000 for the President’s re-election campaign.
Jon Stewart: Oh.
[SOUND OF STUDIO AUDIENCE LAUGHTER]
George
Tsunis was a hotel chain owner from New York who gave and raised money
for Republicans before switching parties to support President Obama.
And, after winning, Obama briefly nominated Tsunis to be U.S. ambassador
to Norway. Briefly.
ARCHIVAL U.S. Senator: A few words about Norway. The United States and Norway…
Dennis
Jett: There are clips on YouTube of his Senate confirmation hearings
where he didn't even know what kind of government Norway had.
Dennis
Jett knows plenty about what US ambassadors should know. He capped off a
28-year foreign service career by serving as an ambassador twice. And
he couldn’t believe how unprepared Tsunis was for his confirmation
hearing.
ARCHIVAL George Tsunis: Um, but, uh, there are, uh, there are…
Dennis
Jett: He didn't know what the political parties in Norway were. He
didn't have any idea what American businessmen would sell in Norway.
ARCHIVAL George Tsunis: There were a lot of markets that will continue to open up. Uh…
That's
the voice of Tsunis … bungling his way through that confirmation
hearing in 2014. And if that seems bad, the news coverage that came
after was even worse.
ARCHIVAL Newscaster 1: What will likely go down as one of the most cringeworthy nomination hearings in recent memory.
ARCHIVAL
Newscaster 2: I'm not sure Tsunis even googled Norway. He made
reference to the country's president, which by the way, Norway does not
have, and stumbled over just about everything else.
[MUSIC]
Tsunis
in the end didn't get that Norway job. But he kept giving money to
political campaigns and finally found himself a diplomatic job under
President Biden ... as America's ambassador to Greece. It's a pretty
sensitive posting. Greece is a doorstep for migrants coming to Europe
from Asia and Africa and it maintains tricky relations with its neighbor
Turkey, given the two countries' history of going to war with each
other. All of which might make you ask: Isn't this just a terrible way
to fill these jobs?
Dennis Jett: The short answer is yes, yes,
it's done anyhow. Yes, both parties do it. Is it a threat to national
security? Yes. We're unique, the United States, in that we are the only
country in the world that sells the title ambassador in exchange for
campaign contributions.
I spoke with Ambassador Jett about this
odd State Department hiring saga for kind of a complicated reason. I've
been trying to make sense of an 887-page document -- a detailed plan,
really -- that aims to overhaul how the US State Department and nearly
every other branch of the American federal government will operate and
hire employees in 2025.
The writers of this document say it'll
help Donald Trump cure what ails the federal government should he win
the White House this year. Critics of the plan say it will basically
leave the federal government wrecked, and a lot of these critics are a
little freaked out.
ARCHIVAL Newscaster 1: The blueprint outlined
by Project 2025, which is a multi-million dollar effort by Trump's
allies aimed specifically at overhauling key government agencies in a
potential second term.
ARCHIVAL Newscaster 2: To reshape
America's balance of power by putting virtually every part of the
government under the control, executive control of Trump.
ARCHIVAL Newscaster 3: The idea is to commandeer, reshape, and do away with what Republicans deride as the deep state.
This
document is part of something called Project 2025, which was put
together by the conservative research institution, the Heritage
Foundation. And it's all part of a wider strategy being worked out by
Trump allies to come into office with a huge roster of vetted applicants
who are loyal to the new president's agenda. And then appoint thousands
of them – perhaps tens of thousands of them – to hold jobs that were
formerly held by career bureaucrats and employees of the federal civil
service.
Among other things, this massive document lays out a
blueprint for what kinds of jobs these political appointees would fill,
who would get fired to make way for the newcomers, and what kinds of
changes would take place inside agencies ranging from the Departments of
State, Defense and Justice all the way to the departments of Treasury,
Education and Agriculture. And a lot of the coverage of this plan has so
far been pretty partisan.
ARCHIVAL Newscaster 1: Here's how Donald Trump plans to end our democracy with Project 2025.
ARCHIVAL Newscaster 2: Republicans have grand visions of what 21st Century America should look like.
ARCHIVAL
Newscaster 3: Crackpots, insurrectionists, and weekend terrorists are
laying the groundwork to turn our government into a Trumpist nightmare.
But
my main questions about what might be coming are less political than
they are practical. The last time Trump was president, let’s put this
charitably, his choices could be hard to predict. But once you got into
the weeds of policy, he was often more than happy to leave the details
up to the people who'd done the homework for him.
Indeed, after
Trump was elected in 2016 he adopted many of the national security
proposals that the Heritage Foundation had already laid out in reports
they’d published.
And in the case of Project 2025, a whole lot of
people have done a whole lot of homework for Trump. And I want to know
how this homework would affect the day to day operations of the federal
government. So I decided to zoom in on just one agency. A department
whose work is important, complicated, and often takes place out of
sight. The State Department.
You'll hear from the person who
actually wrote the State Department chapter of that 887-page document.
She directed the Department’s storied office of policy planning under
President Trump. And she's got big plans for America's diplomats if
Trump becomes president a second time around.
Kiron Skinner:
There were so many people who wiggled into the administration thinking
that they knew better than the president. And that their job was to
undermine. I'd like us to get back to respecting the Commander in Chief.
You'll
also hear from two former U.S. ambassadors who both spent the bulk of
their long careers serving in the State Department. They'll explain what
the diplomats there do and what that means for you.
Tom Shannon:
We're the one that keeps doors open for wheat farmers, for people
producing all kinds of industrial products. For people selling services
abroad, and also looking to bring goods and services into the United
States.
And you'll also hear what they think is coming if the authors of the Project 2025 document get their way.
Dennis Jett: Reading that document, it sounds like a hostile takeover.
Tom
Shannon: It would be kind of like the rapture. People would suddenly
disappear from their desks. And there would be no one to take their
place.
I'm Peter Bergen, and this is "In the Room."
[THEME MUSIC SURGES, THEN FADES]
I
want to start by talking a little bit more about why the United States
has a Department of State in the first place. Even back in the days of
George Washington, it was pretty clear that a U.S. president couldn't
handle all the work of being America's chief executive all by himself.
For one thing, while Washington was at home in the capital, America
needed to shake hands with other countries, to make alliances, to send
messages of friendship or warning and, of course, to help Americans buy
and sell stuff overseas. So the new republic set up its first baby
bureaucracy to handle foreign affairs. Back then, the department was
just a Secretary of State named Thomas Jefferson, a dozen diplomats and a
handful of clerks back home. The State Department now is, of course, a
lot bigger, but basically it has the same job.
Kiron Skinner: And
all of this is about supporting the President's agenda. There is no
other role for the State Department beyond supporting a President — a
duly elected President's foreign policy agenda.
Kiron Skinner is a
professor of international relations at Pepperdine University. She ran
the State Department's office of Policy Planning for about a year while
Donald Trump was president. And she wrote the chapter on how to remake
the State Department in that 887-page Heritage Foundation document
that's causing so much ruckus right now in DC.
Kiron Skinner: I'm
part of Project 2025, which is Heritage's attempt to prepare a
well-ordered transition for the conservative candidate for President in
2020—
Peter Bergen: Which we presume is going to be Donald J. Trump.
Kiron
Skinner: Um, yes. And, don't believe what you read in the media. This
is not a scary group doing odd things. It's fully within the American
tradition of using civil society participants to help organize
themselves for temporary service in government.
Peter Bergen: And
part of this is the lessons of 2016 when, I mean, suddenly Trump was
president, and there hadn't been much planning for that.
Kiron
Skinner: Well, I wouldn't quite put it that way. But you're absolutely
right, Peter, in saying that, we weren't really prepared to govern. I
was at the campaign headquarters in New York on Election night. There
was a lot of surprised faces.
Kiron Skinner: And when it happened
there wasn't much time. That 70 odd days between the day after the
election and Inauguration Day are just not enough to prepare to run one
of the most complicated governments in the world, and perhaps the most
consequential one.
Kiron Skinner: So, the traditional,
establishment Republicans did come in. They weren't in line
intellectually with Trump. They weren't in line with Trump in all kinds
of ways. And then a lot of the true believers didn't have the Washington
or government experience that were needed.
Kiron Skinner: That
wasn't the greatest cocktail for success on the personnel front, nor was
it the greatest cocktail for policy success.
Throughout the
Project 2025 gameplan, you can find variations on this idea that
President Trump's vision about policy got thwarted by people who thought
they knew better. Some of these people were Trump's own appointees who,
like Skinner just mentioned, weren't fully aligned with Trump. But in
this telling of Trump's presidency, a lot of the thwarting came from
people who make a career working for the U.S. government. Civil
servants. Technocrats. Bureaucrats. Or, to use one of Trump's favorite
terms – the Deep State.
ARCHIVAL Donald Trump: Unelected Deep State operatives who defy the voters to push their own secret agendas, are truly a threat…
ARCHIVAL Donald Trump: I'm fighting the deep state. I'm fighting, uh, I'm fighting the swamp. It's a vicious group of people.
More
than 2 million people across hundreds of agencies make up the U.S.
government's more or less permanent civil service. Shrinking this
federal bureaucracy has been a longstanding goal of the Heritage
Foundation and the conservative movement writ large. And they’ve got big
hopes for a president who, back in his reality TV days on The
Apprentice, coined the show’s most famous phrase.
ARCHIVAL Donald Trump: Maria, you're fired.
ARCHIVAL Donald Trump: Michael. You're fired.
ARCHIVAL Donald Trump: Anand, you're fired. Go.
ARCHIVAL Donald Trump: I have no choice, you’re fired.
On
the campaign trail, Donald Trump has said he'd reinstate an executive
order from his first term called Schedule F, which would make ANY civil
servant in a "policy role" easily fireable by an incoming president.
Trump and his allies characterize this order as a way to get rid of a
reasonable-but-unspecified number of uncooperative civil servants.
ARCHIVAL
Donald Trump: Here's my plan to dismantle the deep state and reclaim
our democracy from Washington corruption once and for all. First, I will
immediately reissue my 2020 executive order restoring the president's
authority to remove rogue bureaucrats, and I will wield that power very
aggressively.
It’s true that every incoming presidential
administration gets to replace some people at the top of federal
agencies with their own appointees. Traditionally this amounts to
something like four or five thousand new bosses and policymakers who get
appointed to come in and implement a new president's vision.
Exactly
how many more appointees would flood into the federal government under a
second Trump term is debatable. Critics who've closely read the
Schedule F order think it opens the door for as many as 50,000 civil
servants getting the ax after inauguration day.
ARCHIVAL
Newscaster 1: For months now, Project 2025 has also been vetting Trump
loyalists to replace career civil servants throughout the government.
ARCHIVAL
Newscaster 2: This effort to basically make it so it’s so much easier
to fire career subject-matter experts. That is an effort to make the
government purely partisan and is staffed with loyalists.
In
Kiron Skinner's chapter of the Project 2025 document, she lists a bunch
of problems she says need fixing inside the State Department. But the
first one she mentions, on the first page, is the personal politics of
the department's employees. She asserts that large swaths of State
Department employees harbor left-wing views that will cause them to
resist the agenda of any conservative president. Back in 2020,
then-President Trump made a joke while introducing his Secretary of
State Mike Pompeo at a press conference. The remark perhaps suggests
that Trump sees diplomats the same way:
ARCHIVAL Donald Trump:
Secretary of State Pompeo is extremely busy, so if you have any question
for him right now, could you do that? Because, you know what I'd like
to do? I'd like him to go back to the State Department, or as they call
it, the Deep State Department.
Peter Bergen: In the 2025
document, you say large swaths of the State Department's workforce are
left wing and predisposed to disagree with the conservative president's
policy, agenda, and vision.
Kiron Skinner: And this is true.
That's just not rhetoric. And it's not that they're just left wing, it
is that they really believe so radically different and this is a problem
in our system from a conservative President, whoever he or she is, that
they think they have a responsibility now to dig in and keep their
point of view or wait out the President by slowing the process down.
That's not how our system was designed to work.
Peter Bergen: And
the counterargument to that is, you know, you have to have some level
of professional civil service, whether it's at the State Department or
elsewhere.
Kiron Skinner: I agree. But they need to be
professional. And part of being professional is understanding that you
are really there to support a President's agenda.
Peter Bergen:
So give us some concrete examples, since you were there a year, of where
you felt that very obviously people were not implementing the
president's agenda.
Kiron Skinner: I think it was so
multifaceted, so broad based, it's hard to point out one. What I found
is that there were a lot of junior staffers who were not there for the
President's agenda because no one ever told them it was their job to be.
So, I keep saying, everything starts at the top.
Peter Bergen:
But look at the Biden administration. We've had people inside the Biden
administration sign letters saying that they're totally opposed to the
way he's handling the Gaza situation. It's not like this is specific to
Trump. Right now with Gaza, there's a huge amount of internal opposition
inside the State Department to the president's policy.
Kiron Skinner: Yes. And so, use the dissent channel. That's why it's there.
Peter Bergen: Yeah. But what is it? What is the dissent channel?
Kiron Skinner: It is a way in which career officials or others who work for State can dissent responsibly.
Peter Bergen: And it comes, I think, out of the Vietnam War.
Kiron Skinner: Yes.
Peter
Bergen: And, it's a great idea, except, do you think Biden has paid an
iota of attention, attention to these dissent cables? No, he's just
going on.
Kiron Skinner: No. And I think these people aren't even
doing this dissent channel. They're just, you know, organizing
themselves with separate letters, their resignations and so on.
Kiron
Skinner: I think that's actually okay. If you want to resign in protest
to certain policies, no one says that you can't do that. But what you
shouldn't be doing, and which I think there's a huge liability, is to
decide that you're going in a different direction policy-wise than what
the President is.
Peter Bergen: And the easiest way to do that is just to slow roll things.
Kiron
Skinner: And just wait it out. And so, I think having people –
political appointees – in the DAS, deputy assistant secretary positions,
and even in junior staffers. Not a bad idea. Am I saying jettison all
of the careers? No, they're critical to the movement of the process.
Peter
Bergen: And obviously, there's a huge pool of talent there, people
who've devoted their life to Africa or devoted their life to
understanding trade or counter terrorism or choose your topic, right?
Institutional knowledge is important.
Kiron Skinner: Right, but
they're also the people who, many of them, despite their important
knowledge of policy issues, have been trained up in the view that they
don't have to really respect a conservative President and that they can
wait him out.
Kiron Skinner: We need to take their great knowledge and combine it with great commitment.
Peter
Bergen: Okay. So, January 20th, 2025 President Trump is inaugurated.
You say ‘No one in a leadership position at the State Department on the
morning of January 20th should hold that position at the end of the
day.’ I mean, what does that look like in practice? Because you
mentioned deputy assistant secretaries. That's like five levels down
from the Secretary. So, I mean, you're talking about a pretty broad
purge of these people.
Kiron Skinner: Yeah. I don't know that it's a purge. It's actually how things are done.
Peter Bergen: So this doesn't really differ then from the Biden transition?
Kiron
Skinner: It doesn’t differ from what a transition should be. Why not
have your people ready to go? Those positions matter too. Whether you
are a front office staff assistant, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of
State, you can move machines in government. You have constituents
abroad. Have your people ready to go. And I think that's what Transition
2025 is attempting to provide, a new model for conservative governance.
Peter
Bergen: At the RNC, at the Republican National Committee, there's been
discussion of, well you can't work there unless you say that Trump
actually won the 2020 election. I mean, are there going to be sort of
litmus tests, ideological litmus tests?
Kiron Skinner: No, it's
going to be people who are loyal to the President and his agenda. I
think that's okay. That's the same in most administrations.
Peter
Bergen: But I mean, his agenda is partly – he's running in part on the
fact that he won the last election. So I mean, it's, it's tricky.
Kiron Skinner: I don't know that the foreign policy people are going to be asked about the 2020 election.
That's
as much as Kiron Skinner said on that subject. And there are no
specifics in the Heritage Foundation document about how the political
loyalty of foreign service officers would be determined. There are also
no specifics about how many people in the State Department would get
fired. Skinner said she doesn't have an exact number in mind.
Kiron
Skinner: I don't. But I will say we have talked about non-Senate
confirmed positions, as many as possible. I think there will be an
attempt to have political appointees ready to go. What that sheer number
is, I don't know.
Peter Bergen: We're talking hundreds of people?
Kiron Skinner: Probably. But this is not unusual.
[MUSIC TRANSITION]
But
State Department veterans I spoke with believe some of Skinner's
recommendations are quite unusual. One worry is that — in an
administration where the President isn’t super focused on details, where
agencies are suddenly flooded with newcomers — the Heritage
Foundation’s laundry list of policy changes could end up being
implemented without really considering their ramifications.
Dennis Jett: There'd be a tremendous pressure to do that because the work's done. Here's the list.
Dennis
Jett is the U.S. ambassador you heard from at the beginning. He served
nearly three decades in the State Department. Here’s an example of one
of these in-the-weeds policies he’s worried about. The Heritage document
argues that the new administration should immediately freeze all
efforts to implement unratified treaties.
It takes two thirds of
the U.S. Senate to agree and ratify a treaty. That’s been a pretty rare
occurrence in recent decades. And so sometimes, the State Department
unofficially goes along with treaties that the rest of the world has
adopted because they just seem like a good idea.
Dennis Jett: The
best example of that is the Law of the Sea Treaty. That is a treaty
that's supported by industry because they would like to be able to have
rules for exploiting the resources of the deep sea bed. It's supported
by the Defense Department because they would like to have rules as to
what you can do in various parts of the ocean if you're a warship.
In
simple terms, the Law of the Sea treaty spells out how much control a
country has over the ocean off their coast, and for how many miles out.
More than 160 nations have agreed on questions like who gets to fish or
drill for oil where, and how close another country’s navy can get to
your shores. But the U.S. Senate has never officially ratified that
treaty. Jett is concerned about what kind of chaos might ensue if the
U.S. suddenly decided to “freeze” its policy of following that treaty.
Dennis
Jett: If you got no rules, then why couldn't Chinese ships and Chinese
warships cruise off a couple miles off the beach, or Chinese fishing
vessels. Then it's a Wild West show where whoever has the biggest
warship can dictate what happens in that particular spot at that
particular moment. What are the rules if you say there are no rules?
And
of all the recommendations for the State Department contained in that
887-page Heritage Foundation document, Jett is probably most critical of
the mandate that, "No one in a leadership position on the morning of
January 20 should hold that position at the end of the day."
Dennis
Jett: You would have this wholesale turnover of people that I think do
pretty important work and do pretty important jobs, and do it well.
Ambassador
Jett was a young Democrat living in New Mexico when he signed up to
join the foreign service under the administration of Republican
President Richard Nixon. In deciding to serve, he said the president's
politics didn't ever enter his mind.
Dennis Jett: I didn't even
think of it at the time, and I never considered myself particularly
political. My father was a career Air Force officer. My grandfather also
worked for government. So, that sense of serving your country was very
strong and very motivating. Everybody in the Foreign Service that I ever
met recognized that the president got elected and we didn't.
Jett
ranks among the rare career foreign service officers who work their way
up to become an ambassador. He was first tapped by President George H.
W. Bush to serve as ambassador to Mozambique and later served as
ambassador to Peru under President Bill Clinton.
Dennis Jett:
It's a long shot. Only about 5 percent of the people actually work their
way up to the top and have the combination of dumb luck and hard work
to become an ambassador. It's hard, in the same way that all those
people who go into the military as second lieutenants aren't going to be
generals.
Jett is now a professor of international relations at
Penn State University. He wrote a book called "American Ambassadors."
It’s about U.S. diplomats, their history, and some of the ways he thinks
the job ought to be reformed. The Constitution gives the president the
power to appoint diplomats but is otherwise vague on the details.
Historically, lots of U.S. ambassadorships have been doled out to people
whose main qualification seems to be the money they donated to winning
presidential candidates. Jett is a pretty understated kind of guy, the
sort of person who will tell a joke and doesn't really mind if you miss
it. But his contempt for the dollar diplomats is unmistakable.
Dennis
Jett: We're unique, the United States, American exceptionalism at work,
in that we are the only country in the world that sells the title
‘Ambassador’ in exchange for campaign contributions.
Dennis Jett:
And this is not a Democrat thing or a Republican thing.
Administrations, at least as far back as Nixon, have done this. Normally
though, in a normal presidency, it's 30 percent political appointees
that are ambassadors and 70 percent career people like I was in Peru and
Mozambique.
Dennis Jett: When you're a political appointee,
there are basically three reasons. You're either a friend of the
president – George W. Bush appointed a lot of people from Skull and
Bones, his secret club at Yale. There are the political reasons – former
senator who you owe a favor to. Or it's campaign cash. You, you wrote a
big check and a colleague and I did a paper a number of years back
calculating what it costs to go to London versus what it costs to go to
Lisbon.
A plum ambassadorial posting like London, Jett says, can
cost a campaign contributor more than a million dollars. For Lisbon,
you're only looking at a few hundred thousand.
Dennis Jett:
Lisbon is a bargain, by the way. It's much cheaper. What I love is these
people who say, ‘I want to serve my country, and, I want to go to
Brussels, or I want to go to Copenhagen, I want to go to Stockholm.’
Dennis
Jett: Why don't you serve your country in Uzbekistan, you know? I'm
underwhelmed by their spirit of sacrifice, let's put it that way.
Jett
has plenty of specific, practical objections to Project 2025's plan for
the State Department. But maybe the main one is this: He thinks that
replacing even more career Foreign Service people with political
appointees will make the problem of unqualified amateurs getting into
important diplomatic jobs much, much worse.
Dennis Jett: I'm not
saying you shouldn't have political leadership at the top. But to have
this wholesale turnover would be one way to make America totally
irrelevant in the world and make our government basically dysfunctional.
Then
there's also the issue of how long this wholesale turnover would take,
and how long those new roles for political appointees might remain
vacant. Because working at the State Department isn't like just getting a
job at the Post Office. In addition to extensive background checks, you
also need a high level security clearance.
Dennis Jett: All of
those positions that you're talking about require a top secret
clearance. And so to get a top secret clearance, it takes months to do
the background investigation. You're looking for things like, does this
person have financial problems that makes him or her susceptible to
being bribed by foreign agents or does this person have a criminal
record?
Dennis Jett: I don't know how you get over the clearance problems.
And
just in case you think this critique of Project 2025 is a purely
partisan thing, I spoke to another ambassador who’s got a lot of similar
practical concerns. His name is Tom Shannon. He served in the State
Department under Donald Trump. He said he first registered to vote as a
Republican back in the 1970’s. And then he registered with no party for
the duration of his 35-year foreign service career. And he currently
describes himself as being “without party.” Shannon is also worried
about the consequences of mass firings.
Tom Shannon: I can tell
you from my experience in the first Trump administration, that the
tensions between the Secretary of State and the Office of Personnel at
the White House will ensure that the movement of political appointees
into an institution like the Department of State will be slow. Because
of security clearances, because of disputes over their political
backgrounds, because of concerns about what they're capable of and what
they're not capable of.
Tom Shannon: And the, the bottom line is
that you can end up with, similar to what happened in the first term, a
lack of people in important jobs, that harms the ability of the United
States to get its job done.
Shannon's three decade career at the
State Department spanned six U.S. Presidents. Under President Trump, he
held the department's third-highest job, Under Secretary of State. And
for a few days in 2017, right at the beginning of the Trump
administration, he even served as acting boss of the whole department.
Tom Shannon: Twelve days.
Peter Bergen: How was that?
Tom Shannon: Twelve days. Well, the republic trembled at the thought.
Tom
Shannon ranks among the rare and exceptionally distinguished foreign
service officers who are awarded the title, “Career Ambassador.”
Tom Shannon: Well, it was a tremendous honor. It's our highest rank.
Peter Bergen: “Career ambassador”: Is that another person's deep state?
Tom
Shannon: You know, the deep state's a fascinating concept because at
one level it exists. But it exists not in terms of individuals. It
exists in terms of American national interests and how our national
security organizations are structured around the world.
Tom
Shannon: Because we are not a country that reshapes itself every four
years. We are a country that has profound interests all around the globe
and we've built a larger intelligence network, military network,
diplomatic network that are all designed to address these interests that
have, over time, been confirmed by one President after another.
Tom
Shannon: And so when each President comes into office he or she,
eventually, is faced with a world that has been built for them. And
their job is to oversee it, fine tune it, but keep it running. And if
you wanted to talk about a deep state, that's it. It's the United States
in the world.
Peter Bergen: And so this gets to kind of the
point of the episode we're doing, which we're focusing on the State
Department. The Trump administration has a plan to, basically, there'll
be far more political appointees, not only at the State Department, but
also in the federal government.
Peter Bergen: There are 4,000
political appointees in the federal government. This new plan, the
estimate is there will be 50,000. Now, it seems in particular at the
State Department where, if you're an expert on, let's say, Uzbekistan,
this is not something you become an expert on overnight. So what would
the practical effect of, really upping the number of political
appointees, et cetera?
Tom Shannon: Well, number one, this is,
this would become a jobs program and we'd be returning to a period of
time in the late 19th century, before our professionalization of our
civil service and before the professionalization of our foreign service.
And once you breach a wall, like in the Department of State, what's to
stop you from doing the same in the intelligence community?
Tom
Shannon: What will stop you from doing something similar within the
civilian service of the Department of Defense? Among the core groups of
our national security agencies who have spent decades building expertise
that really can't be replicated.
Tom Shannon: Which doesn't mean
that there aren't smart people who know a lot about foreign affairs.
But they don't have the granular experience of operating in a complex
bureaucracy and making things happen over time.
Shannon and other
diplomats share the worry about the sheer number of people who'd be
affected if Donald Trump fires everyone in a leadership position right
after the inauguration. Diplomats I've talked to say there's at least
300 jobs at the State Department Headquarters in Foggy Bottom, in
Washington, D.C., that are likely senior enough to be considered
leadership jobs. Throw in those leaders’ aides and assistants and that
number more than doubles. Internationally, there are 195 ambassadors.
And then, right below them, there's another 195 deputy chiefs of
mission. Put that all together and it adds up to a whole lot of empty
chairs.
Tom Shannon: It would be kind of like the rapture. People
would suddenly disappear from their desks. And there would be no one to
take their place, because you just can't put people into government
that quickly. The mechanism doesn't exist to do that. And so, if you
want a national security agency in which no one is present, then try to
do that.
And Shannon says what happens at the State Department
isn’t just about treaties and abstract policies. It also affects you
anytime you travel overseas.
Tom Shannon: For Americans traveling
abroad, the State Department is what protects you. Should you be
arrested, should you be injured, should you pass away, it's the
Department of State that will take care of you, first and foremost.
And
American diplomacy can affect you even if you don’t cross a border at
all. A farmer in Nebraska or Louisiana can't just decide to sell their
crops in Bangladesh. And those affordable Bangladeshi-made kids clothes
that you find on the rack at Walmart or the Gap – they didn't just get
there without lots of complex trade agreements.
Tom Shannon:
We're the one that keeps doors open for cattlemen, for wheat farmers,
for people producing all kinds of industrial products. We are the ones
who keep the doors open for people selling services abroad, and also
looking to bring goods and services into the United States.
[MUSIC]
It's
certainly worth gaming out what practical effects the Project 2025
recommendations might have on the State Department. But much of what
happens to US foreign policy in a possible second Trump term would
likely also come down to Trump himself. And Shannon's experience in this
regard is instructive.
[MUSIC]
Peter Bergen: How many times were you in the room with President Trump?
Tom
Shannon: I lost count but I was in all the early meetings that
President Trump, beginning with the Prime Minister of the United
Kingdom, through any number of others.
Peter Bergen: Did he learn over time?
Tom
Shannon: Yeah, certainly. But, he's highly personalistic. He's very
focused on the person sitting across the table from him. He's very much
driven by the idea that leaders lead. Commanders command. And his
purpose was not necessarily to understand kind of the broad strategic
stretch of an issue. It was to understand who you are as a leader, what
you want from him, and to express what he wants from you, and then to
see whether or not a deal can be done.
Tom Shannon: President
Trump was not a person who was easily briefed. He had an inquisitive
mind, sharp opinions, and ideas about what could be done or needed to be
done. And briefing was more an interactive process. In other words, if
you walked into a room thinking you were going to talk to him, you were
mistaken. He was going to speak with you, and you were going to respond.
Peter Bergen: So, what kind of questions would he ask?
Tom
Shannon: You have to remember, his connection to the world of national
security was limited. And so he was constantly amazed and surprised by
the nature of U.S. security commitments around the world where we had
troops, where we had embassies, where we had consulates, where we had
Americans who in one way or another were doing the nation's bidding. And
he had lots of questions about why we were there.
Tom Shannon:
What was the purpose? And especially if he thought that it exposed us in
a way that could lead to attack or could draw us into some kind of
conflict.
Peter Bergen: What did you make of him personally?
Tom
Shannon: He was President of the United States. He was chosen by the
American people and our institutions. And as such, he's someone who has
to be respected. His style of leadership for those of us who had grown
up in a certain ambiance was unusual and sometimes shocking. And I often
found myself disagreeing with the decisions that he and the people
around him made.
Tom Shannon: But at the same time, he's an
iconoclast. And he's an accelerant of change, and he understands that.
And I found that the people who worked best with him realized that he
was not going to be directed or tamed. He could just be channeled. And I
have to say that in the aftermath of this experience, I came away with
much greater respect for Thomas Moore and Thomas Cromwell.
Peter Bergen: Why was that?
Tom
Shannon: Well, as Henry VIII's chancellors, they also were dealing with
a hyperactive and intelligent leader, who was also very dangerous.
Shannon
retired from the State Department in 2018, and now works at a private
law firm. The media coverage framed his departure as a heavy blow to a
beleaguered agency.
Peter Bergen: Didn't your mother say it was the right time to leave when you left the Trump administration?
Tom Shannon: She did indeed.
Peter Bergen: What did she say?
Tom Shannon: Well, my mother died in November of 2017.
Peter Bergen: I’m sorry to hear that.
Tom
Shannon: And I announced my retirement in February of 2018. But, she
and I had many conversations, about the Trump administration and my role
in the Department of State. And it was her opinion that, as she told me
once, one man cannot save an institution, an institution has to save
itself.
Tom Shannon: And that I had done all that I could
possibly do for the foreign service and the Department of State. I
needed to think about myself more and the institution less. She was a
good mother.
Peter Bergen: And what prompted her to make these observations?
Tom
Shannon: She believed we were in a twilight struggle for our democracy.
She was not a fan of the President. And she made that clear.
Peter
Bergen: You worked at the State Department for 35 years, and Rex
Tillerson, the former Secretary of State, once referred to you as a
“walking encyclopedia” at State. And yet, people outside may not know
your name. How do you feel about that? What does it say about the
mission of the State Department in general?
Tom Shannon: I'm very
happy to be an anonymous citizen. Celebrity is never something that I
have sought. What I have sought was service to my country.
Peter Bergen: Are there legitimate reforms of the State Department that are needed?
Tom
Shannon: Always. Always. Remember, we reflect a 19th-century vision of
the world as made up of nation states, but we live in a world that is
globalized economically and socially. And so the nature of power is
shifting. Increasingly power is technology, or access to technology, and
the Department of State is an enormously capable place. But we don't
have the scientific and technological expertise that's going to be
needed as we go deeper into the 21st century.
Peter Bergen: But
that's very different from saying it's a largely left wing organization
that needs to be reformed by having most of its top officials depart.
Tom Shannon: Because that's not a true reflection of what the Department of State is.
In
her portion of that 887-page Heritage Foundation document, Kiron
Skinner seems to disagree pretty strongly. She describes the department
as being too left-leaning, and badly in need of change via a big
infusion of new blood. And she says she didn’t write the chapter in hope
of being part of that unspecified number of new political appointees to
State.
Kiron Skinner: I did not. I know people are campaigning
for cabinet positions. I just never have done that. I wouldn't even know
how to do it. If you have any advice on how to do that, please share
it.
Peter Bergen: Don't shoot your dog.
Kiron Skinner: I'm not. I'm not so, um, but I'm happy to serve in the ways that I can.
Skinner
says she’s confident that the more drastic-seeming recommendations will
be implemented in a reasonable way. She thinks this is true whether
you’re talking about the really visible stuff, like the firing of career
diplomats, or the more obscure stuff, like putting a “freeze” on the
U.S. following the Law of the Sea treaty.
Kiron Skinner: I don't
think anyone would be reading what's in the State Department chapter and
saying, “Oh my God, January 20th, 12:05 pm., you know, this agreement
is dead.” Our system doesn't quite work that way. I think the way I
would expect them to read what we've written is to say that I'm going to
have to make my case to the American public. I'm going to have to work
really hard with my counterparts to make the case that my national
interest matches with yours. I've been saying this to a number of
Europeans.
Peter Bergen: They're reaching out to you because they're pretty sure a Trump administration's coming in or what?
Kiron Skinner: They want to get clarity.
Skinner’s
big picture argument – and the big-picture argument of the other
authors of the many other chapters of that 887-page document – is that
an electorate voting for Trump would be voting for big change. And so
big changes would need to happen throughout the federal government.
Kiron
Skinner: So when you get a cabinet official, and I hope some
prospective ones are listening to this important podcast that you do,
they need to understand there's a genius, there's political artistry in
getting elected. Give the guy or gal some credit. Someone is figuring
out the American electorate. Someone is figuring out what the issues are
that connect with people. And I think in the Trump case, he was
listening to them and they were listening to him.
[MUSIC]
But
I think the point that veteran diplomats like Tom Shannon are making is
that they see themselves as serving the voters too. But they’re serving
voters in a complicated world, doing complicated work – like learning
obscure foreign languages, or understanding complex ocean treaties – and
that messing too much with the machinery of diplomacy can have higher
stakes than you might think.
[MUSIC]
Peter Bergen: To the
average person, in say, Nebraska, Louisiana. Pick your American state.
What is the purpose of the State Department? What does it do for the
American people?
Tom Shannon: Well, let me tell you a story. When
I was confirmed as Under Secretary of State, shortly afterwards,
traveled to Northern Africa, to engage with partners there on some
counter terrorism programs, which were to the obvious benefit of the
United States and the American people. But at the time, I went to
Carthage, and I visited the cemetery there of North American war dead
from World War II. All the Americans and Canadians who had been killed
fighting the German army were buried there.
Tom Shannon:
Thousands and thousands of young men, mostly between the ages of 18 and
26. And the director of the cemetery had a little trick he liked to play
on people who had common names such as myself. He came to me and he
said, ‘Mr. Shannon, I would like to show you your grave.’ And he took me
to the grave of a soldier named Thomas Shannon. And it was a striking
moment, because although it wasn't me, it could have been. And what I
learned from that time at the North American Cemetery outside of
Carthage was that almost everybody in that graveyard, four years before
they were killed, had no idea that they were going to fight the Germans
in North Africa.
Tom Shannon: They had no idea the Germans were
going to kill them. And they had no idea that their mortal remains were
going to stay in northern Africa for the rest of eternity. And what I
mean by this is that history reaches out and touches you in ways you
don't expect. And, in the kind of world we live in today, we need to be
vitally aware of everything that is happening around us.
Tom
Shannon: We need to understand what we have to do to promote our
interests, what we have to do to protect ourselves, and what we need to
do to keep the peace. And so, I would argue that, for the greater
American public, you have no better servant than your Foreign Service
Officer. You have no greater American than the women and men of the
United States Department of State who will go anywhere in the world
armed only with a smile and a handshake on behalf of the United States.