WASHINGTON,
Jan 15 (Reuters) - Aides to President-elect Donald Trump have asked
three senior career diplomats who oversee the U.S. State Department's
workforce and internal coordination to step down from their roles, two
U.S. officials familiar with the matter said, in a possible signal of
deeper changes ahead for the diplomatic corps.
The
team overseeing the State Department's transition to the new
administration, the Agency Review Team, has requested that Dereck Hogan,
Marcia Bernicat and Alaina Teplitz leave their posts, the sources said.
While
political appointees typically submit their resignations when a new
president takes office, most career foreign service officers continue
from one administration to the next. All three officials have worked in
both Democratic and Republican administrations throughout the years,
including as ambassadors.
Trump,
who will be inaugurated Jan. 20, pledged during his presidential
campaign to "clean out the deep state" by firing bureaucrats that he
deems as disloyal.
"There's
a little bit of a concern that this might be setting the stage for
something worse," one of the U.S. officials familiar with the matter
said.
In
response to a request for comment, a spokesperson for Trump's
transition team said: "It is entirely appropriate for the transition to
seek officials who share President Trump's vision for putting our nation
and America's working men and women first. We have a lot of failures to
fix and that requires a committed team focused on the same goals."
A
State Department spokesperson said the department has no personnel
announcements to make. Hogan, Bernicat, Teplitz did not respond to
requests for comment.
Trump
is likely to adopt a more confrontational foreign policy and has vowed
to bring peace between Ukraine and Russia, and give more support to
Israel. He has also pushed for unorthodox policies such as trying to
make Greenland part of the United States and pushing NATO allies for
higher defense spending. A diplomatic workforce that dutifully
implements rather than pushes back will be key to achieving his goals,
experts say.
The
decision to ask the three to step aside is reminiscent of staff shake
ups at the State Department during the first Trump administration, when
several key officials in leadership positions were removed from their
jobs.
According
to two separate sources familiar with Trump's plans for the State
Department, the administration plans to appoint more political
appointees to positions such as assistant secretary, which are typically
filled by a mix of career and political bureaucrats.
These
sources said Trump's team wants to get more politically appointed
officials deeper into the State Department as there was a pervasive
feeling among his aides that his agenda was "derailed" by career
diplomats during his last term from 2017 to 2021.
The Agency Review Team is already interviewing candidates for such positions, said the two sources.
According
to the State Department website, Hogan is the State Department's
executive secretary, the official that manages the flow of information
between department bureaus and with the White House.
Bernicat
is the director-general of the U.S. Foreign Service and director of
global talent leading the recruitment, assignment, and career
development of the Department's workforce.
Assistant
Secretary Teplitz has been with the Department over three decades,
serving overseas as well in Washington. Most recently, she has been
implementing the duties of under secretary for management, which
oversees more than a dozen bureaus responsible for issues from the
budget to recruitment, procurement and human resources across the
workforce.
"These
are not policy positions. This is all the mechanics of the
bureaucracy," said Dennis Jett, a professor at Penn State’s School of
International Affairs who spent 28 years in the foreign service. "But if
you want to control the bureaucracy, that's the way you do it."
Choosing
who fills the three roles would allow Trump's team to divert resources
to and from parts of the State Department, control the information
gathered by the numerous bureaus and embassies and manage personnel
decisions, he said.
SHATTERING THE 'DEEP STATE'
The requests for the officials to step down came as Marco Rubio, Trump's nominee for secretary of state, was testifying on Wednesday before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for his confirmation hearing.
On
his campaign website Trump laid out how, in 10 steps, he would "shatter
deep state" and "fire rogue bureaucrats and career politicians".
The
first of those steps is to reissue a 2020 executive order that would
have removed employment protections for certain civil servants, making
it easier to fire them.
Opponents of the plan - often called "Schedule F"
after the new class of civil servants it would create - say stripping
employment protections from government workers would be an effort by
Trump to politicize the federal bureaucracy to carry out his policy
agenda.
Normally,
presidents get to choose several thousand of their own political
appointees to the federal bureaucracy, but the career civil service -
around two million workers - is left alone. Schedule F would give Trump
the power to fire up to 50,000 of those and replace them with
like-minded conservatives.
Taking charge of State's personnel would "expedite" the process of appointing loyal officials, said Jett, the professor.
Unions and government watchdogs have said they plan to sue Trump if he carries out his promise to re-introduce a Schedule F.
Reporting by Humeyra Pamuk, Simon Lewis and Gram Slattery; Editing by Don Durfee and Alistair Bell