The Misery of Trump’s Second State Department
If Trump’s first term is any indication, Foggy Bottom won’t have it easy in the years ahead.
By David Milne, a professor of modern history at the University of East Anglia.
Marco Rubio looks serious as staffers around him clap, some smiling.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio waits to speak to
employees upon arrival at the State Department in Washington on Jan. 21.
Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images
January 21, 2025
On Feb. 4, 2021, U.S. President Joe Biden traveled the short distance from the White House to Foggy Bottom to address a beleaguered government department. His goal was to help restore self-belief and resource to the State Department, which had endured a torrid four years under then former President Donald Trump:
"Investing in our diplomacy isn’t something we do just because it’s the right thing to do for the world. We do it in order to live in peace, security, and prosperity. We do it because it’s in our own naked self-interest."
Biden’s
speechwriters were smart in characterizing diplomacy as a means to
advance “naked self-interest.” In terms of public messaging, stripping
altruism from U.S. diplomacy made the State Department appear vital and
ruthless, the nation’s first line of defense. But the president’s
primary purpose was therapeutic: to reassure that State would be
accorded respect and reenergized under his watch.
Trump’s
first term was brutal for the State Department. Because of sharp
proposed budget cuts—mitigated to some extent by Congress but injurious
to morale—a hiring freeze, and career professionals bolting for the
exits, the department experienced a 10 percent staff reduction during
Trump’s presidency. Indignity was piled on indignity, with little
respite across the four years. Before he was even inaugurated, Trump’s
transition team communicated that all of President Barack Obama’s
noncareer ambassadors (mainly Democratic fundraisers) had to vacate
their embassies by Inauguration Day, breaking with the tradition of
affording ambassadors a grace period.
Trump’s
first secretary of state, former ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson,
introduced a hiring freeze and commissioned a management consultancy,
Insigniam, to help realize efficiencies. The private firm distributed a
questionnaire that invited State Department employees to assist in their own defenestration:
“To optimally support the future mission of the Department, what one or
two things should your work unit totally stop doing or providing?”
Unsurprisingly, Tillerson and Insigniam did not receive the response
rate they were hoping for.
That
many conservatives viewed State principally as an antagonist to Trump’s
agenda, rather than an instrument to advance U.S. interests, was
illustrated in an interview
that Fox News’s Laura Ingraham conducted with the president in November
2017. Ingraham asked, “Are you worried that the State Department
doesn’t have enough Donald Trump nominees in there to push your vision
through?” before adding that “other State Departments, including
[President Ronald] Reagan’s, at times, undermined his agenda. … And
there is a concern that the State Department currently is undermining
your agenda.”
Trump
replied, accurately, that “I’m the only one that matters. Because when
it comes to it, that’s what the policy is going to be. You’ve seen that.
You’ve seen it strongly.” He also highlighted the merits of simply
leaving posts vacant, for it was better to have no one in roles than the
wrong ones: “So, we don’t need all the people that they [State] want.
You know, don’t forget, I’m a businessperson. I tell my people, ‘When
you don’t need to fill slots, don’t fill them.’ But we have some people
that I’m not happy with there.”
Though
Mike Pompeo, who succeeded a humiliated Tillerson in April 2018, lifted
the hiring freeze, significant problems persisted. Key ambassadorships
and assistant secretary of state roles—described
by former Secretary of State Colin Powell, a retired four-star general,
as tantamount to “battalion commanders”—went unfilled. Across
Tillerson’s and Pompeo’s tenures, diplomats were targeted for
“wrongthink” under previous administrations.
As seasoned diplomat and outgoing CIA Director William Burns wrote
in 2019, “Most pernicious of all was the practice of blacklisting
individual officers simply because they worked on controversial issues
during the Obama administration, such as the Iran nuclear deal, plunging
morale to its lowest level in decades.” Assessing the damage that the
Trump administration’s staffing cuts and hiring freezes had wreaked on
the State Department, Antony Blinken, who succeeded Pompeo as secretary
of state following Biden’s 2020 election victory, said in an interview
before taking office that that “penalizes you in all sorts of ways that
will go on for generations, not just for a bunch of years.”
So,
what does Trump’s second term mean for the State Department? The
obvious answer is more misery. But let’s begin with a potential positive
so far as departmental leadership is concerned. Trump’s pick for
secretary of state, Marco Rubio, will fly through the Senate
confirmation process, and he does not appear to regard the department he
will soon lead as part of the so-called deep state. Rubio was a member
of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has been consistently
interventionist, subscribes to former Secretary of State Madeleine
Albright’s notion that the United States is the one “indispensable
nation,” and has a track record of flagging human rights causes. Rubio
is about as establishment-friendly a Republican as currently exists.
But
this almost guarantees that Rubio will experience significant
frustrations, as his internationalist worldview and Trump’s America
First is split by a chasm. If Trump’s first term is any guide, Rubio
will have to bow as low as Pompeo if his tenure stands any chance of
going the distance. In being nominated as secretary of state, Rubio has
demonstrated that he possesses some of those self-abnegating traits. But
it will be much more challenging to sustain the necessary pliability
and loyalty while in office, as Rubio’s counsel trails off into the void
and Trump starts unloading on social media. It does not augur well that
Tammy Bruce, Trump’s pick to become State Department spokesperson, once
described Rubio as “the kid waving frantically in the back of [the] room trying to prove relevance.”
It
is, of course, also possible that Trump placed Rubio at State as he has
no intention of meaningfully using the man, and the department he
leads, as a shaper of foreign policy. But there are precedents for
ignoring State and running foreign policy from the White House. Does the
name William P. Rogers ring a bell? The likelihood it doesn’t reveals
something about how President Richard Nixon viewed the State Department:
as an unwieldy, leak-prone obstacle to bold policy initiatives.
Secretary of State Rogers was shut out almost entirely from the Nixon
administration’s most significant foreign-policy achievement: the
opening to China. (Rogers’s humiliation was a foretaste of the
marginalization of the State Department to come.) The difference between
Nixon and Trump is that the former drew upon Henry Kissinger, of
course, and the latter will likely draw upon his instincts—which his
closest advisors will cheer on regardless of their quality and utility.
Beyond
the individual who leads the State Department, there might also be a
seismic change in the way diplomats are hired and fired. Three months
before the end of his first term, Trump issued Executive Order 13957,
which allowed him to convert certain federal civil service jobs—namely,
all “career positions in the Federal service of a confidential,
policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating character”—to
“excepted service” under the classification Schedule F. This would have
effectively allowed the president to fire civil service employees and
hire replacements without following the usual civil service hiring and
placement procedure; they would effectively be political appointees.
Trump bluntly expressed
his broader purpose in his very first 2024 campaign event: “Either the
deep state destroys America or we destroy the deep state.” Schedule F
did not go into effect because Biden rescinded it as soon as he assumed
the presidency. But in an executive order signed late on Inauguration
Day, titled “Initial rescissions of harmful executive orders and
actions,” Trump revoked Biden’s order as the first step to reinstating
Schedule F and defeating what he regards as an implacably hostile
federal bureaucracy. Trump has ominously referred to the “Deep State
Department,” and it is firmly in his crosshairs.
If
Trump succeeds, the implications for State are dire. Meritocratic
principles will be ditched in favor of loyalty to the president’s
agenda. The threat of losing one’s job for perceived disloyalty might
also have a stultifying effect on the quality of advice dispensed by
State employees. Why risk flagging human rights abuses in a nation that
happens to be in the president’s good books at any given moment?
But Trump’s reforms will not be easy to achieve. In April 2024, Biden introduced a regulation—“Upholding
Civil Service Protections and Merit System Principles”—that served to
“reinforce and clarify longstanding civil service protections and merit
system principles.” Trump would have to issue and finalize a new
regulation, which would take time. Congress would almost certainly
perform a role as a brake to presidential action. There is at least some
bipartisan consensus that competence is a trait worth having in a
diplomat. Given the profound nature of the potential change, contrary to
the meritocratic purpose of the 1883 Pendleton Act that created the
modern U.S. civil service, Schedule F would likely end up in the Supreme
Court. And then Trump will discover whether his appointments to the
bench are truly as loyal as he expects them to be. Guardrails will be
severely tested, and it is impossible to say whether they will hold.
Whatever happens next, Foggy Bottom is in for a rough ride. The State Department is a perfect representation of the Professional-Managerial Class,
a category term coined by Barbara and John Ehrenreich, so reviled by
the Trump movement. State is populated by staff educated at elite
universities and military academies, professes to hold true to a
bipartisan objectivity in a manner that triggers the partisan, and has
crafted foreign-policy initiatives pertaining to alliance building and
free trade agreements that jar with Trump’s America First beliefs. If
you were to overleave a political map of the United States with the
states from which the foreign service principally recruits, there would
be scant overlap between red and blue. Why should Trump voters care
about an institution culturally alien to them and that appears to have
been complicit in expending vast resource on unnecessary wars and
foreign assistance?
The
longer history of the State Department’s decline is of course vitally
important, too. Over the past 40 years, State has been fighting a losing
battle for influence in the executive branch, as the Pentagon and a
beefed-up National Security Council pushed this faded heavyweight
around. And it is worth remembering that the department has suffered
austerity at the hands of Republican and Democratic presidents alike:
Bill Clinton-era budget and personnel cuts, stemming from a misguided
desire to realize a post-Cold War peace dividend with a sharp
contraction in diplomatic resources, were devastating.
But
the threat posed by Trump is ideological, premeditated, and of a
different order of magnitude. This vast repository of expertise will
find Trump’s second term even harder to bear than the first, and this is
dismal news for the United States and the world. As Gen. James Mattis,
before his stint as Trump’s defense secretary, warned in 2013, “If you don’t fund the State Department fully, then I need to buy more ammunition.”