Nearly four months into President Donald Trump's second administration, more than 100 U.S. ambassador posts currently sit empty. | Win McNamee/Getty Images
With help from Daniel Lippman, Irie Sentner, and Nahal Toosi
If showing up is half the battle, some officials are warning that the United States is losing big abroad.
Nearly four months into President DONALD TRUMP’s second administration, more than 100 U.S. ambassador posts currently sit empty.
That has alarmed veteran senior diplomats and national security officials who argue that prolonged empty posts could have far-reaching adverse effects on U.S. foreign policy. Ambassadors play key roles in shoring up U.S. alliances, gaining access to foreign governments to advance U.S. commercial interests and helping counter the growing clout of China and other geopolitical adversaries worldwide.
That has serious ripple effects abroad: Empty ambassador posts leave U.S. embassies punching below their weight and open avenues for U.S. adversaries like China to move in and expand their own clout and influence.
We spoke to 14 current and former senior U.S. officials as well as congressional aides about this matter. Unsurprisingly, Democrats blame Republicans, and Republicans blame Democrats. But some current and former career diplomats say both sides share blame.
For starters, the Biden administration left dozens of ambassador nominations sitting in the Senate when it left office and, career diplomats said, were much slower to fill posts when they had the majority in the Senate before Trump took office. Some Democrats have slow-walked ambassador nominations by blocking unanimous consent votes to protest the Trump administration’s rapid dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development.
But the Trump administration, several senior diplomats said, broke precedent by requiring many ambassadors to resign when it took office. While it’s customary for ambassadors who are political allies to step down when the White House changes hands, oftentimes nonpolitical career diplomat ambassadors in places such as Cameroon or Tajikistan stay in their posts. Not so when Trump regained the White House in January. Trump also has not moved to re-nominate dozens of other ambassador nominees who were stuck in the Senate process when the Biden administration left office, leaving them in limbo.
All that meant the Trump administration started out with dozens more ambassadorships to fill from the start.
The Trump administration and Republican-controlled Senate have rushed through nominees at a historically fast clip. Trump has nominated 60 people to senior diplomatic posts so far, and 22 of those made it through the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in the first 100 days, compared with just nine in the first 100 days of the Biden administration and five in Trump’s first administration.
“As you’ve seen in the last week alone, President Trump has restored American leadership in the world and we will continue to bolster U.S. presence abroad with the most capable ambassadors,” National Security Council spokesperson JAMES HEWITT said.
So far, all of the nominees for senior diplomatic posts have been for the president’s political allies and none for career diplomats who in past administrations have comprised three-fourths to two-thirds of a president’s total ambassador nominees. TOM YAZDGERDI, president of the American Foreign Service Association union that represents American’s diplomatic corps, said, “This goes well beyond precedent and threatens the nonpartisan, professional career Foreign Service.”
The lower-ranking career diplomats who fill the posts in an acting capacity don’t have the clout, status or access (in either Washington or the capital they’re in) that fully confirmed ambassadors have, argued BRAD BOWMAN, an analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and former national security adviser to Sen. TODD YOUNG (R-Ind.).
“Embassies are on the front lines of American foreign policy, and embassies with confirmed ambassadors can be more effective in implementing the president’s foreign policy,” Bowman said.
Or as one senior U.S. official put it to us, “Presidents and prime ministers invite ambassadors, not charges d’affaires, to dine with them.”
Even ambassador nominees who make it through the committee process are having to wait for a full vote on the Senate floor. Republican leadership is juggling a jam-packed agenda with limited floor time. Ambassador confirmations, unsurprisingly, take a backseat to legislation on major domestic political agendas such as tax reform and Medicaid cuts.