State of Play
Once upon a time, State Department officials would register dissent by writing a memo, or even resigning in protest. But what good would that do under Trump, where debate is squashed, and 20 percent of the agency is about to be laid off?
Around this time last year, Stacy Gilbert, a 20-year veteran of the State Department, resigned in protest over a report concluding that Israel was not blocking aid from reaching Gaza. A few weeks later, Andrew Miller, the deputy assistant secretary for Israeli-Palestinian affairs, also quit over what colleagues said was frustration regarding how little sway he had over policy in his job. The following month, another State Department officer, Michael Casey, walked out, saying he was “tired of writing about dead kids” in Gaza. Between October 7, 2023, and January 20, 2025, some half-dozen State Department staffers resigned in protest over Joe Biden’s “bear hug” policy toward Israel, while others leaked multiple dissent cables, capturing the internal frustration over Benjamin Netanyahu’s conduct of the war.
But since January 20—crickets. It’s certainly not for lack of material. Donald Trump proposed moving the Palestinians somewhere, and then shared an A.I.-generated video featuring an opulent “Trump Gaza” resort built atop their prime Mediterranean seaside “property.” He appointed Mike Huckabee, an evangelical Zionist, ambassador to Israel, and removed every Biden-era sanction on the settlers terrorizing Palestinians in the West Bank. Bibi, cognizant that he’ll get zero pushback from the Trump administration on anything, is now openly planning to seize the entirety of Gaza and has blockaded the strip for nearly three months. Earlier this week, dozens of Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces as crowds rushed to get emergency food rations.
Things are, arguably, worse than ever, and yet there have been no public resignations, no leaked dissent cables, no long reads about a Foggy Bottom being roiled by disagreements on Israel-Palestine—or really any number of other issues Staties of yesteryear might have resigned over. Why not?
In part, it’s because the country’s diplomats feel paralyzed. “There was a visiting delegation here the other day, and when they brought up Gaza, I wanted to cry,” one State Department official told me. “There’s nothing we can do.” If the official felt powerless to change anything, I noted, they could always resign in protest. But they demurred. “Before, if you resigned, you’d be on CNN later that night,” they explained. “Now there’s so much going on, what kind of change would that even bring? The media is overwhelmed, Republicans don’t care, and Democrats are helpless.”
In prior administrations, there was a sense that dissent was tolerated and even accepted as a mark of healthy policy debate. Antony Blinken was said to have read and marked up every dissent cable he received. “He went out of his way to say that, rather than stifle dissent, he wanted to hear it,” Blinken’s former advisor Ned Price recalled. “He made clear that people should go to the seventh floor if their viewpoints weren’t getting through to their management.” (Whether Blinken was able to get Biden to budge on policy was another matter.)
Needless to say, Marco Rubio has not taken the same approach. Not only is the Trump administration uninterested in opposing viewpoints, it largely views the State Department as an enemy stronghold that needs to be broken and purged. This is also not an administration that prioritizes human rights—especially those of Palestinians—so diplomats feel that raising the issue is futile. A second State Department official told me that some of their colleagues have tried to reframe the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza in terms of America First policy, arguing that it makes America more prosperous and secure when Arab countries and Israel are talking. But it was always a stretch, and it hasn’t worked. Arab countries seem perfectly willing to make deals with Trump regardless.
“They just don’t care,” the first official said regarding their higher-ups. “If you wrote a dissent cable today, they would find a way to fire you. If you resign and go on CNN, they might fire the spouse who still works in the U.S. government. The threat of retaliation is serious.”
“Can I Afford to Leave?”
Russ Vought’s dictum that the federal workforce should be “traumatically affected” to the point that they “not want to go to work” has particularly impacted the State Department, a place long derided in Washington as a den of deeply risk-averse, paralysis-by-analysis policy wonks. When Trump returned to the White House, he immediately fired career diplomats, minorities, and women who held leadership positions at State, all while throwing Ukraine under the bus, proposing to empty out Gaza, and attacking European allies. America’s diplomatic corps was shocked, especially by the scale and vigor of the purge, incapacitated like Trump’s stunned prey. Forget resigning over Gaza. They were just trying to survive in Foggy Bottom.
In Trump’s first term, Staties became a rich font of resistance and media leaks, but the people who are still “inside” have clammed up this time around—too scared to speak to reporters, or terrified when they do. One person I spoke to disappeared, then reappeared after a month of lying low, because they feared an internal hunt for leakers. “It’s not the same,” this official said when I asked where people’s courage of conviction had gone. The staff felt “demoralized, deflated,” this person added. “There is so much fear at State,” another department official told me. A third spoke to me in whispers from their office.
What are people so scared of? First and foremost, losing their jobs. On the one hand, they don’t know what their jobs mean anymore, or whether they even want to do them, which would entail having to carry out policies they find deeply odious. On the other hand, they are regular people with bills and mortgages and children. In an economy frozen by tariff uncertainty, and a local job market flooded with thousands of axed USAID workers with similar skill sets (many of whom still haven’t found jobs and will probably have to leave D.C.), a steady paycheck is nothing to sneeze at.
“People are assessing, Can I afford to leave?” the first State Department official confessed. “It’s really testing the financial side versus the moral side.” It was one thing to quit during the Biden years, when there were plenty of government-adjacent policy jobs to be had. That’s all gone now, especially for anyone associated with the Biden administration. Fearing the wrath of Trump, no one wants to hire them. “If you want to work in international affairs, it’s really difficult to find somewhere else to go,” the official added.
Even diplomats who’ve resigned or taken early retirement tell me they are looking over their shoulders, watching what they say. “It’s another era,” a recently retired senior State Department official told me. “People are afraid of the Musk army. People are afraid of doxxing. They’re concerned: I worked my entire life in public service. Will my retirement benefits and healthcare be taken away from me? That is really affecting people. My family is telling me, Be careful.”
Vacated Convictions
During Trump’s first administration, Washington elders soothed themselves with the mantra that the institutions would save us. But Trump heard that message, too. Which is why he is now going after the very institutions that previously got in his way. He knows, as I’ve said before, that institutions are just buildings with people in them. And people, no matter how fancy their degrees and how lofty their ideals, need roofs over their heads and food and stability for their kids.
And all this is before you even get to the reorg. Last week, Rubio sent Congress a 136-page proposal for how he planned to restructure and slim down the State Department. Between early retirements and reduction in force (R.I.F.), some 3,400 jobs will be cut—a full fifth of the department’s workforce, not the 15 percent originally advertised. Staties are hunkered down, waiting for the pink slips. The Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor alone will be cut by 80 percent. The Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration will now be focused on “remigration,” a euphemism for mass deportations taken from the far right. According to the proposal, State’s focus will be redirected from human rights to “Western civilization” and going after Europe’s “backsliding” on free speech. New recruits will have to prove their political loyalty. Retirement classes are full. Everyone else is hoping they won’t get R.I.F.’d.
In this context, what would be the point of resigning in protest? “They’re happy to have as many people leave as possible,” another State Department official told me. “They only want people who agree with them. If someone wants to resign in protest who doesn’t agree with them, perfect.”
This, of course, rankles Biden-era political appointees who are sympathetic to their former colleagues’ plight, but also furious that their convictions evaporated when Trump came to town again. One of them griped that the Biden-era resignations and leaks represented a “weird compulsion to take it out on your own,” given that Democratic presidents tend to be more sympathetic to State, and vice versa. The result was a disarray that only hurt Democrats, whereas State’s current reticence only helps Trump. “I suspect no one is resigning now for the same reason reporters don’t ask hard questions in the briefing room anymore,” this former State Department official complained. “The soft bigotry of low expectations.”