The Playbook
Over
the past eight months, the U.S. Foreign Service has faced a fundamental
transformation. In 2025, the Trump administration adopted and
operationalized the personnel overhaul blueprint laid out in Project
2025 to dismantle the non-partisan, professional core of the State
Department and to replace it with a cadre of political loyalists
beholden to executive will, not constitutional duty. This was not
reform, but a political blitzkrieg aimed at capturing what was seen by
Donald Trump and his team as enemy territory in need of occupation.
We all should have been on notice last
year, when Project 2025’s “Mandate for Leadership” chapter on the
Department of State insisted that “no one in a leadership position on
the morning of January 20 should hold that position at the end of the
day,” and described “left-wing bureaucrats” as incompatible with the
President’s agenda. The chapter called for sweeping reallocation of
authority, freezes on discretionary spending, and widespread use of
acting officials to bypass Senate confirmation. These were not abstract
proposals; they were the playbook for a wholesale political takeover of
diplomacy. The logic was coherent in its ambition: purge first, then
repopulate with ideologues who would execute a narrower, politicized
posture abroad going forward.
Day One: Loyalty Over Law
On
January 20, 2025, the administration issued an executive order
restoring and renaming the discredited Schedule F, now recast as
“Schedule Policy/Career,” and targeted positions that determined,
formulated, or advocated policy. The order directed the Office of
Personnel Management to rescind or override prior civil-service
protections, and created a new ground for removal: failure to
“faithfully implement administration policies.” In practice, this meant
political loyalty became the condition of continued employment. The
State Department leadership quickly instituted loyalty screenings,
coupled with informal vetting lists of “desirables” and “undesirables.”
Some asked for ideological questionnaires or even personal affirmations
of alignment with administration priorities.
The Purge in Practice
By
mid-2025, the purge was underway. The administration moved to terminate
more than 1,350 U.S.-based employees—supplemented by voluntary
departures amounting to approximately 3,000 total. Among the targets
were civil-service and foreign-service officers whose portfolios touched
on democracy, rights, civil-military affairs, and international
accountability. Simultaneously, offices specializing in human rights,
war-crimes monitoring, and civilian security were downgraded, merged, or
eliminated altogether - often with minimal notice or consultation. In
practice, the strategy stripped space for dissent, pressured survivors
to self-censor, and constricted the institutional memory anchoring U.S.
diplomacy. The purges, justified in part by litigation and Supreme Court
clearances, mapped onto the Project 2025 direction to destabilize and
reconstitute from the top down.
Symbols and Signals
Beyond
personnel moves, the administration imposed symbolic but telling
constraints. Countering multilateral initiatives, the government
rescinded support or funding for several U.N. bodies, accelerated
withdrawals from key international agencies, and commanded reviews or
pauses on U.S. foreign aid lines. These steps reaffirmed that power now
flowed unidirectionally: from the executive’s political center outward,
not from specialized expertise upward. For career diplomats who had long
relied on principled continuity through law, norms, and institutional
guardrails, these moves sent a signal that only political alignment
mattered.
The Warning to Diplomats
In
September, it was reported that the administration had warned U.S.
diplomats of retaliation should they provide honest, off-script
assessments. That fit the model: loyalty was enforced not only by
purges, but by the chilling warning that the alternative to fealty would
be banishment.
The Pattern of Capture
This
pattern has followed the Project 2025 agenda with precision. That
agenda prescribed a day-one purge of leadership and urged freezes and
reviews of allocations, which the administration implemented through
Schedule Policy/Career and suspensions of aid. Project 2025 encouraged
the widespread use of acting appointments, and the administration
replaced career heads with acting loyalists. It called for elimination
of so-called “woke” or DEI functions, and the administration wiped out
anyone who had ever been connected to “diversity,” “equity” or
“inclusion.” It advocated centralization and the removal of independent
agencies, and the administration rapidly absorbed development units into
State, invading and shuttering institutions like the National Endowment
for Democracy, the Wilson Center, the U.S. Institute for Peace, and
USAID.
The Firewall Breached
The
civil-service system had long been built on merit, free _expression_, and
protection from partisan tests. This firewall ensured that estimates,
dissent, and continuity outlasted political tides. When the new regime
reclassified policy roles as at-will, demanded ideological loyalty, and
systematically purged contrary voices, it severed that firewall. That
invited grave dangers: chilling dissent, causing institutional memory
loss, privileging compliance over candor, and testing the limits of
statute, civil-service protections, and constitutional constraints.
Those who resisted were forced into costly litigation, often before a
Supreme Court whose partisan majority repeatedly proved willing to give
Trump what he wanted.
What Is Being Lost
As a former State Department official,
I had long seen how a professional core of foreign service and civil
service officers provided the United States an enduring capacity to
promote and advocate for American interests around the world. What was
now being lost was not just jobs but a culture built over generations of
service to Republican and Democratic Presidents alike. It was a service
tradition in which foreign policy was informed by overseas experience,
analysis, engagement, and a restraint derived from institutional
gravitas to ground our policies and actions in knowledge rather than
whim. That tradition was the very essence of steady state governance.
Hollowing Out
Now,
with diplomacy being run out of the White House—special envoys drawn
from the President’s business and family circle, career diplomats forced
out—the State Department seemed to lose the capacity to resist
short-term impulse, to counsel caution, to say no when necessary, and to
build coalition-based legitimacy. Few will speak truth to power when
job security depends, regardless of merit, on saying “Jawohl.”
Each
day, honorable and talented men and women at State and other national
security agencies continued to be purged, or to exercise self-help by
fleeing. It will take decades to recover from their loss.
Jonathan
M. Winer is the former Special Envoy for Libya and Deputy Assistant
Secretary of State for International Law Enforcement and a Distinguished
Diplomatic Fellow at MEI. He is a member of The Steady State.
Founded
in 2016, The Steady State is a nonpartisan, nonprofit 501(c)(4)
organization of more than 300 former senior national security
professionals. Our membership includes former officials from the CIA,
FBI, Department of State, Department of Defense and Department of
Homeland Security. Drawing on deep expertise across national security
disciplines including intelligence, diplomacy, military affairs and law,
we advocate for constitutional democracy, the rule of law and the
preservation of America’s national security institutions.