U.S. Diplomats Report Broken Morale and Abandoned Careers
A new survey found that 98 percent of Foreign Service officers felt lower morale. Only 1 percent reported an increased ability to carry out U.S. foreign policy.
Michael Crowley covers diplomacy and the State Department.
America’s professional diplomats feel demoralized and ignored, with fully 98 percent saying in a new survey that workplace morale has fallen since the Trump administration took over in January.
The findings are contained in a forthcoming report from the American Foreign Service Association, or A.F.S.A., that warns that “America’s diplomatic capacity is being decimated from within” as seasoned diplomats are laid off or choose to leave government.
“The Foreign Service is in crisis,” said John Dinkelman, the association’s president. “Damage is being done to America’s diplomatic service that we will be paying for for decades to come.”
The report, which will be officially released on Wednesday, paints a grim portrait of the diplomatic corps that is consistent with countless anecdotal complaints from both Foreign Service officers, trained professionals who work in embassies and consulates abroad, and the civil servants who mainly staff the State Department’s headquarters in Washington.
Most of the survey’s more than 2,100 respondents said they were managing tighter budgets and greater workloads amid the Trump administration’s spending cuts, including drastic reductions in U.S. foreign aid. Eighty-six percent said it had become harder to carry out U.S. foreign policy. Just 1 percent reported an improvement.
Most likely fueling the dissatisfaction is a sense among current and former U.S. officials that, under Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the department has become more political and less relevant. Although Mr. Rubio initially assured department workers that he valued their expertise and wanted the department to play a greater role in foreign policy, numerous officials insist the opposite has happened.
Diplomats sense that their input is not welcome, especially if it diverges from President Trump’s views. They have watched from the sidelines as much of America’s most sensitive diplomacy is conducted not by Mr. Rubio but by Trump insiders such as Steve Witkoff, a real estate mogul with no prior diplomatic experience, and Mr. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, often acting with little or no assistance from career diplomats. Mr. Witkoff and Mr. Kushner traveled to Moscow this week to meet with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.
Trump officials argue that Mr. Witkoff has been an effective diplomat, pointing to the cease-fire agreement he helped broker in October between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. But Mr. Witkoff’s diplomacy with Russia has raised questions about his judgment, even among some Republican allies of Mr. Trump’s.
Tommy Pigott, a State Department spokesman, rejected the idea that diplomats now had less effect on foreign policy.
“Secretary Rubio values candid insights from patriotic Americans who have chosen to serve their country,” he said. “In fact, this administration reorganized the entire State Department to ensure those on the front lines — the regional bureaus and the embassies — are in a position to impact policies.”
He added, “What we will not tolerate is people using their positions to actively undermine the duly elected president’s objectives.”
State Department officials also insisted that they were maintaining a healthy Foreign Service, saying that applications to take the Foreign Service officer test this year were up nearly fourfold from their lowest level during the Biden administration. (The foreign service association has challenged previous claims by the Trump administration about test applicants.)
Mr. Rubio, who also serves as Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, spends much of his time at the White House and has traveled less frequently than other recent secretaries of state.
He does not plan to attend a meeting of NATO foreign ministers on Wednesday in Brussels, for instance, a break from recent practice that is especially notable amid a flurry of high-stakes diplomacy between Russia and Ukraine. (A senior State Department official said on Sunday that Mr. Rubio had attended dozens of meetings with NATO allies and that it would be “completely impractical” to expect him to attend every meeting.)
Mr. Pigott described Mr. Rubio’s dual roles as a clear positive.
“Anyone trying to paint Secretary Rubio’s close coordination with the White House and other agencies as a negative could not be more wrong,” he said. Referring to the White House’s National Security Council, he added that “we now have an N.S.C. and State Department that are totally in sync, a goal that has eluded past administrations for decades.”
Contributing to a sense of declining influence among some current and former diplomats, the department has stopped holding daily televised briefings for the news media. They ceased after the departure of the department’s last spokesperson, Tammy Bruce, in August.
Ms. Bruce, a former Fox News commentator with no background in foreign policy, has been nominated to be deputy U.S. representative to the United Nations. If confirmed by the Senate, she would replace Dorothy Shea, a career Foreign Service officer and former U.S. ambassador to Lebanon who has also served in Israel, Tunisia and Egypt.
The foreign service association estimates that about a quarter of America’s active Foreign Service officers have left government service this year. Nearly one third of the survey’s respondents said they had changed their career plans since January.
Among those who said they were considering leaving the Foreign Service, 75 percent cited declining morale as a factor in their thinking; more than half cited political influences in the workplace.
The State Department has a strong ethos of nonpartisanship, and many career officials have blanched at the appointments of relatively inexperienced ideological conservatives to senior positions. Mr. Rubio in turn has asserted that he inherited a department infected by “left-wing activists.”
The sense of a more politicized workplace has led diplomats to self-censor their observations and advice, Mr. Dinkelman said. And he added that orientation training for new workers no longer taught them about the State Department’s venerable “dissent channel,” which was created in 1971 in response to concerns that unwelcome opinions about the Vietnam War that proved accurate were ignored or suppressed.
“If I’m not telling you everything I know because I fear that you might not like the answer to the question, then what is the value of diplomacy?” Mr. Dinkelman said.
The report lands as the group protests the State Department’s decision on Tuesday to follow through with some 1,300 layoffs it first announced in July and scheduled for November. The government shutdown prevented the logistical steps required to carry out those layoffs.
The association and many Democrats insist that the job cuts — which mainly affected civil servants, along with 264 Foreign Service officers, according to Mr. Dinkelman — were rescinded by language in last month’s spending agreement in Congress that ended the government shutdown. The Trump administration disagrees with that interpretation. The matter is likely to be headed for the courts.