Destroying the State Department
Daniel Drezner has a horrifying piece in the Post about the damage Tillerson is doing – on purpose – to the State Department. He’s gutting it, not carelessly but as a matter of policy.
Did Trump even run on that? Were we ever told that a Trump administration would gut the State Department?
Tillerson’s emphasis on reorganization has resulted in the hemorrhaging of human capital from the State Department. There are myriad examples of top-notch Foreign Service officers retiring rather than having to endure the caprice of Tillerson’s obsession with reorganization. A month ago, New York Times columnist Roger Cohen collected some astonishing on-the-record quotes from recently departed Foreign Service officers:
An exodus is underway. Those who have departed include Nancy McEldowney, the director of the Foreign Service Institute until she retired last month, who described to me “a toxic, troubled environment and organization”; Dana Shell Smith, the former ambassador to Qatar, who said what was most striking was the “complete and utter disdain for our expertise”; and Jake Walles, a former ambassador to Tunisia with some 35 years of experience. “There’s just a slow unraveling of the institution,” he told me.
Colum Lynch and Robbie Gramer note in Foreign Policy that one of Foggy Bottom’s top lawyers stepped down this week. Lynch and Gramer’s story is devastating to any defense of Tillerson’s management acumen:
Veteran employees have been leaving in droves since January, when the Trump administration forced the State Department’s top career diplomats, including Patrick Kennedy, the undersecretary of state for management, and Tom Countryman, the acting undersecretary for arms control, to pack their bags. “This is extraordinary…I’ve never seen anything like it,” said one senior career State Department official….
“When serious hardcore professional diplomats that have records of exemplary service serving both Republicans and Democrats are deciding to head for the door rather than stick it out, something is very wrong,” said Reuben Brigety, dean of George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs and former U.S. ambassador to the African Union.
“If you wanted to actually set out to break American diplomacy, this is how you’d do it,” Brigety said.
Just as State’s most senior staff is leaving, Tillerson has halted the pipeline of any fresh infusion of human capital. State’s hiring freeze has been extended to fellowship programs designed to entice the best of the best to consider a career in diplomacy.
This is “draining the swamp” with a vengeance…and with a very twisted interpretation of “the swamp.”
Tillerson is such a bad manager that he has spurned both free money and free talent. The State Department has not spent $80 million authorized by Congress to fight misinformation and Russian propaganda. According to Politico, “Tillerson aide R.C. Hammond suggested the money is unwelcome because any extra funding for programs to counter Russian media influence would anger Moscow, according to a former senior State Department official.” Furthermore, State has spurned all of the Council on Foreign Relations’ International Affairs Fellows. This is a program that makes talented scholars freely available to U.S. foreign affairs agencies for a year. Council president Richard Haass confirmed to me that State has not accepted any of this year’s fellows, despite the fact that they come with zero cost.
Let’s be very clear: Rex Tillerson is purposefully downsizing the State Department.
Last month, the American Conservative’s Daniel Larisonexplained why the crippling of the State Department would be a long-run catastrophe:
Trump and Tillerson are not only hamstringing this administration’s foreign policy in another example of self-sabotage, but they are ensuring that future administrations will inherit a diminished, dysfunctional department. They are going to make it harder to secure U.S. interests abroad in the near term, and they are practically guaranteeing the erosion of U.S. influence everywhere. Insofar as the State Department is the chief institution responsible for American “soft” power, weakening the institution simply makes it easier for an already intervention-prone Washington to rely on “hard” power to respond to crises and conflicts. That means more unnecessary wars, at least some of which might have otherwise been avoided.
That makes my blood run cold.
It may not yet reach the level of treason, but it sure seems to be headed that way. Kneecapping US interests is hardly what the voters who elected Trump wanted or expected, since they are so “America First”. Now we appear to be “Trump first, Moscow second, everyone else not at all”.
Another thing that occurs to me is that many of Trump’s key appointments are similar to Trump in not wanting to acknowledge that some one else might know more about something than they do. They do not believe any government bureaucrat could actually have real knowledge, because they’ve all been “leaning on their shovel” their whole lives while Tillerson was working his ass off ordering his secretary to bring him coffee and ruining the environment.
If there is one force driving this administration more than any other (except greed), I think it has to be anti-intellectualism. I see this all the time in people that surround me. If they don’t know something, it isn’t worth knowing. And if someone else does know something they don’t know, they don’t want them around, even if getting rid of them will destroy the project or whatever. Better to accidentally put beer in the baby formula than have someone there who actually knows you mix it with water.
The paranoid ramblings about the “deep state” and “administrative state” out of Bannon et al dovetail with that nicely: the very people with relevant knowledge and experience, doing work in a specialized position, are considered the enemy and eliminating their work is a primary policy goal.
Were we ever told that a Trump administration would gut the State Department?
Not in so many words, but wasn’t that Hillary’s department? “Lock ‘er up! Lock ‘er up!”
Well, he did claim he’d run the government the way he ran his businesses. Since he actually ran his businesses into the ground (and the bankruptcy courts), in a sense he did warn the voters.
Fuck nuance. Fuck expertise. Fuck experience. Mindless, thoughtless, shallow, bullying, flag-waving bomb-dropping patriotism and loyalty to Trump is the standard now. Didn’t he tell the Russians in the wake of an expulsion of American diplomats that he wanted to “reduce payroll?” All these State Department types were only ever going to say “No, you can’t do that, and here’s why” anyhow. It looks like it’s too late for ten minutes and chocolate cake to straighten Trump out, and I’m not sure that would have ever worked for Tillerson. It takes no personal knowledge and only technical skill to draw a target on someone’s back. Laser-guided bombs don’t care who they blow up or why. If they’re not admiring and worshipping, they’re Enemies and expendable. Let’s just hope there are enough sane adults sprinkled throughout the US military willing to disobey illegal orders.