The Trump administration has nominated 14 major inaugural donors to ambassadorships, signaling an expansion of diplomatic picks from a pool of wealthy inaugural committee donors in comparison with previous administrations.
The average contribution to the Trump inaugural committee by the donors tapped to be ambassadors was over $350,000, according to an NBC News report on Wednesday. The report also underscores that the Trump administration has only managed to land eight confirmations to diplomatic posts, despite the Republican majority controlling the Senate.
In addition to being donors to Trump’s inaugural committee, these individuals picked to lead the 14 American embassies ranging from Slovenia to Morocco have no previous experience in the U.S. Foreign Service, the wing of the State Department that trains and deploys the nation’s diplomatic corps to its embassies around the world.
The American Foreign Service Association, the professional association that represents and advocates for members of the State Department’s Foreign Service, says that ambassadorship makeup of every administration after World War II consisted of nearly two-thirds career foreign service officials and one-third political appointees. Under the Trump administration, that split has shifted to 50-50.
Trump has had trouble in getting his nominees approved by Congress, with the State Department still having 52 ambassadorships vacant, nearly one-fifth of the slots available. Many of those vacancies include crucial posts to American foreign policy statecraft, including Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, and Pakistan.
R. Nicholas Burns, who served as the U.S. ambassador to Greece under the Clinton and Bush administrations and then later as the U.S. representative to NATO under Bush, said he believes the administration’s inability to get the Senate confirmations done in a timely manner is due to “questions about the qualifications of some of these people” that Trump is nominating.
By contrast, Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush had 11 and 15 vacancies, respectively, at this point in their presidencies.
The Washington Examiner reached out to the State Department Wednesday for comment.
