“It’s the single biggest simultaneous departure of institutional memory that anyone can remember, and that’s incredibly difficult to replicate,” said David Wade, who served as State Department chief of staff under Secretary of State John Kerry. “Department expertise in security, management, administrative and consular positions in particular are very difficult to replicate and particularly difficult to find in the private sector.” Several senior foreign service officers in the State Department’s regional bureaus have also left their posts or resigned since the election. But the emptying of leadership in the management bureaus is more disruptive because those offices need to be led by people who know the department and have experience running its complicated bureaucracies. There’s no easy way to replace that via the private sector, said Wade. “Diplomatic security, consular affairs, there’s just not a corollary that exists outside the department, and you can least afford a learning curve in these areas where issues can quickly become matters of life and death,” he said. “The muscle memory is critical. These retirements are a big loss. They leave a void. These are very difficult people to replace.”
This seems like a serious problem, and will no doubt send a message about the federal government’s confidence in the Trump administration. However, at least politically, this may not be an entirely bad thing for Trump. Trump supporters already viewed the State Department under Clinton and Kerry as a grab bag of serious failures and aggressively pursuing ill-advised policies such as the Russian “reset”, Benghazi, the Iran Deal, and undermining Israel. They’re unlikely to be bothered. Further, if continuity in critical State Department functions is a serious matter for diplomacy and national security, the departing officers look like they are putting politics over country.
That said, smooth transitions of power are undoubtedly critical and it is important for those heading large federal agencies, especially one as critical as State, to have experienced career employees around that can show incoming secretaries where the plumbing is, so to speak. This could prove to be a big headache for Rex Tillerson and the Trump administration.
UPDATE: Contrary to the Washington Post report, CNN is reporting that the senior State Department officials were asked to leave:
Two senior administration officials said Thursday that the Trump administration told four top State Department management officials that their services were no longer needed as part of an effort to “clean house” at Foggy Bottom. Patrick Kennedy, who served for nine years as the undersecretary for management, Assistant Secretaries for Administration and Consular Affairs Michele Bond and Joyce Anne Barr, and Ambassador Gentry Smith, director of the Office for Foreign Missions, were sent letters by the White House that their service was no longer required, the sources told CNN. All four, career officers serving in positions appointed by the President, submitted letters of resignation per tradition at the beginning of a new administration. The letters from the White House said that their resignations were accepted and they were thanked for their service.
It makes some sense that Trump would want to clean house. Patrick Kennedy in particular has been at the center of State Department scandals for nearly 20 years, and most recently, he played a questionable role in Benghazi and Hillary Clinton’s email scandal.
