Editorial: Tillerson presided over a deeply dysfunctional State Department.

ExxonMobil’s former CEO presided over a deeply dysfunctional State Department.

Come home to Texas, Rex Tillerson.

The ExxonMobil CEO who endured an apparently miserable tenure as President Trump’s first secretary of state suffered one final humiliation Tuesday when his boss fired him via Twitter. Tillerson spent most of the last year working under a cloud of speculation about when he would get the ax. Now, as he departs Foggy Bottom, he faces speculation over whether he’ll go down in history as one of the nation’s worst secretaries of state.

Tillerson’s appointment as the country’s top diplomat was initially greeted with hope that he would serve as one of the grown-ups in the room, a source of stability in an otherwise chaotic administration. Instead, his authority was consistently undercut by a mercurial president with whom he never developed the trusting relationship essential to any top diplomat. Perhaps the most galling of all insults came when the president named his utterly unqualified son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to broker a peace deal in Middle East, effectively letting one of his relatives run a shadow State Department.

As an energy executive Tillerson had extensive experience dealing with heads of state, but his job skills clearly didn’t transfer to government. His chilly relationship with Congress and the press indicated he never learned the difference between management in the private and public sectors. One would think someone who ran one of the world’s largest corporations would know how to manage the State Department, but it’s now evident he administered a deeply dysfunctional agency.

Tillerson gave in to demands from the Office of Management and Budget that he cut the State Department and foreign aid budget by 30 percent. He presided over a botched reorganization effort that devastated his workforce’s morale. Under his leadership, the State Department hemorrhaged experienced diplomats, one of whom wrote a searing resignation letter saying, “I would humbly request that you follow me out the door.”

Of course, almost any bureaucracy can stand some cutbacks. But Tillerson failed to fill important, senior level positions for diplomats who could provide crucial advice and counsel to an administration facing a nuclear crisis on the Korean peninsula.

Once Tillerson exits, eight of the nine top jobs at the State Department will sit empty. Key positions up and down the roster, such as ambassador to South Korea, lack nominees entirely. Only 63 out of the 153 top roles at the State Department have a confirmed appointee, according to the Washington Post.

Tillerson oversaw a hollowing of our foreign policy apparatus — our source of post-war soft-power — and allowed Trump to replace it with a combination of nepotism and Twitter.

What’s more, as applications for the foreign service plunged, Tillerson showed little interest in developing new talent.

As Max Boot from the Council on Foreign Relations pointed out in Foreign Policy magazine, Tillerson withdrew from Presidential Management Fellows program, which has been a conduit bringing promising young professionals into the State Department. One former ambassador speculated it would take 15 to 20 years for the State Department to recover from the damage wrought under Tillerson’s leadership.

Now the president has named CIA Director Mike Pompeo to succeed Tillerson. It’s noteworthy that Pompeo’s job will be assumed, if Congress consents, by deputy director Gina Haspel, who would become the first woman to serve as CIA director. Glass ceiling aside, Haspel’s record of overseeing the torture of suspects at a CIA black site deserves scrutiny.

It’s also noteworthy that Pompeo has been interviewed as part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election; President Trump reportedly asked Pompeo to intervene in the in the FBI’s investigation, but Pompeo refused.

We can only hope that Pompeo, unlike Tillerson, will be able to establish a good working relationship with the president and begin to clean up the mess his predecessor left at Foggy Bottom. Meanwhile, now that Tillerson has been put out of his misery, one thing President Trump said about his firing rings true: “I think Rex will be much happier now.”