Stop letting rich people buy ambassadorships

Many of the items on President Joe Biden’s to-do list are daunting: Helping Americans recover from the coronavirus pandemic. Fixing the dysfunctional immigration system. Battling climate change. Rebuilding, and restoring public faith in, the democratic institutions his predecessor spent four years tearing down. The mind reels.

So when there’s an easy, straightforward move that makes sense on both policy and political grounds, Biden should seize the opportunity. One modest possibility: Jettison the skeezy practice of rewarding big campaign contributors with ambassadorships.

Paying off donors with ritzy, taxpayer-funded tours in exotic locales is one of those forms of soft corruption that give Washington its swampy funk. The transaction has a dark logic. Presidential campaigns need money. Lots of it. And what grander way for grateful presidents to say “thank you” than by dispatching their benefactors to host fancy parties and otherwise play at diplomacy for a few years in Paris or London?

As defenders of the practice see it, what’s the harm, really — especially in today’s interconnected world, where ambassadors aren’t the crucial conduits they once were? “There are some who do a lot for the campaign, and they don’t have a lot of experience in government, and you want to take care of them,” one longtime Democratic donor recently told Politico, musing, what “else are you going to do with them?”

Coddling the well-heeled who grease America’s political cash machine is no doubt a rough job. But surely there are better alternatives to maintaining a system of quasi-graft that puts political buckraking ahead of experience and talent when doling out high-profile diplomatic posts.

The United States is an outlier in assigning ambassadorships in this fashion. “This practice is aberrational among advanced democracies and a source of recurrent controversy in the United States,” observed Ryan Scoville, an associate law professor at Marquette University in his study of such appointments, published in 2019.

Think of it as a kind of American exceptionalism.

This is far from a new disgrace. Presidents of both parties have embraced this form of donor maintenance for decades, some more systematically than others. Richard Nixon, while chatting with his chief of staff in the summer of 1971, suggested a hard floor of $250,000 for “anybody who wants to be an ambassador.”

Now and again, Congress has taken a run at reform. Jimmy Carter promised a merit-based process. But by and large, most everyone has been content to let the pay-toplay continue.

Donald Trump, ever the master graftsman, supercharged the practice. Since the 1950s, presidents have handed out roughly 30% of ambassadorships to political appointees, the bulk of whom tended to be donors. (Carter did have the lowest level, at 24%.) Trump pushed that number north of 40% in his first two years — the highest percentage of noncareer appointments since the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Some of Trump’s more colorful picks seemed set on confirming the caricature of the ugly American. His ambassador to Iceland, Jeffrey Ross Gunter, a dermatologist by trade, upset the locals by promoting a Trump tweet ranting about “the China virus.” Even more controversial was Gunter’s request for special permission to carry a gun and his advertisement for armed bodyguards. (Iceland takes pride in its status as the world’s most peaceful nation.)

Woody Johnson, the heir to the Johnson & Johnson fortune and Trump’s man in London, faced accusations of inappropriate behavior, including making racist and sexist comments. (Johnson denied the claims.) He also (unsuccessfully) sought the British government’s help in arranging for the British Open golf tournament to take place at Trump’s Scottish resort.

Perhaps most memorable was Gordon Sondland, the hotelier whose $1 million contribution to the Trump inaugural committee helped land him the position of ambassador to the European Union. From there, he managed to get so entangled in Trump’s Ukraine shenanigans that he wound up being a central figure in the president’s first impeachment trial.

Biden has a prime opening to clean up the mess left behind.

Thus far, the president has named only one ambassador: Linda Thomas-greenfield, a former assistant secretary of state, as his envoy to the United Nations. He has also been quietly saying that he will dial back the number of political appointees. This has made some big donors twitchy, according to Politico.

Biden should ignore their jockeying for glamorous assignments and work to uncouple fat donations from ambassadorships to the greatest extent possible. And he should not bother being subtle. If the president is going to tick off some of his more entitled patrons, he might as well get credit for it from the millions of nonrich Americans who sent him to Washington to look after their interests.

Not every ambassador needs to be a career Foreign Service official. The State Department does not have a monopoly on wisdom, political savvy or diplomatic skills, and there is typically a solid block of political appointees chosen for reasons unrelated to campaign cash. The close ties that some political appointees have with the president can prove valuable, and even delicate diplomatic postings have been deftly handled by noncareer chiefs, including Arthur Burns in West Germany, Martin Indyk in Israel and Jon Huntsman Jr. in China and Russia (and, incredibly, Singapore, if you go all the way back to his early 30s, beginning in the closing months of the George H.W. Bush administration).

The law outlining the qualifications of Foreign Service “chiefs of mission” recognizes this reality. While career Foreign Service members are preferred, “circumstances will warrant appointments from time to time of qualified individuals who are not career members,” reads the relevant section of the U.S. Code.

But the law is also explicit about forking over buckets of campaign cash as a qualification: “Contributions to political campaigns should not be a factor in the appointment of an individual as a chief of mission.”

Code, shmode. At this point, top donors have come to see themselves as entitled to such spoils. It is time to reset those expectations. Biden was elected to restore honor, decency and competence to the White House, and to the government more broadly. Dismantling the donor-to-ambassador pipeline would be a quick step in that direction.