State Department understaffing likely to linger into 2018
Spokesman: Tillerson wants to restructure agency before naming leadership team
WASHINGTON — The stampede of diners who once rushed through the State Department’s vast cafeteria has ebbed, with diplomats who previously grabbed quick bites between meetings now lingering over Korean barbecue and checking their phones for some kind of news.
Many have little to do until the Trump administration starts filling the nearly 200 jobs at the department that require Senate confirmation, and their agendas look increasingly as if they will remain empty. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has done almost nothing to select leaders for the White House’s consideration, and nominations for assistant secretaries and others who largely run the State Department are unlikely to be made for months.
In an unusual interview, R.C. Hammond, Tillerson’s spokesman, said the secretary intended to embark within days on a listening tour of the building and then a restructuring of the department’s operations. Only after those are underway will he begin to name his wider leadership team.
With a Senate confirmation process that takes months, that means the department will remain largely leaderless until well into 2018. And no other department in the federal government is as dependent on political appointees, or as paralyzed when the appointment process freezes.
State Department veterans reacted to Tillerson’s timetable with incredulity.
“There is a crisis with North Korea now, at a time neither State nor Defense have the bench of senior leaders needed, and with State facing a massive budget cut,” said Wendy Sherman, a top diplomat in the Obama administration. “How do you execute a policy with the quality you need in that circumstance?”
Fill-in leaders, like those who are conducting diplomacy in the absence of political appointees, do not always instill confidence in foreign governments, said Siddharth Mohandas, another Obama administration diplomat.
“People abroad are looking to see that the president’s own people are in place and can speak to the president’s agenda,” Mohandas said.
But Hammond said there was no sense nominating people for jobs that might be eliminated in a restructuring. The Trump administration has proposed cutting the department’s budget by 31 percent, and while the Senate is unlikely to approve such a drastic cut, some reduction is likely.
“The first step was to find out where the Titanic was, and then it was to map out where everything else is,” Hammond said, likening the department’s organizational structure to a sunken ocean liner and its seabed surroundings. “I think we’re still in the process of mapping out the entire ocean floor so that we understand the full picture.”
While an unusually difficult White House vetting process has slowed appointees elsewhere in the administration, that is not the problem at the State Department. Tillerson has done little beyond proposing a lone deputy and acceding to a handful of ambassadorial nominations by the White House.
Whatever the future — even if it involves drastic reductions — there is a near-universal wish among State Department employees for Tillerson to lead them to it, and soon. The wait is taking a toll.
“With very little guidance coming from the secretary’s office, rumors of draconian cuts abound, and many dedicated and extremely knowledgeable civil servants are electing to leave,” said Robert Berschinski, a top Obama administration diplomat.
Elliott Abrams, a neoconservative whom President Donald Trump rejected as Tillerson’s pick for a deputy, said delays in appointing new leaders meant that career diplomats — most of whom lean ideologically toward the Democratic Party, he said — might remain in charge for nearly a quarter of the president’s term.
“The Republican Party won the election, and Republicans should be in charge,” he said.
Tillerson’s principal challenge, of course, is serving a mercurial president whose ideas on foreign policy are short on substance. The first months of the Trump administration have featured such breathtaking strategic reversals that paralysis at the State Department was arguably better than having diplomats charge off in one direction only to reverse course weeks later.
But Tillerson has also been plagued by a series of embarrassing missteps and hour-by-hour tactical turnarounds that a trusted team might have prevented. He declared President Bashar Assad of Syria an enduring presence only to contradict himself within days, publicly disagreed with South Korea over whether he had been invited to dinner, and noted cryptically that Iran was complying with a landmark nuclear accord only to declare hours later that the deal had failed.
Most secretaries of state spend their transition periods plotting structural changes, but the Trump transition was bare-bones, and Tillerson was unusually cloistered — never meeting with his predecessor, John Kerry, for instance.
After his chief duty of “helping the president develop his foreign policy positions,” Tillerson’s next steps, Hammond said, were “touching gloves with our allies and partners around the world” — including in Europe, Japan, South Korea and Mexico — and hosting a meeting of foreign ministers from countries fighting the Islamic State group.