The State Department’s entire senior management team just resigned
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
"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. The “entire senior management” team suffering this “mass” obliteration consists of Assistant Secretary of State for Administration Joyce Anne Barr, Assistant Secretary of State for Consular Affairs Michele Bond, Ambassador Gentry O. Smith of the Office of Foreign Missions, and most notably Undersecretary for Management Patrick Kennedy, who tried to drag the FBI into Hillary Clinton’s cover-ups. Also, while most news reports described the four outgoing officials as holding their offices under both Republican and Democrat administrations, to promote the impression they were nonpartisan fixtures of the bureaucracy who just couldn’t handle the arrival of President Trump, that is really only true of Kennedy, and he was only in position for two years before the Obama administration began. Joyce Barr was appointed in 2011, while Michele Bond and Gentry Smith were appointed in 2015. The Hill reports that these four joined “a number of other officials who have departed since President Trump took office last week,” but goes on to cite only two names: Assistant Secretary of State for Diplomatic Security Gregory Starr, who retired, and Bureau of Overseas Building Operations Lydia Muniz. CNN notes that Starr only came out of retirement in 2012, and planned all along to retire at the end of the Obama administration, even if Hillary Clinton won the 2016 election... The New York Daily News falsely implied Tillerson’s visit to the State Department on Wednesday actually prompted the “walk-outs” that didn’t happen..."
http://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2017/01/26/fake-n...
They don't. They implement policy. They are handed policy objectives and figure out who needs to do what to make that happen.
This is like having all the seniormost engineers and project managers leave a gigantic company after a takeover.
These are people in positions that, I believe, are all political appointments, not civil service jobs. They are all career foreign service officers who have been in non-political jobs at State for decades, and all but one seem to have held political appointments under Presidents of both parties, but they aren't "senior civil service".
Arguably they do create policy, in the Yes, Minister sense that they'll happily modify or kill a political initiative that would knock things off an even keel. There a lot of things that do or don't happen pretty much heedless of what politicians demand.
Of course, that doesn't derail your metaphor. A good PM can do a lot to guide a client or executive away from their original demands to a better plan that still satisfies them. This is still a huge loss of institutional knowledge and ability to execute properly.
Its not democrat vs republican to him. Its nationalist vs globalist. The old guard were globalists. This has Thiel and Bannons fingerprints all over it.
Tenure does not equal competence. Some would argue this is especially true in government.
The philosophical and political decisions that dictate what that foreign policy says are given by the Secretary of State and eventually the presidential administration over these people.
I think that's debatable. The Russian "reset" of 2009 comes to mind; it seems like an abject failure from start (the intended Russian word for "reset" on the symbolic button was actually "overload", but nobody at State caught that) to finish.
I won't argue that, as with any senior departure(s) in other organizations, there is going to be some institutional knowledge vanishing. And that's never good.
Whatever criticisms there have been of foreign policy, there has been little criticism that the State Department has failed administrstively in implementing the policy set by the Administration.
So yeah, "off topic for hackers" I guess.
It's sad to see so much of the government tied so closely to the Clinton machine but it's for the best that they go quietly into the night, now we can move forward without the graft plaguing the Democrats where foreign money infects every corner of DC and PA.
But the State Department knows a lot more about what is really going on than many of us do. Maybe they wanted no part of it, should there be some kind of post-calamity Nuremberg Trials.
1. A giant departure of the old guard (some of whom were set to retire soon) could be a great bit of creative destruction. Think of all the internal processes and tools that new leaders could fix or replace.
2. Isn't this kind of expected during a regime change? I mean, wouldn't many of them have been Obama/Clinton loyalists? I'm asking not telling.
3. Like the article states, there is a component of brain-drain. Knowledge that likely won't be reacquired except through mistakes.
Third paragraph: """All are career foreign service officers who have served under both Republican and Democratic administrations."""
I didn't support Trump but I'm cautiously optimistic. We can't know from the outside, but letting these guys go might easily be an example of "draining the swamp".
It's not like they can "hire" replacements from competitors (like what happens in the corporate world). There is only one State Department and the work they do is very different from any other institution.
It seems likely there's primarily one tool that needs to be replaced, here.
(Email, obviously. What, did you think I meant something else?)
Seriously. How many times in the last decade or two have you thought "You know, America's working pretty well, but it's clear that we really need is a big shake up in State Department processes and tools."
And their resignation seems likely to mean "I can't fulfill the set of policy objectives I'm seeing proposed, as a matter of conscience."
Think about the different policy leanings you've seen over recent decades, and think about what might be outside them.
No, it's not expected during a change in administration. While the positions involved are, I believe, all positions that serve at the pleasure of the President, they people involved are career officers that have served in senior positions under administrations of both parties (as the article states). It would be normal for them to have offered their resignation effective at the moment of transition, but they wouldn't still be there now if they hadn't been asked, and agreed, to stay on. A mass resignation just after the new Secretary of State has been confirmed is not normal.
> I mean, wouldn't many of them have been Obama/Clinton loyalists?
Probably not. While Joyce Ann Barr was appointed to her current position by Obama, she was appointed to her prior position (Ambassador to Namibia) by George W. Bush, and has been with State since 1979. Michele Bond has only held political appointments under Obama, but has been a Foreign Service officer since 1977. Gentry Smith has been with State since 1987, and looks like we was Director of the Office of Physical Security programs before Obama came into office. And the main figure, Patrick Kennedy, was appointed to his current office by George W. Bush, held a different appointed office previously under Bush, and held an appointed position for essentially the whole Clinton Administration; he's been a Foreign service office since 1973.
Between the four, it's like 152 person-years of foreign-service experience.
These guys aren't partisan loyalists of any stripe.