Breaking: Entire Senior Management Team at the State Department Has Resigned

Mass Exodus at Foggy Bottom

Four top State Department officials resigned Wednesday afternoon, just five days after two other top officials quit. The Washington Post Thursday morning reports, “The State Department’s entire senior management team just resigned.”

All are “career foreign service officers who have served under both Republican and Democratic administrations.”

Among them are Patrick Kennedy (photo), a nine-year veteran of the State Dept., who served as undersecretary for management. 

Washington Post foreign policy and national security opinion writer Josh Rogin, breaking the news, notes that Trump Secretary of State nominee Rex Tillerson, who has yet to be confirmed by the full Senate, “was actually inside the State Department’s headquarters in Foggy Bottom on Wednesday, taking meetings and getting the lay of the land.”

Some might consider that inappropriate.

“Then suddenly on Wednesday afternoon, Kennedy and three of his top officials resigned unexpectedly, four State Department officials confirmed. Assistant Secretary of State for Administration Joyce Anne Barr, Assistant Secretary of State for Consular Affairs Michele Bond and Ambassador Gentry O. Smith, director of the Office of Foreign Missions, followed him out the door.”

Rogin adds that “Assistant Secretary of State for Diplomatic Security Gregory Starr retired Jan. 20, and the director of the Bureau of Overseas Building Operations, Lydia Muniz, departed the same day. That amounts to a near-complete housecleaning of all the senior officials that deal with managing the State Department, its overseas posts and its people.”

Secretary of State John Kerry’s State Department chief of staff, David Wade, tells Rogin the mass exodus is “the single biggest simultaneous departure of institutional memory that anyone can remember, and that’s incredibly difficult to replicate.”

He adds, “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.”

“These retirements are a big loss. They leave a void. These are very difficult people to replace,” Wade says.

Rogin reports the State Department workforce “is panicked about what the Trump administration means for them.”

The Wall Street Journal has a bit of a different spin, reporting “a majority were asked to leave by the Trump administration, a person familiar with the situation said.” Whether or not the Trump administration specifically asked them to leave has not been confirmed, but the Trump administration has, for the most part, asked all presidential appointees, including State Dept. Ambassadors, to resign effective Jan. 20. 

Regardless of whose choice it was, it is a tremendous loss. Kennedy, for example, has been in foreign service since 1973.

“Of course the incoming administration has a right to replace whatever under secretaries and assistant secretaries they’d like to,” Nicholas Burns, a former under secretary of state for political affairs and longtime diplomat, told the Journal. “Normally the outgoing person would stay in the job until his or her successor is confirmed. What you don’t want to have is a vacuum without senior leadership.”

The Trump transition team took a good deal of heat after it was revealed the head of the Washington, D.C. National Guard was requested to resign as of 12:01 PM on the day of Trump’s inauguration, during the moment he was in fact protecting the people who came to see the new president be sworn in. Days later, after tremendous outrage, he was asked to stay an extra three days. He chose not to.

Image by U.S. Department of State via Flickr

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