Outside the Beltway

Trump and the Deep State at State

Normal transition . . . and potential red flags.

James Joyner · Monday, January 20, 2025 · 14 comments

WaPo (“Scores of career State Dept. diplomats resign before Trump’s inauguration“):

Scores of senior career diplomats are resigning from the State Department effective at noon on Monday after receiving instructions to do so from President-elect Donald Trump’s aides, three U.S. officials familiar with the matter said.

The forced departures, aimed at establishing a decisive break from the Biden administration, will result in an exodus of decorated veterans of the Foreign Service, including John Bass, the undersecretary for management and acting undersecretary for political affairs, and Geoff Pyatt, the assistant secretary for energy resources, said the officials, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss personnel decisions ahead of Monday’s inauguration.

Requesting the resignations, the prerogative of any incoming administration, indicates a desire to quickly shift the tone and makeup of the State Department as Trump seeks to upend the global diplomatic chessboard after four years of President Joe Biden. Key priorities for Trump include imposing sweeping tariffs on allies and adversaries, ending the war in Ukraine, solidifying the wobbly ceasefire between Israel and Hamas and deporting millions of undocumented immigrants.

“It is entirely appropriate for the transition to seek officials who share President Trump’s vision for putting our nation and America’s working men and women first. We have a lot of failures to fix, and that requires a committed team focused on the same goals,” said a spokesperson for the transition team.

I’m a bit befuddled that the incoming administration even had to ask. It’s customary for all people in presidentially-appointed posts to offer their resignation at the start of a new presidential term. People with “Secretary” in their title certainly fill the bill.

What’s unclear is whether they have simply resigned their Plum Book posts and are going to be reassigned to non-appointed positions in the Senior Foreign Service or they are leaving government entirely. If they were coerced into the latter, it would be highly problematic. Career officials are entitled to Civil Service protections.

What is more unusual is this:

Some incoming presidents choose to keep a larger stable of career diplomats in senior roles until handpicked political appointees receive Senate confirmation. Instead, Trump has authorized the selection of more than 20 “senior bureau officials” to take over various divisions where leadership posts are being vacated this week. A number of those officials served in key roles in the State Department and the National Security Council during Trump’s first term, and some have been pulled out of retirement, officials familiar with the matter said.

That’s too murky to assess. Presidents are allowed to appoint people at the Deputy Assistant Secretary level and below without Senate confirmation and those people are allowed to serve in an Acting capacity in higher roles. But the highest roles are required to be filled by either Senate-confirmed personnel or career civil servants.

Trump campaigned on dismantling what he has called the “deep state” of federal bureaucrats whom he views as lacking loyalty and undermining his agenda. He has pledged to kill workforce protections for thousands of government employees in a move expected to face significant legal challenges.

As I’ve told our students in my introductory lecture on the US National Security decisionmaking process the last several years, what some call “the deep state” others call “national security professionals.”

Trump has the right to try to get the apparatus of state to bend to his policy will even if it offends their professional sensibilities. He’s the elected President and Chief Diplomat. But he’ll need Congress to go along to remove Civil Service protections. And President Biden has agreed to all manner of other protections for those in collective bargaining positions. Those will be very hard, if not impossible, to untangle.

His pick for secretary of state, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida), said the State Department needs to prioritize Trump’s “America First” agenda, and he vowed to make the department “relevant again.”

“What has happened over the last 20 years under multiple administrations is the influence of the State Department has declined,” Rubio said at his confirmation hearing last week. “We have to be at that table when decisions are being made, and the State Department has to be a source of creative ideas and effective implementation.”

That’s really a wholly separate issue. When Congress created the National Security Council in 1947, President Truman thought it was an unconstitutional encroachment on his authority and largely shunted it aside, preferring to make foreign policy exclusively in conjunction with the Secretary of State.

The Korean War and the permanent national security posture of the Cold War changed that, greatly increasing the role of the Secretary of Defense, Director of Central Intelligence/Director of National Intelligence and, eventually, National Security Advisor and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. But, certainly, a President who wanted to rely more on the State Department has the ability to do so.

One senior official who was asked to resign said he was willing to serve longer to help bridge the gap but underscored that this is Trump’s call to make. “We should all wish the new team success,” the official said.

A second diplomat who was asked to resign said the Trump team handled the matter professionally and made clear the request wasn’t personal.

“They want to have people in place whom they’ve worked with before who are known quantities,” the official said.

That actually gives me some hope. It sounds like the matter was handled much more professionally than much of the first term would have led me to expect.

One such official is Lisa Kenna, who heads the State Department’s intelligence arm called the Bureau of Intelligence and Research. Kenna worked as the executive secretary for then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. She is expected to reprise that role and serve also as acting undersecretary for political affairs. The latter job is one of the most challenging in the building, overseeing regional bureaus from Asia to Latin America to Africa to Europe. “They’re both full-time jobs,” one official said.

Kenna is a career State Department employee with the rank of Minister Counselor. Interestingly, she was appointed as Ambassador to Peru in May 2020, confirmed by the Senate in November of that year, and served in that role through September 2023—entirely during the Biden presidency—before returning to State in her current capacity.

But this is somewhat concerning:

Last week, Trump’s aides asked three senior career diplomats who oversee the department’s workforce and internal coordination to resign in a move reported by Reuters. The career officials were Dereck Hogan, Marcia Bernicat and Alaina Teplitz.

The top diplomat for East Asia, Dan Kritenbrink, served his last day as assistant secretary on Friday and will retire Jan. 31. Kritenbrink, like Bass, Pyatt and other career officials, served in influential positions under both Democratic and Republican administrations.

Another career diplomat said the forced resignations are occurring “a little quicker” than in previous administrations but that it is common for a new administration to eventually pick new career diplomats for Senate-confirmed positions like those held by Bass and Pyatt. Other officials expressed frustration that the request to resign, on the Friday before the inauguration, came with little warning and that they have no indication whether they may apply for other jobs within the department.

The Senior Foreign Service—and, indeed, the Foreign Service, period—is a different animal than the Defense Department and I have considerably less expertise in its precise function. It would be unconscionable, indeed, if career SFS officials were simply kicked out of government because they happened to be appointed to senior posts by the outgoing administration.

Note that Kenna, who was not only confirmed to the ambassadorship after Trump’s election loss but served as Pompeo’s right hand was not only retained in the ambassadorship—an appointed post—but then assigned to another senior State post afterward. We don’t punish career officials for being seconded to posts that serve a presidential administration.

It’s unclear how far the Trump administration will go in rooting out perceived enemies at Foggy Bottom, which Trump often calls the “Deep State Department.”

The chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Rep. Brian Mast (R-Florida), has told reporters that pushing back against “woke” bureaucrats should be a priority.

Anyone “nefariously supporting a radical agenda … should be aware that we’ll be looking for them,” he said last week, “and we will be looking for creating authorities to make sure that their existence doesn’t continue in the State Department.”

That, of course, is a red flag. Presidents, and to a lesser extent oversight committee chairmen, have a right to insist that career officials carry out their policy aims. They do not have a right to fire those with policy preferences with which they disagree.