Usually, 2/3 of U.S. ambassadors come from the career foreign service. But the Trump administration has named mostly political ambassadors, leaving senior career diplomats with few prospects.
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The State Department has had a surge of new retirements. Like the military, the Foreign Service is a so-called up or out system. So diplomats have to be promoted to stay in. And longtime Foreign Service officers are finding it hard to advance during the Trump administration. NPR’s Michele Kelemen has more.
MICHELE KELEMEN, BYLINE: Kelly Adams-Smith served for 28 years as an American diplomat and recently retired, along with others who still wanted to serve.
KELLY ADAMS-SMITH: It’s heartbreaking, staggering. We had experts on every area of the world going out the door at a very senior level.
KELEMEN: She was on tap to become ambassador to Moldova but was nominated in the Biden administration when many career diplomats languished in the Senate confirmation process. After Trump came back to office, she received an impersonal email.
ADAMS-SMITH: It said, dear colleague, you are no longer considered to be a nominee, and that I needed to find another position within the Department of State.
KELEMEN: She says the government invested in her training over the years. She speaks Russian, Romanian, Czech and other languages. But finding a place in the Trump administration proved difficult.
ADAMS-SMITH: It was our job to give the American taxpayer a return on that investment. And we have not been able to do that now.
KELEMEN: The State Department points out that the numbers of retirees is up because some of those Foreign Service officers worked in the now-dismantled U.S. Agency for International Development. A statement to NPR says career ambassadors have been encouraged to seek onward roles. But there aren’t many opportunities, says former ambassador to Estonia, George Kent. He says the Trump administration effectively fired him on Day 1. So when he returned to Washington, he retired and says there have been larger than usual retirement classes recently.
GEORGE KENT: What this shows is that under the second Trump administration, there’s a concerted effort to make senior Foreign Service officers feel unwelcome, not give them onward assignments and to try to create the conditions in which they retire, leave willingly, so that they are no longer within the system.
KELEMEN: In recent decades, about 70% of American ambassadors were career diplomats, but more than 90% of Trump’s ambassadors, so far, are political appointees, and the Foreign Service is shrinking.
KENT: We’ve lost 20, 25% of our Foreign Service officers over the last 16 months, and my guess is that will take a decade to recover, just on the personnel side, not to mention institutional integrity.
KELEMEN: That also worries Daniel Rosenblum, who retired as ambassador to Kazakhstan last year.
DANIEL ROSENBLUM: The real thing that haunts many of us as we’re looking at it is – how bad will the damage be, and how long will it take to recover?
KELEMEN: His social media feeds have been filled with news of retirements, including most recently the acting ambassador to Ukraine, Julie Davis. And last year, the State Department recalled about 30 career ambassadors from overseas assignments.
ROSENBLUM: Very few, if any of them, have found opportunities, and most of them are heading towards retirement.
KELEMEN: Dozens of embassies remain without an ambassador, including Moldova, where Kelly Adams-Smith was planning to serve. She says in diplomacy, America is ceding ground to its geopolitical rivals.
ADAMS-SMITH: We have more than 80 embassies without an ambassador right now. We are disarming. We’re unilaterally disarming. Russia or China would never do that.
KELEMEN: She’s now teaching at American University and still encouraging young people to think about a future career in the Foreign Service. Michele Kelemen, NPR News, the State Department.
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