TRACY WILKINSON AND NOAH BIERMAN -
Five days after President Donald Trump took office, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, assistant secretary of state for African affairs, was summarily fired — the start of what was to become a purge of senior State Department officials and career professionals over nearly four years.
Now Thomas-Greenfield is back, leading president-elect Joe Biden’s State Department transition team to restore its devastated morale. That is expected to include an ambitious campaign to rebuild the department’s ranks by recalling veteran officials like herself, driven away, and refilling many of the approximately 1,500 foreign service and civil servant jobs lost under Trump, as well as vacant ambassadorial positions.
Biden’s ability to fulfil his promise to restore “normalcy” in the US will rely heavily on whether he can revitalise key agencies, starting with State and including the Environment Protection Agency, Education Department and Labor Department.
“There is going to be a need to massively rebuild the government,” said Max Stier, president of the Partnership for Public Service, anon-profit that tries to improve the effectiveness of the federal government. Biden’s government experience and respect for diplomacy can only go so far, current and former officials warn. Some of the damage inflicted under Trump — disparaging professional statecraft, dismantling inter agency systems and filling positions within experienced friends — may take months if not years to repair. “You can’t do it overnight. You’ve got to create a relationship of trust with the career workforce,” Stier said.
Thomas-Greenfield, who was the highest ranking black diplomat at State when she was fired in 2017, is advocating a bold initiative of recruitment that focuses both on experience and on broadening diversity; the numbers of people of colour in important State Department jobs has also plummeted.
“The United States needs a top-to-bottom diplomatic surge,” she wrote in a recent article in Foreign Affairs magazine.
“The Trump administration’s unilateral diplomatic disarmament is a reminder that it is much easier to break than to build. The country doesn’t have the luxury of waiting for a generational replenishment.”
Thomas-Greenfield, 68, declined to comment for this article.
For the moment, Trump’s refusal to acknowledge his loss to Biden is slowing her effort by withholding crucial information about budget and vacancies. The transition period is critical because it’s the one time when are “you get unencumbered by the day-to-day developments and the requirements of the inbox,” Denis McDonough, former chief of staff to president Obama, said in an interview. It’s hiring, converting campaign promises to policy, morale, communications and identifying what experts remain who can do the job, he said.
“It’s also about making sure you have the budget authority, you have the plans, and you have preparation and the understanding of the institutions to carry them out,” McDonough said.
He said he often ran into worried career employees on the street after Trump won in 2016. “A lot of people asked ‘Should I stay?’ And my answer always was, ‘Uncle Sam needs you. We need a political experts advancing the national interest based on not ideology, not partisanship,’” he said.
Biden is also expected to again put apolitical career diplomats into senior positions; under Trump, most were replaced with political appointees or acting officials. “It begins with appointments,” said Uzra Zeya, a retired 27-year veteran diplomat who specialised in the Middle East and South-east Asia.
“It is a totally anomalous situation in the State Department’s modern history to have exactly zero career officers as confirmed assistant secretaries of state... There are exactly zero African-Americans at assistant secretary level or above.” A swift recovery of lost talent and reinvigoration of those who remain is all the more important in light of the apparent drop in interest among young people to enter foreign service.
The number of young potential diplomats taking the entrance exam for
the foreign service plummeted from 20,000 in the early Obama years to fewer than 5,000 now. — dpa
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