America’s career diplomats are braced for the threat of a mass purge if Donald Trump wins the November election and for the potential flooding of the state department with loyalty-tested political appointees.
Rather than leading to a seamless change of course in a rightward Trumpist direction, the diplomats’ union and former ambassadors argue, such an attempted takeover would be much more likely to end in legal challenges, gridlock and chaos.
If elected, Trump has threatened to reinstate a policy he unsuccessfully attempted in his first term with the creation of “Schedule F”, a new category of federal employees which would be applied to tens of thousands of civil servants in “policy-related” jobs, robbing them of legal protections and making them liable to be fired at will.
A rightwing Washington thinktank, the Heritage Foundation, has prepared a blueprint for a second Trump term called Project 2025, fleshing out the Schedule F approach with a chapter on plans for the state department, which puts an emphasis on a clean-out of career officials suspected of not being fully committed to the president’s agenda, from the first day of a new Trump presidency, his inauguration.
“The next administration must take swift and decisive steps to reforge the department into a lean and functional diplomatic machine that serves the president and thereby the American people,” the 2025 plan declares. “No one in a leadership position on the morning of January 20 should hold that position at the end of the day.”
The plan also envisages getting around the requirements of Senate confirmation of nominees for senior positions by the president simply placing his people in state department posts in an acting capacity pending confirmation, and thereby “exert leverage on the Senate” to accelerate the confirmation process.
The author of the chapter, Kiron Skinner, ran the state department’s office of policy planning for about a year in the Trump administration. She depicted the department as a bastion of leftwing partisan resistance.
“It’s not that they’re just left wing, it is what they really believe is so radically different,” Skinner told the In the Room with Peter Bergen podcast this week. “They think they have a responsibility now to dig in and keep their point of view, or wait out the president by slowing the process down.”
When Bergen asked her if she could think of an instance in the Trump presidency when state department staff obstructed policy, she said she could not come up with a specific example.
“I think it was so multifaceted, so broad-based, it’s hard to point at one,” she said. “What I found is that there were a lot of junior staffers who were not there for the president’s agenda because no one ever told them it was their job to be.”
Dennis Jett, a former ambassador on the same podcast, said the plan sounded like “a hostile takeover”.
Thomas Shannon, who was undersecretary of state for political affairs under Trump, the third highest position at state, said the plan of mass replacement of state department staff with Trump loyalists was unlawful and unworkable.
“These people are smoking some pretty serious weed. I’d like to know where they get it,” he said. “Kiron Skinner might think that she is landing the stormtroopers to take over the state department, and to be ready to respond to the president’s orders, but actually what’s going to happen is chaos, as people resist,” said Shannon, who served as interim secretary of state in the first 12 days of the Trump presidency.
“First of all, Schedule F is almost certainly illegal and unconstitutional,” he said. “The authority to establish the structures for the civil service, and to reform that service, lies in the Congress.”
Shannon – who served six presidents in his career, four of them Republican – said that placing people in positions in large numbers in an acting capacity would enrage the Senate, making it much harder to work with Congress. He pointed out it would also take a substantial amount of time to security-vet the new arrivals, and meanwhile it would be illegal for junior staff to share sensitive material with them, putting the rank and file in an impossible situation.
The diplomats’ union, the American Foreign Service Association (AFSA), has made clear it would fight any attempt to impose Schedule F.
“It’s probably not lawful, because people do have protections,” AFSA’s president, Thomas Yazdgerdi, said. “Remember, these are professional career foreign service members, who have devoted their lives to protecting our interests and promoting our values – and who serve in some of the most inhospitable and dangerous places on earth.”
Yazdgerdi adamantly disputed Skinner’s depiction of the state department as a partisan stronghold.
“I just couldn’t buy her main contention, that there is this leftwing group of folks who will not carry out the foreign policy of a conservative president. It’s just not true,” he said. “No one is questioning that the foreign service needs to carry out the foreign policy of the president. We do that. We don’t ask our members what party they are when they join AFSA. It’s completely non-partisan.”
Daniel Fried, a former ambassador to Poland, said that all administrations come into office seeking to populate the state department with officials who share their political vision. The difference with Project 2025 and the Schedule F plan is the scale of the ambition. Some observers believe that up to 50,000 across the whole civil service could be axed after inauguration day, about 10 times the normal turnover. However, Fried suggested that some of Trump’s incoming team might not object to the resulting confusion.
“A lot of the people in the Trump movement don’t like the federal government anyway,” he said. “They would want to paralyze it for ideological reasons, and that could do a lot of damage. It could be a real problem.”