Breaking - Nation Breathes a Sigh of Relief as Entire Senior Staff of State Department Walks Out

UPDATE via CNN:

Two senior administration officials said Thursday that the Trump administration told four top State Department management officials that their services were no longer needed as part of an effort to “clean house” at Foggy Bottom.

Patrick Kennedy, who served for nine years as the undersecretary for management, Assistant Secretaries for Administration and Consular Affairs Michele Bond and Joyce Anne Barr, and Ambassador Gentry Smith and Ambassador Gentry Smith, director of the Office for Foreign Missions, were sent letters by the White House that their service was no longer required, the sources told CNN.

All four, career officers serving in positions appointed by the President, submitted letters of resignation per tradition at the beginning of a new administration.

The letters from the White House said that their resignations were accepted and they were thanked for their service.

The White House usually asks career officials in such positions to stay on for a few months until their successors are confirmed.

“Any implication that that these four people quit is wrong,” one senior State Department official said. “These people are loyal to the secretary, the President and to the State Department. There is just not any attempt here to dis the President. People are not quitting and running away in disgust. This is the White House cleaning house.”

I wish I could hug that headline, I love it so much.

Via the Washington Post:

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s job running the State Department just got considerably more difficult. The entire senior level of management officials resigned Wednesday, part of an ongoing mass exodus of senior foreign service officers who don’t want to stick around for the Trump era.

Tillerson was actually inside the State Department’s headquarters in Foggy Bottom on Wednesday, taking meetings and getting the lay of the land. I reported Wednesday morning that the Trump team was narrowing its search for his No. 2, and that it was looking to replace the State Department’s long-serving undersecretary for management, Patrick Kennedy. Kennedy, who has been in that job for nine years, was actively involved in the transition and was angling to keep that job under Tillerson, three State Department officials told me.

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

In addition, 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.

“It’s the single biggest simultaneous departure of institutional memory that anyone can remember, and that’s incredibly difficult to replicate,” said David Wade, who served as State Department chief of staff under Secretary of State John Kerry. “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.”

Several senior foreign service officers in the State Department’s regional bureaus have also left their posts or resigned since the election. But the emptying of leadership in the management bureaus is more disruptive because those offices need to be led by people who know the department and have experience running its complicated bureaucracies. There’s no easy way to replace that via the private sector, said Wade.

“Diplomatic security, consular affairs, there’s just not a corollary that exists outside the department, and you at least can afford a learning curve in these areas where issues can quickly become matters of life and death,” he said. “The muscle memory is critical. These retirements are a big loss. They leave a void. These are very difficult people to replace.”

There is no part of the federal government, in my lifetime, that has done more damage to the safety and security of America than the US State Department. It has never met a dictator it wouldn’t suck up to, an enemy it wouldn’t appease, or an ally it wouldn’t cheerfully f*** over. It’s treatment of Israel would make anyone wonder if anti-Semitism was a requirement of working in Foggy Bottom. It is difficult to look at a single point over the past 5 presidencies and find yourself saying, “gee, State really saved our bacon on this one.”

Recently, State has been in thrall of the Clinton’s. According to State, Hillary’s personal email was fine, her abuse of security procedures without flaw. They lied to Congress for here about Benghazi. They broke the law by abusing FOIA regulations to cover Clinton’s fat and slovenly tracks.

While Patrick Kennedy and his merry little band of lawn dwarfs think they are sending a message to Tillerson, they are going to be richly disappointed.

First, State needed a change of atmosphere so these people all needed to depart anyway.
Second, the graveyard is full of indispensable men.
Third, lots of experience does not mean lots of good experience.
Fourth, everybody moves up one position.

By next week no one in State will even remember who these people are.

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