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Empty slots and special envoys

Let me try to clarify a bit the issues of empty slots and special envoys in the State Department, which I find confused in some of the public discussion.

The normal procedure in the State Department is that there are no empty slots, except when the position is slated for elimination. Secretary Tillerson is being reasonable when he refuses to fill jobs that he wants to eliminate. For the rest, someone moves up the hierarchy to be “acting.” So when an ambassador is out of country or not yet named, the “deputy chief of mission” (aka The Minister in most non-American embassies) is acting as Charge’ d’affaires ad interim. The same principle applies to jobs at State: if the Assistant Secretary for the Near East has not been named, a deputy assistant secretary moves up and acts in that role, and on down the line.

This means that more high-ranking jobs at State are in professional hands right now than normally, because the Trump Administration has been slow to name its appointees. I don’t bemoan that, because I fear that they may name people in the mold of Steven Miller, Sebastian Gorka or Steve Bannon. I’d much prefer a professional with long experience in those jobs to a white supremacist rabble rouser.

There is however a problem: many of the more senior State people are resigning rather than work for an Administration that does not respect them or their efforts. Someone with 20 or more years in can resign a Foreign Service commission and get a pension. If they are also over 50, the prospects of a second career are attractive. That means some of the “acting” people may have much less experience. That’s not good, but it is still likely better than a young batch of Trumpistas.

A lot of concern has been expressed in the last few days about elimination of some of the special envoys, who are appointed for specific topics, like Muslim world or human rights in North Korea. Most new administrations come in saying there are too many special envoys and try to eliminate lots of them. What they mean is that the last administration’s special envoys do not represent the new administration’s priorities. The new people soon realize how useful they are for giving added visibility to subjects that don’t fall naturally into the pigeon holes of the State Department bureaus and appoint some of their own, as a way of reshaping priorities.

There is nothing unusual about this. It is quite reasonable that the Trump administration might eliminate the special envoy for the Syrian opposition, support to which it has abandoned, but keep the one for the war against the Islamic State. Ditto for the Muslim world: why would an Islamophobe administration want to keep that? The problem is not the special envoys but the priorities. Much of the work the special envoys do is any event done by the normal bureaucratic hierarchy. What suffers is visibility and focus.

So State’s problems today have far less to do with empty slots or abolished special envoys, and far more to do with cockeyed priorities. That’s even worse.