{"id":26035,"date":"2017-01-26T10:54:08","date_gmt":"2017-01-26T18:54:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/?p=26035"},"modified":"2017-01-27T07:40:04","modified_gmt":"2017-01-27T15:40:04","slug":"abandon-ship","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/2017\/01\/26\/abandon-ship\/","title":{"rendered":"Abandon Ship!"},"content":{"rendered":"

I've been trying to imagine what it must be like to be a well paid senior nonpartisan career expert working in one of the federal departments, waiting for a Trump appointee to take over, and knowing his role is to destroy my life's work and that of all the other dedicated professionals in the department.  I decided that there could be only one ethical course of action, but thought nobody actually facing that situation would see it that way.  Fortunately, I was wrong.<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\"0126ship\"<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Kennedy will retire from the foreign service at the end of the month, officials said. The other officials could be given assignments elsewhere in the foreign service.<\/p>\n

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<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

“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… [emphasis added<\/em>]<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

From <Washington Post<\/a>><\/font><\/p>\n

Major kudos to all the officials who resigned, rather that serve at the whim  of Nectarine Nero!<\/font><\/p>\n

RESIST!!<\/font><\/font><\/h1>\n

When I'm wrong, I say so.  The Post article on which I based my conclusions was wrong.  The State Department Officials who left did not quit.  The Fuhrer purged them, presumably to make room for replacements selected by Vladimir Putin.  More  coming in another article.<\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I've been trying to imagine what it must be like to be a well paid senior nonpartisan career expert working in one of the federal departments, waiting for a Trump appointee to take over, and knowing his role is to destroy my life's work and that of all the other dedicated professionals in the department.  […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26035","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-5-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26035","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26035"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26035\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26035"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26035"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26035"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}