Foreign Policy

Report: The State Department Does Basically Nothing Now

Written by SK Ashby

To say that the State Department is out of the loop under the Trump regime feels like an understatement.

According to the Guardian, the State Department has almost entirely been cut out of the decision-making process and officials now rely on foreign sources for domestic information.

Senior state department officials who would normally be called to the White House for their views on key policy issues, are not being asked their opinion. They have resorted to asking foreign diplomats, who now have better access to President Trump’s immediate circle of advisers, what new decisions are imminent.

The public voice of the state department has fallen silent. There has not been a daily press briefing, the customary channel for voicing US views and policy on world events, since January.

Ordinarily you may be able to attribute this to the department being severely understaffed, but they're still firing people.

Much of seventh-floor staff, who work for the Deputy Secretary of State for Management and Resources and the Counselor offices, were told today that their services were no longer needed.

These staffers in particular are often the conduit between the secretary’s office to the country bureaus, where the regional expertise is centered. Inside the State Department, some officials fear that this is a politically-minded purge that cuts out much-needed expertise from the policy-making, rather than simply reorganizing the bureaucracy.

When shit hits the fan in other parts of the world, the Trump regime will not have the expertise to deal with it because they've excised everyone with actual expertise.

The rest of the world doesn't play by our rules and they certainly don't hinge their decisions on Trump's tweets. He's going to embarrass us and get people killed.