Decimated by staff cuts, inattention , bad bosses who worry about pleasing THEIR boss, not their staff and a general ‘I don’t give a shit President’?
The United State State Department is mere shadow of what ‘Foggy Bottom’ used to be…
The only good thing?
Its disenchanted employee’s have stuck back at Trump thru testimony before House members of Congress….Telling what they have seen that Trump & Co. had tried to cover up…
After nearly 30 years as a foreign service officer, his State Department career was over. The reason? Lukens says he had unwittingly committed a fatal error in his speech: He had mentioned former president Barack Obama.
To open the speech, Lukens, who had worked for presidents of both parties, used an anecdote from his time as ambassador to Senegal to illustrate how allies can handle disagreements. He mentioned Obama’s 2013 visit to the country. “There was incredible excitement,” Lukens said in his speech. “He had a guard of honor, crowds shouting his name, street vendors selling WE LOVE OBAMA T-shirts. It was really amazing. And the president had really great talks with the Senegalese president, Macky Sall. They got on really well. But what I remember most of all was the disagreement they had—as friends.” Lukens explained that during the trip, an American journalist had asked Obama whether he had pressed the Senegalese leader on LGBT rights—a provocative topic in a country where same-sex relationships are criminalized as “unnatural” and where the LGBT community faces widespread discrimination. Lukens told the students that Obama handled the thorny question well. And then he moved on to the rest of the speech, not realizing the damage he’d done with a single anecdote. (When asked about the episode and Lukens’s ouster, the State Department declined to comment. The American embassy in London did not respond to a request for comment.)
This incident, which has not been previously reported, offers a stark example of the politicization of the foreign service under Trump. It’s also a grim illustration of how the administration—through three years of attempted budget cuts, hiring freezes, and grotesquely personal attacks—has eviscerated the country’s diplomatic corps and put highly sensitive matters of national security in the hands of politically appointed novices. They are people like Gordon Sondland, the Trump donor who became America’s ambassador to the European Union, who is now playing a starring role in the Ukrainian imbroglio that imperils the Trump presidency. It is no accident that impeachment hangs on a matter of diplomacy—and a stand-off between the country’s top foreign policy professionals and the president’s political allies, national security amateurs installed to do Trump’s bidding rather than the country’s….