Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is moving immediately to fill vacant senior positions at the State Department, a task so large it has the feel of a “presidential transition” as opposed to a hand-off from one member of President Trump’s Cabinet to another, according to Republican foreign policy experts.
“That is true in the sense that there’s so many vacancies,” Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow Elliot Abrams told the Washington Examiner. “It’s really incredible how many vacancies there are. It’s more like starting fresh.”
Five of the nine most senior positions at Foggy Bottom are vacant; the number was six, but Pompeo already has filled the role of counselor of the department. Dozens of ambassadorships are empty, while there are just five Senate-confirmed assistant secretaries of state.
As a result, Pompeo has an unusual opportunity to shape the upper echelons of the diplomatic corps the way he wants to, at a time when the Trump administration has multiple high-stakes negotiations underway.
But it’s also more than just an opportunity — it’s a requirement for him to win over a bureaucracy whose hostility to fired Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was a seedbed for media controversies and clashes with congressional overseers.
[Trump fires Rex Tillerson, will nominate Mike Pompeo to replace him]
At the moment, he’s being received at Foggy Bottom like a breath of fresh air.
“He has one piece of luck, which is that he is inevitably going to be compared with his predecessor,” said Abrams, who served in the State Department during President Ronald Reagan’s administration and on President George W. Bush’s White House National Security Council. “So Secretary Pompeo starts way ahead of the curve. Rather than following a very popular secretary, he follows an unpopular secretary.”
Beyond the politics of getting confirmed, there have also been signs that Pompeo has a sincere criticism of how Tillerson managed the department.
“I enjoyed working with Secretary Tillerson, I think his lack of appointees being confirmed by this body was one of the problems, but, for whatever the reasons, there’s a morale problem,” Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, told Pompeo during his confirmation hearing. “I’m not going to ask you to repeat with me what you said in private, but I was encouraged.”
The lack of political appointees under Tillerson has a number of causes, not least of which is the hostility between Trump and much of the traditional Republican foreign policy establishment. Still, Pompeo was startled to learn the extent of the vacancies as he met with State Department staff after Trump picked him to take over as the top diplomat.
When one official suggested that Tillerson had postponed some nominations until after he finished developing a much-discussed plan to reorganize the State Department, Pompeo dismissed the explanation.
“In my corporate life, I did two multimillion dollar [reorganizations], and that has nothing to do with filling up slots,” Pompeo said during one such meeting, according to a source close to the White House.
Pompeo has promised to nurture State Department morale from the earliest days of his nomination — a message that was a political necessity, given the need to win a precious few Democratic senators to back his confirmation. “He’s already started interviewing people here at the state department for various positions,” State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert told reporters Thursday. “He intends to interview people throughout the weekend.”
His efforts could get bogged down in the Senate, due to the twin pressures of political opposition and the congressional calendar. “The blessing is that he gets to choose his own team,” Abrams observed. “The curse is that I think the confirmation process is going to be a big problem. If you come in on January 20th, you have the opportunity to get everybody confirmed in a few months, but because of the August recess and then the October election recess I think he’s going to have trouble getting everybody confirmed before mid or late fall.”
In the meantime, Pompeo is waging an effective public relations campaign directed at the State Department personnel.
“I will get to as many parts of this organization as I can. I said in my testimony that I’ll spend as little time on the seventh floor — I think it’s the seventh floor, right?” he said to laughter, referring to his new office. “I look forward to meeting just as many of you as I can get a chance to do, to learning from just as many of you as I can, and to leading that team onto the field … I’ll see you all around the building.”
To Tillerson’s critics, that was a clear break with the former Exxon Mobil CEO’s style.
“Tillerson wanted to make appointments at first but started discovering that most of the people he recommended were on the White House blacklist — so after a while he started relying on his few political appointees in the front office and didn’t care so much about the rest of the building,” one Republican foreign policy expert with knowledge of the process told the Washington Examiner. “For Tillerson, the career people were doing just fine, so why spend time on the issue?”
For one thing, the lack of appointees exposed Tillerson to a steady drumbeat of attacks from congressional Democrats that he had “hollowed out” the State Department, charges amplified by persistent leaks from current and former diplomats. Pompeo reportedly has put a tourniquet on at least one of those vulnerabilities; he plans to withdraw Adm. Harry Harris’ nomination as ambassador to Australia, in order to send the former Pacific commander to South Korea, according to the Washington Post.
As he tried to fill other posts, Pompeo will still have to navigate the problem of White House hostility to Trump’s erstwhile critics.
“[The president has decided] basically, ‘if you opposed me in 2016 or said critical things, then we’re not going to offer you a position in this administration,” said Abrams, whose bid for the second-highest job in the State Department was nixed reportedly due to past criticism of Trump. “My own view is it’s a mistake. … The president needs all the talent he can get. Any president needs all the talent he can get.”
