President-elect Donald Trump spent his first term cutting the State Department’s staff and budget. Former foreign service members of the department expect to see a similar approach in his second term.

The Trump administration implemented a government-wide hiring freeze in early 2017 that lasted several months. But the administration maintained a hiring freeze at the State Department in place for a year and a half, with the goal of reducing its total staff by 8%.

Tibor Nagy, former assistant secretary of state for Africa in the first Trump administration and former ambassador to Guinea and Ethiopia, said he expects the next Trump administration to pursue a similar strategy.

“We just have to assume that resources will decrease. There will not be more and more resources for the State Department, nor more and more staff. We can do the job — the essential work — with fewer people,” Nagy said Tuesday at an event hosted by the Hudson Institute.

Meanwhile, a new bipartisan commission will soon consider how to reform the State Department.

Congress, as part of the FY23 National Defense Authorization Act, initiated the Congressional Commission on Department of State Reform and Modernization.

The panel, championed by Senators Ben Cardin (Democrat of Maryland) and Bill Hagerty (Republican of Tennessee), will “examine the changing nature of diplomacy and ways in which the department can modernize to advance the interests of the United States “. .”

The FY 2023 NDAA gives the commission 18 months to examine the challenges of modern diplomacy and report its findings to Congress and the President.

President Joe Biden appointed four members to the commission in October. Legislators gave the new commission $2 million funding in the FY 2024 omnibus spending bill.

Drew Peterson, a former Foreign Service officer now an assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh, urged the commission to focus on streamlining how the Foreign Service handles recruiting, assignments, evaluations and promotions .

“These processes are exceptionally inefficient and costly. They often generate high rates of vacancies, reductions and other factors that hinder the smooth running of embassy operations. Ultimately, the department spends far too much time on these processes for insufficient results,” Peterson said.

Peterson said new Foreign Service employees can spend years doing consular work and training before doing the job they were hired to do.

“When you add it all up, you might come up with a pretty unflattering ratio between the time spent simply managing institutional activities and the time spent promoting U.S. foreign policy objectives,” he said. declared.

Peterson said the new administration and commission should also ensure the Foreign Service recruits the next generation of diplomats.

THE average age of a person entering the foreign service is now 36 years old, a little more than in recent years.

“We must bring young people back into the foreign service, even if they do not have a 28-year career there. It was like this 50 years ago. Today, maybe some people will come and spend 10 years in the foreign service, or even five or even three, and then they will go and do something else.”

Simon Hankinson, a former foreign service officer who is now a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, said the work of modernizing the foreign service will take longer than the next administration.

“Hopefully this could happen in eight or 12 years and maybe Republicans and Democrats could agree that it needs to be done,” Hankinson said.

“We need a soup-to-nuts assessment. The only thing conservatives agree on is that we can’t have unlimited funds and just continue to double staff and have a training fund,” he added.

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