A group of top career officials at the State Department left their jobs the same day Secretary of State Rex Tillerson paid a visit to Foggy Bottom to introduce himself, it was reported Thursday. The Washington Post reported that the four — including Patrick Kennedy, State’s long-time undersecretary for management — resigned on Wednesday. But Administration sources told CNN that the four were fired because Team Trump wants State to chart a new course. Kennedy, a nine-year veteran, had been active in the transition from John Kerry to the former-Exxon/Mobil chief, and was said to want to remain in his post. But once word got out that Team Trump was looking to give him the boot and hire someone else, he and three of his top aides bailed, the Washington Post said. The others who left Wednesday included 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. All were long-time staffers who had served under both Democratic and Republican administrations, the paper reported, citing department sources. And they weren’t the first to go. Assistant Secretary of State for Diplomatic Security Gregory Starr retired Jan. 20 — the day Trump was inaugurated — and the director of the Bureau of Overseas Building Operations, Lydia Muniz, left the same day. CNN said they had all gotten letters from the White House telling them their services were no longer needed. “It’s the single biggest simultaneous departure of institutional memory that anyone can remember, and that’s incredibly difficult to replicate,” David Wade, who served as State Department chief of staff under Kerry, told the paper. “Department expertise in security, management, administrative and consular positions in particular are very difficult to replicate and particularly difficult to find in the private sector.” All the officials had submitted letters of resignation, a requirement when a new administration takes office for all jobs that are appointed by the president and that require Senate confirmation. Ambassador Richard Boucher, the State Department spokesman for Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, said there’s always turnover when a new administration takes office and that top officials work with the new appointees to see who should stay on. But the mass exodus will make it harder for Tillerson to hit the ground running, he said. “You don’t run foreign policy by making statements, you run it with thousands of people working to implement programs every day. To undercut that is to undercut the institution,” Boucher told the paper. Trump spokesman Sean Spicer told reporters aboard Air Force One that he was unaware of the resignations. Meanwhile, the US Border Patrol chief has left the agency that’s in charge of securing the country’s borders with Mexico and Canada. A current and former official told AP that Border Patrol agents had been told that Mark Morgan is no longer on the job. It was not immediately clear whether Morgan quit or was canned. Morgan’s departure comes a day after President Trump announced plans to build a wall at the Mexican border and hire 5,000 Border Patrol agents. http://nypost.com/2017/01/26/senior-staff-resigns-en-masse-from-state-department/
It's my understanding that large groups of folks at state routinely "resign" during administration changes. I don't know if this is more or less than usual, but it's not surprising. You have a group of folks who have operated under a particular policy for so long, and along comes a guy to upset the apple cart, you'd expect flight.
Self draining swamp. Cool. Somehow we will survive the loss of these idiots who gave us such successes as Benghazi, Iran nuke deal, Libyan intervention and coups in Egypt and Ukraine.