Efficiency drive
Tillerson’s demolition job on the State Department is even worse than I’d thought. Even the security branch.
Republicans pilloried Hillary Clinton for what they claimed was her inadequate attention to security as secretary of state in the months before the deadly 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya. Congress even passed legislation mandating that the department’s top security official have unrestricted access to the secretary of state.
But in his first nine months in office, Mr. Tillerson turned down repeated and sometimes urgent requests from the department’s security staff to brief him, according to several former top officials in the Bureau of Diplomatic Security. Finally, Mr. Miller, the acting assistant secretary for diplomatic security, was forced to cite the law’s requirement that he be allowed to speak to Mr. Tillerson.
Mr. Miller got just five minutes with the secretary of state, the former officials said.
Five minutes!?!
What on earth?
Afterward, Mr. Miller, a career Foreign Service officer, was pushed out, joining a parade of dismissals and early retirements that has decimated the State Department’s senior ranks. Mr. Miller declined to comment.
The departures mark a new stage in the broken and increasingly contentious relationship between Mr. Tillerson and much of his department’s work force. By last spring, interviews at the time suggested, the guarded optimism that greeted his arrival had given way to concern among diplomats about his aloofness and lack of communication. By the summer, the secretary’s focus on efficiency and reorganization over policy provoked off-the-record anger.
Efficiency ffs. The State department doesn’t make shoes or cars or keyboards. Efficiency isn’t a relevant virtue in diplomacy.
In a letter to Mr. Tillerson last week, Democratic members of the House Foreign Relations Committee, citing what they said was “the exodus of more than 100 senior Foreign Service officers from the State Department since January,” expressed concern about “what appears to be the intentional hollowing-out of our senior diplomatic ranks.”
Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, and Senator Jeanne Shaheen, Democrat of New Hampshire, sent a similar letter, telling Mr. Tillerson that “America’s diplomatic power is being weakened internally as complex global crises are growing externally.”
Mr. Tillerson, a former chief executive of Exxon Mobil, has made no secret of his belief that the State Department is a bloated bureaucracy and that he regards much of the day-to-day diplomacy that lower-level officials conduct as unproductive.
What does he even know about it? What relevant knowledge or experience does he have? Besides negotiating for a for-profit corporation, which is not very relevant?
Even before Mr. Tillerson was confirmed, his staff fired six of the State Department’s top career diplomats, including Patrick Kennedy, who had been appointed to his position by President George W. Bush. Kristie Kenney, the department’s counselor and one of just five career ambassadors, was summarily fired a few weeks later.
It’s the Revenge of the Stupid, I swear. All we need is maximum firepower and maximum cash and we can beat everyone at everything – that’s their Political Science.
In the following months, Mr. Tillerson launched a reorganization that he has said will be the most important thing he will do, and he has hired two consulting companies to lead the effort. Since he decided before even arriving at the State Department to slash its budget by 31 percent, many in the department have always seen the reorganization as a smoke screen for drastic cuts.
Mr. Tillerson has frozen most hiring and recently offered a $25,000 buyout in hopes of pushing nearly 2,000 career diplomats and civil servants to leave by October 2018.
His small cadre of aides have fired some diplomats and gotten others to resign by refusing them the assignments they wanted or taking away their duties altogether. Among those fired or sidelined were most of the top African-American and Latino diplomats, as well as many women, difficult losses in a department that has long struggled with diversity.
God, it’s just nauseating.
For those who have not been dismissed, retirement has become a preferred alternative when, like Mr. Miller, they find no demand for their expertise. A retirement class that concludes this month has 26 senior employees, including two acting assistant secretaries in their early 50s who would normally wait years before leaving.
The number of those with the department’s top two ranks of career ambassador and career minister — equivalent to four- and three-star generals — will have been cut in half by Dec. 1, from 39 to 19.
I feel sick. Sick. It’s all-out war on everything – intelligence, experience, diplomacy, knowledge, discussion, negotiation, all in favor of stupid people barking rude malginant orders at gunpoint. It’s school bullies taking over the entire world. It’s putting the Mafia in charge of the universe.
Even more departures are expected as a result of an intense campaign that Mr. Tillerson has ordered to reduce the department’s longtime backlog of Freedom of Information Act requests. CNN reported that the task had resulted from Mr. Trump’s desire to accelerate the release of Mrs. Clinton’s remaining emails.
Every bureau in the department has been asked to contribute to the effort. That has left midlevel employees and diplomats — including some just returning from high-level or difficult overseas assignments — to spend months performing mind-numbing clerical functions beside unpaid interns.
Oh my god. They’ll have them cleaning the toilets next…while painting anti-Clinton slogans on the walls.
“The United States is at the center of every crisis around the world, and you simply cannot be effective if you don’t have assistant secretaries and ambassadors in place,” said R. Nicholas Burns, a retired career diplomat who was an under secretary of state for President George W. Bush. “It shows a disdain for diplomacy.”
It takes such deep, barbarian stupidity to have disdain for diplomacy of all things.
Although the North Korean nuclear crisis is the Trump administration’s top priority, the administration has yet to nominate an assistant secretary for East Asia or an ambassador to South Korea, crucial positions to deal with the issue.
In the midst of the war in Syria and growing worries over a possible conflict between Saudi Arabia and Iran, there is no confirmed assistant secretary for Near Eastern affairs or ambassadors to Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Jordan, Egypt or Qatar. And as Zimbabwe confronts the future after the departure of Robert Mugabe, the department is lacking a confirmed assistant secretary for African affairs or an ambassador to neighboring South Africa.
We’re doomed.
If Trump decides that he and his Twitter are enough, Tillerson job may be over….
Actually, efficiency isn’t a bad thing, even in the State Department. But efficiency means getting the job done without a lot of wasted effort. It doesn’t mean firing everyone who does the job.
Too many of these corporate types have come to equate “you’re fired” with efficiency. That rarely works out well, and in the State Department, it is sure to be a disaster.
Capitalisms cultural revolution.
It kind of reminds me of something I read on Cracked once, they were interviewing someone from the military who had to brief GW Bush on something.
What the guy found was that he had basically one sentence to give the information the president wanted, which he chalked up to the president having so much to do that he couldn’t afford to waste any time. The president was surprisingly sharp you see!
This in turn reminded of another report in which somebody was supposed to brief the president on tax and the president cut him down a peg or two – and this showed how smart Bush was. Nevermind that the person he was cutting down a peg or two was an actual expert who may just have been nervous briefing the president, and thus the drive to cut him down was actually getting in the way of getting some valuable information.
GW Bush’s presidency was likely the second worst presidency in American history. You’re looking at the worst one now.
And a lot of it had to do with that machismo approach to leadership, wherein the whole shebang comes down to putting people in their places, and being decisive and thus failing to create an open management environment. Instead of encouraging discussion, you encourage rushed decisions tainted with groupthink.
How much information can you pack into one short sentence?
Efficiency isn’t just doing things faster, it isn’t cutting out every delay, it is doing something properly once so you don’t have to do it again. That can mean taking the time required to do it properly.
And that is the real root problem with the Republicans in management – not the corruption, not the inhumanity, not even the dogmatism, it is this inability to take a breath and slow things down so that good decision making can happen.
So they fire the most competent, experienced voices because those are the ones who are most likely to raise objections and slow things down so that there is time to actually make them work, rather than just having the illusion of swift, decisive action.
The result is that quality drops. Exxon has a history of disasters based upon failures to gather information, the Deepwater Horizon disaster for example. Rex Tillerson’s experience isn’t irrelevant, the corporate culture he came from is relevant – as a warning.
But this is what Republicans see as being smart, because it is quick and decisive and very, very macho. Intimidation is not good leadership, good leadership is having the ability to make the best of your team, getting them to open up about potential problems, or even solutions, is part of that.
Unfortunately that is not what you’ve got right now.
T Rex Pol Pot
Doesn’t one of the security-minded organizations have in their mandate to protect against enemies both foreign and domestic? Because this clearly falls under the domestic part.
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