A State Department in Crisis

Of the 15 executive departments in the U.S. federal government, none are held in such high esteem as the Department of State. At least, that used to be the case.

Since Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was sworn in, the department has seen a tremendous amount of upheaval from top to bottom. An exodus of career foreign service officers has left dozens of key positions around the globe vacant, and leadership doesn’t seem to be in a hurry to fill them. Meanwhile the number of young Americans taking the Foreign Service exam has dropped precipitously in just a year’s time.

Is this all just the inevitable blowback of a bureaucracy being forced to change, or are these changes actually threatening American interests?

This week on PolicyCast, HKS Professor and former U.S. Ambassador Nicholas Burns, a 27-year veteran of the U.S. Foreign Service who served as under secretary of state for political affairs in the Bush administration, sounds the alarm over what he sees as “draconian” cuts that undermine U.S. national security.