Many career diplomats at the State Department will resign at noon on Monday after being asked to leave by the incoming Trump administration, The Washington Post reports.
President-elect Donald Trump’s aides have told a number of veterans of the U.S. Foreign Service, including those working as undersecretaries and in other high-level positions, that they will no longer be needed from the moment of his inauguration. That list includes John Bass, the State Department’s acting undersecretary for political affairs.
Asking top officials to leave is standard in the changing of the guard for near presidencies, although some presidents will keep longtime diplomats in their posts until they are replaced with other appointees.
Fox News notes that Trump plans to choose 20 or so “senior bureau officials” to take over the duties of the departing diplomats, some of whom worked in such posts during his first term in the White House.
A Trump transition spokesperson defended the move in a statement to the Post, saying the incoming president had “a lot of failures to fix and that requires a committed team focused on the same goals.”
“It is entirely appropriate for the transition to seek officials who share President Trump’s vision for putting our nation and America’s working men and women first,” a spokesman told the paper.
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Trump also plans to suspend the security clearances for 51 intelligence officials who said damaging news stories about President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, were linked to a Russian influence campaign in 2020.
The plans are part of a broad blitz of more than 200 executive actions Trump is reportedly planning to take during his first days in office. Those plans will quickly seek to shift the fabric of the federal government in his image, including dramatic shifts in border and environmental policy.