State Department sets business-as-usual course while ignoring Biden

The department has been collecting those messages but will not turn them over to the Biden team until President Donald Trump's General Services Administration, which so far has refused to authorize a transition, gives the go-ahead.

"I've found myself saying formally that I can't OK the delivery of a message to the president-elect because he's not officially that," said a current official. "They go into some box somewhere."

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo this week discussed the state of affairs in a telephone call with politically appointed ambassadors, according to a second current official and a former official familiar with the matter, telling them not to forward congratulations through official channels.

"This is clear paranoia of not saying or doing anything that might upset the big man," the current official said, referring to Trump. The official, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

Six current officials inside the department, who were not authorized to speak to the news media, said they had received no guidance from leadership, and that it was unclear how they should proceed amid Pompeo's assertion at a news conference this week that he expects "a smooth transition to a second Trump administration."

While much of the administration has descended into turmoil - obsessively searching for nonexistent ballot fraud, as Cabinet secretaries and other senior officials are fired, resign or are stricken with the coronavirus - the State Department has calmly set a course toward business as usual.

Pompeo leaves Friday for an 11-day trip, with a full agenda, to seven countries in Europe and the Middle East - all of whose leaders have publicly congratulated Biden on his victory. This week, the department released a slew of new economic sanctions on its least-favored countries, held an economic dialogue with Israel and a counterterrorism forum with Nigeria, and congratulated "the people of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines on their successful election."

"There's still a great deal of work to be done, and this work will continue in this year and next," Pompeo told Fox News during one of several interviews with conservative news outlets Tuesday.

Asked about Pompeo's call to political ambassadors and the lack of internal department guidance, a State Department spokesman said: "It's been made very clear that we still have work to do at the department and everyone should stay focused on the mission."

"It's also not unusual for the secretary to pick up the phone to call staff and leadership throughout the department," said the spokesman, speaking on the condition of anonymity under rules imposed by the State Department.

But even as Pompeo expressed confidence in Trump's eventual victory, his flurry of speeches and media appearances on Tuesday also sounded like a legacy-building farewell, as he congratulated himself and the president on changing the world and boosting U.S. standing.

In an address on Tuesday at the virtual launch of the Ronald Reagan Institute in Washington, Pompeo drew a direct line from the popular 40th president, who he said did more than any other "to restore America's confidence and advance human freedom in the post-World War II era," to the "accomplishments" of the 45th. Trump's foreign policy, Pompeo said, "will steer a generation of American foreign policymakers" to come.

At the top of his list, Pompeo placed"delivering peace" to the Middle East, moving the world to "wake up" to the threat posed by China, and reversing the "days when America sacrificed its natural leadership to morally pliant multilateral institutions." 

One of the few top administrations officials who has lasted throughout Trump's term, Pompeo has rarely, if ever, experienced the president's wrath. He deflects all questions about his own political ambitions - including mentions of a possible presidential run in 2024 - by saying he is focused on his current work and happy to do it as long as Trump wants him.

One former senior official described Pompeo as less willing to incur Trump's anger because he had little independent base of support outside the administration. "Pompeo has political ambitions, and those ambitions are tied to Trump," the former official said. "He goes nowhere without Trump." 

But assuming that Pompeo leaves office in January, his record will be mixed. Many of the administration's signature foreign policy priorities, with which he was closely associated, have made little or no progress. 

Despite U.S. withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal and new sanctions heaped on Iran almost weekly, Tehran did not buckle and change its "malign behavior." Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro remained stubbornly in power despite efforts to turn his own military against him and push him into exile. North Korea remains a belligerent nuclear power.

While Pompeo has been successful in persuading some countries to reject Chinese technology, it remains unclear whether administration efforts to curb Chinese expansionism will succeed. 

One area where he has claimed a significant measure of success has been his efforts to elevate religious freedom as a foreign policy priority.

An evangelical Christian who said he prays on the elevator up to his seventh-floor office every day, he put religious freedom at the top of his list of "inalienable rights" that many saw as a way to downgrade less-traditional legal freedoms related to gender issues and abortion.

When Pompeo became secretary in April 2018, a sense of relief washed over the State Department, where diplomats and civil servants had grown deeply demoralized under his predecessor. Rex Tillerson, the ExxonMobil executive who served as Trump's first secretary, imposed hiring freezes, restricted spousal assignments and acquiesced to attempts to weed out officials who had worked in the Obama administration.

Viewing Pompeo as someone who had Trump's confidence, professional diplomats who had felt marginalized and usurped by the White House thought that under Pompeo they would once again become players in foreign policy. 

From the beginning, however, Pompeo struck many as an unlikely choice to be the nation's top diplomat, because he was so often undiplomatic. It was a reputation cemented by his attack-dog belligerence as a congressman from Kansas during the House inquiry into the department and then-Secretary Hillary Clinton over Benghazi.

As secretary, Pompeo was sometimes as dismissive of Congress as he was of the news media, whose questions he often labeled "crazy" and "ridiculous."

Disenchantment with Pompeo inside the department started gradually, when he issued an "ethos" statement on the need to promote U.S. interests and values around the world with "unfailing professionalism." The elementary points, suggesting they had not been lived up to before, rankled many veteran diplomats.

"I don't think there will be many people sorry to see him go," said one of the current officials who discussed Pompeo's tenure. While Pompeo was an improvement over Tillerson, he has little communication with the staff outside a handful of top lieutenants seen as loyal, and is widely known as a hothead whose blowups are sometimes laced with profanity.

Although he routinely spoke publicly of his admiration for the diplomats he led, Pompeo undercut the power of his own words when he stood beside Trump in March and amiably chuckled as the president mocked the "Deep State Department."

Events surrounding Ukraine and Trump's subsequent impeachment were a hinge moment for Pompeo and the department he led. Despite resistance from his own aides, he failed to defend Marie Yovanovitch, the highly regarded career Foreign Service officer who was the U.S. ambassador in Kyiv, and bowed to Trump's demand that he fire her, after a smear campaign against her led by Trump's personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani.

Many of the State Department's personnel problems, and its fading relevance vis a vis the White House and Pentagon, as the driver of U.S. foreign policy, predate Trump.

But under Trump, what former Trump aide Stephen Bannon called the hoped-for "deconstruction of the administrative state" has been particularly pernicious.

"The wreckage at the State Department runs deep," William Burns, who retired from 33 years in Foreign Service in 2014 as deputy secretary of state, and Linda Thomas-Greenfield, a former ambassador and assistant secretary for Africa who now heads Biden's State Department transition team, wrote in this month's Foreign Affairs.

"Career diplomats have been systematically sidelined and excluded from senior Washington jobs on an unprecedented scale. The picture overseas is just as grim, with the record quantity of political appointees serving as ambassadors matched by their often dismal quality."

The Foreign Service, they wrote, "has experienced the biggest drop in applications in more than a decade," while "painfully slow progress on recruiting a more diverse workforce has slid into reverse." Only four of the 189 U.S. ambassadors serving abroad are Black.

"No amount of empty rhetoric about ethos and swagger can conceal the institutional damage," they wrote.