New figures have laid bare the shocking extent of brain drain in the U.S. diplomatic service during President Donald Trump’s second stint in the White House.
The Trump administration has either laid off or forced into retirement around 2,000 career diplomats since the president’s second inauguration last year, NBC News reported Sunday, citing the latest stats from the American Foreign Service Association.
The numbers—representing decades of combined experience in vital areas like international negotiation and crisis response—do not include more than 2,000 staff who lost their jobs when the Trump administration shut down the United States Agency for International Development last year.
Career officers apparently now account for less than 8 percent of White House picks for ambassador-level roles abroad.
The vacancies have also piled up, with close to 100 embassies—over half the global total—now running without a Senate-confirmed envoy.
The drop has proven particularly pronounced in the Middle East, where half of U.S. missions now lack a formal ambassador.
This includes four of the Gulf states, along with Qatar and Pakistan, which have both been pivotal to ongoing negotiations on an end to Trump’s war with Iran.
The numbers climb even higher across Africa, where upward of 75 percent of countries have no sitting U.S. ambassador.
Among those states is the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where global health authorities have raised alarm over a rapidly spreading outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus.
During his second term, Trump has often shunned seasoned diplomats, instead leaning heavily on close political allies to conduct international negotiations on his behalf.
Steve Witkoff, a close business associate of the president with zero diplomatic experience, has led Trump’s efforts on the wars in Ukraine and Iran with the help of Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law.
Witkoff has not once set foot in Kyiv since assuming his post as special envoy last year, but has repeatedly shuttled between Washington and Moscow for high-level meetings with Putin and other Kremlin officials.
Kushner, who holds no formal role in the second Trump administration, has meanwhile faced mounting accusations of gross conflicts of interest over his diplomatic role in the Middle East, given his sizable investments and assets in the region.
John Bass, who formerly served as the U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan, Georgia and Turkey, told NBC that the pattern of firings and forced retirements speaks volumes about the White House’s approach not only to diplomacy, but also to the federal bureaucracy.
“Clearly, there is an organized effort to strip the career, professional workforce of experienced leaders who have a degree of expertise and who have been taught to take initiative, to solve problems, to fill the space and to speak on behalf of the nation,” he said.
“It’s pretty clear that this administration does not value any of those things, and in fact sees anyone taking initiative as disloyal or somehow part of a ‘deep state,’ even if they’re taking that initiative in a way that is fully consistent with the objectives that have been laid out by the president and the secretary,” he added.
Elizabeth Horst, a career diplomat who has served under both Democratic and Republican administrations at posts in Europe and Central Asia, said the impact of the cuts will be felt for years to come.
“The long-term damage is not just to America’s reputation, but the things Americans care about,” Horst said. “Will I be OK overseas if I travel and have an emergency? Can I get a passport? Can my business export the way it used to? Are my supply chains OK?”
The Daily Beast contacted the White House and the State Department for comment on this story.
State Department spokesperson Tommy Pigott rejected the suggestion that the administration had gutted the career diplomatic corps.
“Certain Foreign Service Officers and Civil Servants were notified in July of a Reduction In Force (RIF), in compliance with all legal requirements,” he said, describing the layoffs as “the most complex and tailored in federal government history” and “thoughtfully designed to facilitate a more efficient, faster, and effective America First diplomacy.”
He added on ambassadorial vacancies that the president “has the right to determine who represents the American people and interests around the world,” and that “in those embassies without a Senate-approved ambassador, experienced chargé d’affaires lead the missions.”
Pigott also dismissed the idea that career experts had been sidelined in favor of figures like Witkoff and Kushner, calling the critics “nameless unelected bureaucrats who are complaining to the press” and the warnings of lasting damage “baseless.”
The White House did not immediately respond.
