David McKean was U.S. State Department director of policy planning from 2013-2016. He is currently a senior fellow at the U.S. German Marshall Fund.

Imagine holding the job of representing the most important country on the planet, facing an exploding array of crises around the world, and focusing not on diplomacy but on fiddling around with your org chart and mundane tasks like fixing the email system.

Yet that’s what Rex Tillerson has done in his bizarre and disappointing 10 months as America’s secretary of state—a position held by such giants as Dean Acheson, Henry Kissinger and James Baker. Unlike his predecessors, who generally left the day-to-day management of the State Department to others, Tillerson has reportedly immersed himself in a mysterious, corporate-inflected overhaul of Foggy Bottom’s bureaucracy.


The staff of the State Department has not taken kindly to Tillerson’s ministrations: Experienced and talented diplomats are fleeing; top posts have inexplicably gone unfilled; and those left behind are demoralized and adrift. Applications for the foreign service are down by half. As the head of the Foreign Service Association, an alumni group, recently pointed out, the number of career ministers—the diplomatic equivalent of three-star generals—is down from 33 to 19, while minister counselors—equal to two stars—has fallen from 431 to 369.

Like any bureaucracy, the State Department tends to resist change; past secretaries have made attempts at reform with mixed success. But what’s happening to the department under Tillerson looks to many not like reform but sheer incompetence, if not deliberate sabotage. And what’s especially strange about his focus on management issues is that, for a former CEO of one of the world’s largest corporations—ExxonMobil—he doesn’t seem very good at it.

Consider, for example, a recently leaked document out of the secretary’s office that suggests he is relying on the 25-person Policy Planning office as the principal vehicle for day-to-day decision-making. As the previous director of that office, under former Secretary of State John Kerry, I was especially keen to understand how Tillerson is using my old shop.

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The document, which was first reported by POLITICO, is a flow chart that attempts to streamline the making of foreign policy. It references no other office in the Department of State as playing a role besides Policy Planning, which appears to be the primary originator, implementer and monitor of policy.

It’s not clear whether this is because the secretary thinks he is facilitating central planning, or because there isn’t anyone else left with the requisite experience in the department to advise him—he hasn’t filled scores of critical positions, and yet he is slashing the department’s staff by 8 percent, or roughly 2,000 people. There is nothing wrong with trimming bureaucracy, but using a Texas chainsaw instead of a scalpel, Tillerson is severing from the department its most valuable expertise and experience.

Every secretary has a different model for decision-making. And Tillerson is certainly entitled to his own system; he seems to want fewer stops in the chain of command, perhaps to restrict the flow of information to a trusted close circle of advisers. This may streamline the decision-making process, but it won’t necessarily produce a better outcome.

To understand why, it’s worth taking a look back. Created during the Cold War era, the Office of Policy Planning was intended to help keep the big picture in view. Acheson, the undersecretary of state at the time, described its mission as to look “far enough ahead to see the emerging form of things to come and outline what should be done to meet or anticipate them.”

Acheson, of course, lived in the middle of last century, well before the communications revolution. The “form of things” seems to emerge more quickly these days, so it isn’t surprising that in recent years Policy Planning has dialed up—and down—its operational role depending on the issue. It is something of a balancing act: To be relevant, Policy Planning can’t remove itself from current crises. Yet it also needs to step back from the immediate, so that it can recommend actions to meet future challenges and take advantage of future opportunities.

When I was director of the Office of Policy Planning, sometimes “long-term” planning was reduced to weeks, such as during the 2015 Nigerian presidential election, when we recommended that the secretary visit Lagos to highlight the critical importance of free and fair elections. At the same time, we were constantly adjusting our long-term strategies—for instance, managing the rise of China by working together on issues such as climate and development while confronting Beijing on cyber espionage and freedom of navigation in the South China Sea.

No matter the timeline for the policies we developed, we always worked with the various bureaus inside the department and with our embassies abroad. We knew that the assistant secretaries, our ambassadors and the career officials of the foreign service had valuable experience and therefore an important perspective. And we knew that for any strategy to be successfully implemented, we needed buy-in from those officers in the field.

Oddly, the power grab on behalf of Policy Planning does not appear in the “Redesign” plan submitted by the outside consultants Tillerson hired to advise him on reorganization. In their PowerPoint presentation, the consultants highlighted such obvious truisms as “People support what they help create” and “Build everything from the framework of supporting the mission.”

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In creating the Office of Policy Planning, Acheson wanted the staff to “do something else” beyond strategic planning: He wanted the office “to constantly reappraise what was being done.” The most important undertaking for Policy Planning today should be to reappraise the secretary’s evisceration of the foreign service and advise him to change course as quickly as possible.

Sidelining experts has led to some embarrassing mistakes. Tillerson began his tenure as secretary by initially announcing his decision to skip the NATO summit in April. He ultimately reconsidered, but it was an inauspicious beginning. And since then he has sent the message to Latin America that it is not a priority, when he couldn’t find time to attend the OAS General Assembly in June or the Lima meeting in July. He invited the chair of the African Union to Washington and then backed out of the meeting, infuriating African diplomats. On his first trip to Beijing, he repeatedly adopted the diplomatic language of the Chinese to describe the relationship, leaving our allies in the region scratching their heads. And finally, he has downgraded human rights as a cornerstone of American diplomacy.

Tillerson needs to stop playing management consultant and be the secretary of state. He needs to devote the necessary resources to diplomacy and development. He needs to lay out his vision of international relations and articulate actual policies to meet the many challenges the United States faces around the world, including the development of a diplomatic strategy in Afghanistan, the implementation of a global sanctions policy against North Korea, and a plan to reinvigorate the trans-Atlantic alliance. To do all of this, he needs the long-term vision of Policy Planning, but he also needs to listen to our diplomats and empower the foreign service officers who put their lives on the line every day for America.

