Julia Ioffe has an illuminating piece over at The Atlantic about the possibility that the president* may find savings in his upcoming budget by simply eliminating unnecessary frills—like, say, the State Department.

Not really, but the folks at Foggy Bottom apparently are feeling particularly foggy these days.

The action at Foggy Bottom has instead moved to the State Department cafeteria where, in the absence of work, people linger over countless coffees with colleagues. ("The cafeteria is so crowded all day," a mid-level State Department officer said, adding that it was a very unusual sight. "No one's doing anything.") As the staffer and I walked among the tables and chairs, people with badges chatted over coffee; one was reading his Kindle. "It just feels empty," a recently departed senior State official told me.

And thus does the State Department—the freaking Department of State—become a DPW road crew out along Route 2 in Deerfield.

Sometimes, the deconstruction of the administrative state is quite literal. After about two dozen career staff on the seventh floor—the State Department's equivalent of a C suite—were told to find other jobs, some with just 12 hours' notice, construction teams came in over President's Day weekend and began rebuilding the office space for a new team and a new concept of how State's nerve center would function. (This concept hasn't been shared with most of the people who are still there.) The space on Mahogany Row, the line of wood-paneled offices including that of the secretary of state, is now a mysterious construction zone behind blue tarp.

If they're not putting in a Tiki bar, I don't want to know about it.

It struck me while reading this that, for most of the time I've been alive, the president's office and the State Department have been stuck in a marginally dysfunctional relationship. Things seemed OK with Ike and JFK. But Johnson's State Department under Dean Rusk got all tangled up in Vietnam and, like just about everything else about the LBJ administration, it also was tangled up in the Kennedy legacy because Rusk was a Camelot holdover like Robert McNamara at Defense. (It wasn't until Clark Clifford took over at the latter that Johnson got turned around on the war.) Richard Nixon had Henry Kissinger whispering in his ear until William Rogers finally quit and let Kissinger take over in 1973. Ronald Reagan allowed foreign policy initiatives to run out of the White House basement until the operation that birthed Iran-Contra nearly brought down his presidency.

Now, it seems that the president*, as part of Steve Bannon's great experiment in supply-side Leninism, simply is letting the entire department wither away while Rex Tillerson bops around the globe. Remember all those stories about "rubber rooms," where unemployable teachers whiled away the hours because you couldn't fire them? It sounds to me like the State Department—the freaking Department of State—is turning into one big rubber room.

With the State Department demonstratively shut out of meetings with foreign leaders, key State posts left unfilled, and the White House not soliciting many department staffers for their policy advice, there is little left to do. "If I left before 10 p.m., that was a good day," said the State staffer of the old days, which used to start at 6:30 in the morning. "Now, I come in at 9, 9:15, and leave by 5:30." The seeming hostility from the White House, the decades of American foreign-policy tradition being turned on its head, and the days of listlessness are taking a toll on people who are used to channeling their ambition and idealism into the detail-oriented, highly regimented busywork that greases the infinite wheels of a massive bureaucracy. Without it, anxiety has spiked. People aren't sleeping well. Over a long impromptu lunch one afternoon—"I can meet tomorrow or today, whenever! Do you want to meet right now?"—the staffer told me she too has trouble sleeping now, kept awake by her worries about her job and America's fading role in the world. "I used to love my job," she said. "Now, it feels like coming to the hospital to take care of a terminally ill family member. You come in every day, you bring flowers, you brush their hair, paint their nails, even though you know there's no point. You do it out of love."

But don't worry. The president*'s son-in-law is on the case.

"They really want to blow this place up," said the mid-level State Department officer. "I don't think this administration thinks the State Department needs to exist. They think Jared [Kushner, Trump's son-in-law] can do everything. It's reminiscent of the developing countries where I've served. The family rules everything, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs knows nothing."

This will certainly end well.

But while senior State appointees have yet to be appointed, other staff has been showing up. The Office of Policy Planning, created by George Kennan after World War II, is now filled not just with Ph.D.s, as it once was, but with fresh college graduates and a malpractice attorney from New Jersey whose sole foreign-policy credential seems to be that she was born in Hungary.

Oh.

The last month, the staffer said, "has been a very deliberate stress test." "There seems to be no effort to benefit from the knowledge and expertise of people who are here, who just want to help," said the mid-level officer. Instead, they see the White House vilifying them as bureaucrats no one elected, and it all seems, the mid-level officer said, "symbolic of wanting to neuter the organization." "This is probably what it felt like to be a British foreign service officer after World War II, when you realize, no, the sun actually does set on your empire," said the mid-level officer. "America is over. And being part of that, when it's happening for no reason, is traumatic."

Can't say I'll miss being an empire much but, also, I think we need a State Department that exists somewhere outside of Jared Kushner's head.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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