Some say it’s time to rethink, if not cap or outright bar, political appointments for ambassadorships.

“It is out of whack under Trump,” said Dana Shell Smith, a former career Foreign Service officer who served as the U.S. ambassador to Qatar. “These ambassadorships are being seen as the spoils, as opposed to being very serious jobs that act in the interest of the country.”

Most modern presidents have given roughly 30 percent of U.S. ambassadorial postings to political appointees, with the rest drawn from career government ranks. Under Trump, the proportions appear to have changed significantly. As of now, nearly 45 percent of his ambassadorial picks — people who have been confirmed or are awaiting confirmation — are political appointees, one database shows.

The statistics have deeply frustrated the diplomats’ union, the American Foreign Service Association, which is calling on Trump to reevaluate his approach.

The group’s president, Eric Rubin, said in a statement to POLITICO that the Foreign Service Act of 1980 specifies ambassadorships should “normally be accorded to career members of the Service,” with only occasional exceptions for qualified outsiders.

The union "does not believe that asking to follow the law is a radical position,” Rubin said, adding that the Trump-era numbers are “dismaying.”

Current and former U.S. diplomats, including those who’ve been ambassadors, stress there have been some excellent political appointees in the past and that not all career appointees are perfect. But they’re alarmed by the implications of the impeachment inquiry’s findings so far.

The ongoing investigation has uncovered evidence that the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland, was operating outside the usual State Department chain of command to pressure the Ukrainian government to launch investigations that could help Trump in the 2020 presidential election.

Sondland is a hotel owner who reportedly donated $1 million for Trump’s inauguration and had no notable diplomatic experience before being named to the Brussels-based post. Ukraine is not a member of the EU, making Sondland’s involvement in its affairs even more odd.

But the envoy, like a handful of other politically appointed ambassadors, is known to have a direct line to Trump, another reason congressional investigators are keen to understand his activities. This week, the State Department ordered Sondland not to testify before Congress, but he’s been subpoenaed and has said he will appear before lawmakers.

Also caught in the impeachment inquiry is Marie Yovanovitch, a highly regarded Foreign Service officer named ambassador to Ukraine under President Barack Obama. Yovanovitch was pulled out of Kyiv in May, a few months before she was due to leave the post, under murky circumstances.

What is known is that the president’s allies had for months spread rumors about her, claiming she was anti-Trump. Trump called her “bad news” and seemed to vaguely threaten her while talking to Ukraine’s president, according to detailed call notes released by the White House.

In closed-door testimony before lawmakers Friday, Yovanovitch asserted that Trump had forced her out of her position based on "unfounded and false claims." She also warned lawmakers that many of “this nation’s most loyal and talented public servants” are looking to quit.

Democrats said the State Department and White House had tried to bar Yovanovitch's testimony, but investigating House committees had issued a subpoena and she'd complied with it.

Neither the State Department nor the White House responded to requests for comment on this story.

Last week, the American Foreign Service Association sent out a notice to its diplomats asking them to donate to a legal defense fund “for members with legal issues that involve possible far-reaching significance to the rest of the Service, such as cases involving due process or fundamental fairness.”

According to a union official, it was the first time in several years the group had sent out such a solicitation, which was first reported by Foreign Policy magazine. Although the group did not mention Yovanovitch by name, many career U.S. diplomats are donating to the fund because they are furious with how she’s been treated.

Such career diplomats point out that they are sworn to serve the U.S. government in a nonpartisan way, meaning they implement the policies of whoever is in the White House. Trump, instead, has cast them and other career government staffers as a “deep state” bent on thwarting him.

Under Trump, many of the political appointees “have absolutely no understanding of U.S. government policy and State Department policy. They don’t know what the hell they’re doing,” one former U.S. ambassador said, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.

Some career diplomats said it also feels like there’s more of a cultural clash with the Trump crew than political appointees from past administrations, though they agree it’s tough to quantify the phenomenon.

The former ambassador described how, during a get-to-know-you gathering of U.S. envoys last year, a political appointee was asked when he was going to return to his post. “He said, ‘I have my private plane here, so I’ll go back when I want to,’” the former ambassador recalled. “It was like, how far removed are these people from normal American life?”

Another former U.S. ambassador who was at the event said the atmosphere was starkly different from that of a similar gathering held two years earlier under Obama.

Then, the political appointees — many of whom were also fairly wealthy — eagerly talked to their career counterparts about the latest gossip. Under Trump, the political appointees largely kept to themselves, the former U.S. ambassador said. “We couldn’t really get any conversations going,” the former envoy said.

Some of the political appointees derisively referred to career staffers who worked for them as “Obama holdovers,” even if those employees had been in government for decades. There was even talk of “Obama ambassadors,” in reference to veteran U.S. envoys from the career ranks.

One Trump political appointee, the U.S. ambassador to Spain, Duke Buchan III, is known for his love of polo and the horses he raises, which in the sport are referred to as “ponies.”

During the same 2018 event, Buchan complained about the European Union having too many onerous regulations, making it hard for him to ship his polo ponies to Spain, according to another person who attended the event.

Buchan is fluent in Spanish and has long studied the culture. But he had no serious diplomatic experience before Trump nominated him for the Madrid post; he had, however, given hundreds of thousands of dollars to support the president’s campaign.

In response to multiple emails, Buchan, via an embassy spokesperson, did not deny that he’d wanted to bring over his horses or say whether he ever did. The spokesman said, however: “Ambassador Buchan is only concerned about EU regulations that affect the security and prosperity of the American people.”