Lawfare Daily: The U.S. Foreign Service at a ‘Breaking Point,’ with John Dinkelman

[Intro]

John Dinkelman: We're there for America. So what happens when all of a sudden I can no longer provide that input without fear of adverse ramifications, retribution, recrimination, or retaliation? It's going to close people down. People are going to start worrying more about themselves than they are about the service to the country that they've sworn to do.

Tyler McBrien: It's the Lawfare Podcast. I'm Tyler McBrien, managing editor of Lawfare with John Dinkelman, president of the American Foreign Service Association.

John Dinkelman: The foreign service is a canary in the coal mine for other ranking person systems in the U.S. government, namely the U.S. military. And as we see the erosion in the confidence that we have in our duly appointed, commissioned officers of our government to fulfill the legal requirements of their positions, it is potentially increasingly adverse in its effects on our government.

Tyler McBrien: Today we're talking about the association's latest report entitled “At the Breaking Point, the State of the U.S. Foreign Service in 2025.”

[Main Episode]

So John, the American Foreign Service Association just published a report in December called “At the Breaking Point, the State of the U.S. Foreign Service in 2025.”

So first I'm curious what motivated this report? Is this something that the association normally does or was this a new endeavor? And if so, why did you undertake, you know, such an in-depth survey of the foreign service?

John Dinkelman: Well, thanks for that question, 'cause that's really the basis of why we're here in that the federal government decided to not conduct its annual survey of workplace conditions of employee satisfaction of what have you. It's quite an intricate survey, having taken it over the course of many years myself.

They decided to dispense with that. Go figure. And the American Foreign Service Association determined that it was in the best interest of our membership, and frankly, in the best interest of our organization, meaning the larger foreign service that we at least get a grasp of the nature of the workplace as it was being portrayed in 2025.

So we jumped into that breach and we conducted a survey, we went out to our membership and we're quite happy with the voluminous response that we got. We weren't so happy with the results, which I'm sure we can go into in some depth, but that's the genesis. No one was going to speak the truth that power needed to hear, and so we jumped into that breach.

Tyler McBrien: Yeah, that's, I think one of the reasons I've found the reports so valuable is that, for the past year many of our listeners will also relate to this, just hearing things being done to the foreign service and on, on behalf of the foreign service. And so rarely hearing from foreign service officers themselves, due to very good reasons of nonpartisanship and all of that good stuff.

So you mentioned that you sent this out to your membership and you had quite a robust response. We'll go into the findings in just a bit, but how many survey respondents, how representative of the foreign service, both former and current, is this report?

John Dinkelman: Current is the issue. We're talking about the workplace as its sits right now. We went out to a total—and remember, we only reach our members, right, so, so we are a subset of the foreign service, but rather unique to government unions in general. About 85% of the foreign service are members of our organization. We originally went out to over 6,000 individuals to survey, and over 2,000 people responded.

We feel that is an excellent response rate given the overall concerns in the workforce of being perceived as giving bad information, but also in general, I think a 30-plus percent survey response is quite high and was certainly statistically significant and reliable.

Tyler McBrien: Before we get into the findings, out of curiosity, were you, what was your reaction to that high response rate? I think anyone who's done a survey of any kind would be happy with that response rate, but what did that tell you about the state of the foreign service?

John Dinkelman: That people are unhappy, but there's much more to it than simply saying, ‘Oh, you're unhappy in your job. Life's tough, suck it up.’

The overall responses, the unanimity, not just uniformity, but the overwhelming messages that over 86% of the foreign service said that their ability to carry out their jobs has been inhibited over the past eight months. That 78% reported that their budgets and their resources have been reduced, and 75% say that they've been hurt in their ability to do their job. And finally, of course, that 98% of them feel that morale has been adversely affected.

I mean, I don't think you can get 98% of people to agree, any group of people to agree that the sky is blue, much less that the situation is dire. But it's one thing for us to simply say, yeah, people are unhappy. It's another to think about the secondary and tertiary ramifications of our abilities to do our jobs when the workforce is being adversely affected in such a way.

When you weaken the foreign service, you weaken America and that message needs to be brought home. And I don't know how better to do it than to meet with people like you who will listen, since leadership in and of itself seems to have a deaf ear for all of this.

Tyler McBrien: I wanna drill down on that. How do these, this low morale, pretty wide-scale firings, how does this material affect the work, the day-to-day work, of the foreign service officer?

You know, people can conceive of how low morale would translate to their own work, but from the point of view of a foreign service officer, how does this make their job harder? How does it weaken America with a diminished foreign service? What did you hear, maybe beyond the data, from some of your members?

John Dinkelman: That's an excellent question. Now, I'll try to get to the core of it, but you're gonna have to forgive me if my answer is rather long. So there's a vicious cycle that's taking place here. When I was hired as a foreign service officer, oh so many years ago, it was drilled into me that the greatest single value I brought to the workplace was my unique input, whether it was my regional expertise, my functional expertise, my linguistic capabilities, my intercultural abilities, and my institutional understanding were all brought together over the course of decades for me to be able to produce for elected leadership, the full picture of what was going on around the world.

Simply put, the uninhibited ability to speak truth to power and to provide a sometimes very ugly picture of what's going on or how it's being interpreted outside the United States is the reason why the State Department exists. Yes, we are there to, to advocate for the poor American who's found himself in a victim of crime or to help people in jail, or to go to the poor child who's been abducted by one parent and the poor parent in the United States isn't able to get to their kid. We are there on the ground for all of that.

In addition to that, we're able to tell people what it's like in Washington where the beltway is such an inhibitor in the ability to feel what's going on in the rest of our country, much less the rest of the world.

We're there for America. So what happens when all of a sudden I can no longer provide that input without fear of adverse ramifications, retribution, recrimination, or retaliation? It's going to close people down. People are going to start worrying more about themselves than they are about the service to the country that they've sworn to do, and that's going on.

It's more a managerial issue than anything. As I have led organizations, one of the greatest things that I've learned is that being able to empower my people with the safety of knowing that their input, their opinions, and their true desires to contribute to the organization will never endanger the value I place in them.

Rather, I want to make sure that my people know how to deliver those messages to maximize their effects on an organization. And the opposite is going on right now with thousands of diplomats around the world worried that their next step might be their last.

Just yesterday, I received an email from an employee who was informed that he had been fired on that day while back in the United States on leave, visiting his family at Christmas, coming from a rather isolated, difficult place to be in, and he gets a message informing him that his ticket, going back to his overseas assignment, has been canceled. And he will be severed that afternoon.

This is no way to run an organization that is more akin to the military than it is to the private sector, and this is the state of affairs that we find ourselves in right now.

Tyler McBrien: I'm also curious about your own background. Could you share a bit about, you know, your career in the foreign service and when you took this position as the head of the association, why did you decide to helm an organization like this at a time of such crisis?

John Dinkelman: I was approaching the end of a 37-year career with the Department of State. It's been an absolutely fantastic ride. It has been nothing but an honor to represent my country since before the fall of the Iron Curtain. As a matter of fact, my first assignment was on the other side of that Iron Curtain as those walls came down. And nothing can be more invigorating or wonderful than seeing our national policies lead to such sea changes around the world.

So at the end of this career, I thought the best way that I could contribute to the organization and the people who have grown to love and respect so much was to join the collective bargaining unit, to be the individual who leads the professional association.

You know, if you're a doctor and you become the head of the American Medical Association, it probably says something about you and the people you work with. And so that, that was the situation with the American Foreign Service Association until March 27^th, when the president decided that we no longer should be a collective bargaining unit.

Adding to the insult to the injury of that, however, is more the Department of State's unwillingness to even recognize the value of a professional association, which AFSA has been for a hundred years. We've only been a collective bargaining unit since the mess that was Watergate and the Vietnam War caused the Nixon administration to determine that it was in our national interest to have a way in which the diplomats could organizationally state, you know, this isn't what we are telling you, so please don't try to convey this as being something that the diplomatic corps is telling you as far as a policy inducing action.

Unfortunately, the Trump administration has determined that we don't need that guardrail or those safeguards anymore. It's really unfortunate.

And so anyway, your question back to me, I am in this breach because frankly, I've been in the organization for a long time. I've seen what can go wrong and I wanna make sure it doesn't go wrong. And unfortunately things are going wrong.

Tyler McBrien: You mentioned a moment ago, the rolling back of certain protections for the workforce, protections that are in place to I believe, to ensure that it remains a professional diplomatic corps and an apolitical one or a non-partisan one.

I'm curious what other similar things have we seen similar to that I, you know, the report sites, for example, changes to the foreign affairs manual. What other actions by the administration do you also put into this bucket of the guardrails?

John Dinkelman: It's a rather big picture to paint my friend. The issue being that you have a professional foreign service that is nonpartisan so that it can serve the interests of the nation. And because that is such a sensitive and critical tool for a government over the course of literally centuries, we have enshrined the organization so that it could not be used to the disadvantage of our country for internal political purposes.

There are a lot of safeguards that were put into place. One example would be, let's assume for a moment that for some unanticipated reason, we decided that we didn't need 10,000 diplomats, but rather we wanted to have only 8,000 and so it was time to summarily escort 2,000 of them out the door.

There is an intricate, or there was an intricate system, by which it would be determined which one of us would be of the least value to the United States government. Putting it in military terms, if you have a bunch of majors. And you decide that you want to get rid of 20% of your majors, do you just take the ones who are assigned to one military base and say you're all fired?

Or do you go through, and you look at their evaluations, you see their performance, you see their expertise, and you take the 20% of the lowest performers and you tell them that they're done? And that's the way it had been with the foreign service, to allow the safeguards to be in place to tell those under performers or lower performers in the case that it was their time to go.

But instead, the administration just summarily decided to throw all those rules out the window and to go with the military example, to simply take the bases that they didn't want to continue on and tell everybody that they were gone.

That undermined the confidence that individuals within the foreign service had, that they would be judged on their merits, that meritocracy would prevail, and that if they did a good job, that they would be rewarded or at least not punished accordingly.

That went out the window on July 11th and has led to the crisis of confidence, which we have within the organization. And that is one of, but various things, that has gone on in the organization that has eroded our ability to conduct our diplomacy in a manner that America deserves.

Tyler McBrien: Unfortunately, as you know, and many of our listeners know, some of these actions and contours of the crisis are not unique, unfortunately, to the foreign service and are occurring elsewhere in the civil service.

In other parts of the civil service, there has been litigation to challenge some of these firings and layoffs as illegal or circumventing proper procedure. Are you seeing similar legal challenges among the, your members in the foreign service? And if so, has there been any success in rolling back some of these cuts?

John Dinkelman: Successes, not yet, but the cases are still working their way through the courts. I think a bigger picture needs to be painted. And then, and I won't go into the Title 22 versus Title V, areas of discussion, which I'm sure your audience is well acquainted with.

The way I will portray this differently is that the foreign service is a canary in the coal mine for other ranking person systems in the U.S. government, namely the U.S. military. And as we see the erosion in the confidence that we have in our duly appointed, commissioned officers of our government to fulfill the legal requirements of their positions, it is potentially increasingly adverse in its effects on our government.

Tyler McBrien: Before I turn to some of the recommendations at the end of the report to reverse what's happening or strengthen the foreign service in this new reality. I wanted to zero in on one of the major findings here, which is that nearly one in three officers surveyed are considering leaving the foreign service.

And, you know, I also, I can't imagine that, you know, young people who are graduating from graduate degrees in international relations and similar fields are eager to join up seeing the corps in the crisis that it's in.

If the crisis continues you know, what could the foreign service look like in the next administration and two administrations from now? What worries you about this trend? If the crisis continues the way it is?

John Dinkelman: We'll see a politicized foreign service with individuals being brought in by whichever party has the administration at the time, who have proven themselves favorable for eight or 12 years prior. It will erode the institutional understanding and the expertise that we take decades to build up. That's the long-term concern that I have.

The short-term concern is a caliber issue. Let's face it. If you're a college sophomore and you've decided that in your heart you called to be a diplomat for your country and you are gearing yourself up, are you going to consider a profession that is undergoing such a tumultuous adversity at this time?

Everyone I ask, I tell them that I am still bullish on diplomacy. I'm still encouraging the youth of the United States to consider this profession because in the end, whether it is in 2028 or 2032. We will have to rebuild the diplomatic element of our national power.

And we need levelheaded, nonpartisan professionals who are willing to devote their lives to a profession that will at least assure them that when the winds of policy change in Washington, that they're not out the door, simply because they refuse to sign some loyalty oath to whomever is in office at any given time.

We swear an allegiance to the Constitution, we swear an allegiance to execute the legal policies of the duly elected leaders of our country. I have never seen in my 37 years in the organization, I have never seen a foreign service officer who has violated that tenant or those precepts, and I doubt I ever would for the simple fact that, who is going to enter into such a profession with such malforethought?

But that's not the issue that we're facing now. We're facing the potential brain drain of our diplomats going into areas where they feel they can be of greater service to our country. And it's a loss that we will continue to feel. We've seen it with the U.S. Agency for International Development, the horrific situation of our government cutting off its nose to spite its face because they think that development is a bad thing, or at least they portray it that way.

And now we see this massive rush to try to repair and redirect our abilities to be of assistance in our own national interests. And the mess that is creating will eventually be sorted out. But the good people who have that expertise, they are going to international organizations, they're going into the private sector, and they are done with it because we have eroded the confidence and goodwill with that workforce. And it will take a generation, if ever, to rebuild that confidence.

Tyler McBrien: We mentioned how the nature of the foreign services, if not already changed, may be starting to change, in terms of starting to become more of a political arm, this being of course, forced upon the service by changes from the administration.

I'm curious though, how the American Foreign Service Association has also had to change potentially vis-a-vis its interactions with the administration or how has, you know, your organization been forced to adapt to this new environment this year? In addition, you know, other than of course conducting this survey where the foreign service had in years past.

John Dinkelman: Understood. The nature of diplomacy the work of the diplomat has always been one—it's always supposed to have been one that's behind the scenes. It is far better for our diplomats to work with foreign interlocutors, to negotiate with them, to convince them to reason with them as to why their desired course of action should be our desired course of action, and it is far better for everyone involved if they come to the right decision in and of themselves.

And our job is done with a minimum of fingerprints on what is going on around the world. And that in some ways, that ethos has bled into the way that the American Foreign Service Association has worked with foreign affairs agencies in the past for over a century.

We've been the one who have quietly had the meetings. We've explained, of course, we support policies and we will execute policies. That's what we're there for. But when the unforeseen consequence of a policy might be adverse, especially to our nation, but also to the workforce, we'll explain it to the bosses. We'll let them understand what we see and they'll make their decisions and we will salute and march smartly.

This has all been done quietly. This has all been done in meetings, in communications, heavens at lunch, where people are given the information they need and they act accordingly. But frankly, I can't even get into the State Department anymore and they don't even recognize that I exist.

So unfortunately, AFSA, for its part, has to take more public of a stance. Meeting with you, going on to podcasts, in the press, explaining these negative ramifications that decisions are being taken, that are adversely affecting our nation, that are having, what I hope are unforeseen consequences, bringing us into a dire situation.

Lamentably, my job has become much more outward facing than any of my predecessors. I would hope that someday this could return, and that at least the professional association element of what we have to offer, all of the foreign affairs agencies, would be utilized by leaders to effectively steer our government.

Tyler McBrien: So in addition to stepping into the spotlight in ways that maybe AFSA has never done before, to better explain the value of the foreign service and the, especially the apolitical, nonpartisan nature of it, to the public and to leaders, what else can be done here to address the crisis, to strengthen the foreign service for the future?

I know the report mentions a few recommendations toward the end, but what can we do? And again, and then who is the “we” here? You know, what can be done and by whom?

John Dinkelman: Well, we look to Congress to exercise its oversight authority to make sure that they support what is being done to our foreign affairs complex.

In the end, we rely on external actors to make sure that our branches of government are acting within the guardrails they have been given. And now would be such a time. Barring that, I will continue to ring as many bells as possible with the media, such as yourself, and with the workforce, so that they are at least aware of things that their own leadership are not sharing with them.

Tyler McBrien: So I just wanted to toss it over to you for the final word. If you have a parting word for your membership or, you know, a message heading into the new year for your membership and the public and our listenership, of course. What are you thinking, you know, heading into 2026 vis-a-vis this crisis?

John Dinkelman: Well, first and foremost, whatever storms may be blowing outside, AFSA will never lie to our members. We will always be a source of truth and a reliable repository of institutional memory as to the way things have been run in the past and the way they can be restored in the future. Simply put, AFSA will still be here.

The winds may blow, but we are shuttered tight and we are ready for this fight. Going forward, I would continue to, to a more external audience, I would continue to sound the alarm. There is an urgency here. It is not too late to save the ship of state from the perils that are on our course.

It will require the meeting of many right-thinking individuals. And frankly, it is not too late for leadership either. I know for a fact that there are good and honorable people in positions of responsibility in the Harry S. Truman building who truly want what is best for our country, and they see that that is done only through the effective application of a non-partisan foreign service.

They are willing, they're simply not able because of the pressures that they're receiving from above. I would encourage those pressures from above to reconsider their actions and make use of a workforce that is ready to serve the United States.

Tyler McBrien: So I think it's fair to say at a breaking point, but not yet broken. Which I think is a good note to end on. So John, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today.

John Dinkelman: Been a pleasure.

Tyler McBrien: Thank you.

[Outro]

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