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Dozens of U.S. ambassadors will spend this holiday season packing up to return home. The Trump administration is recalling about 30 career diplomats. It's a move that the State Department's union is calling, quote, "institutional sabotage." NPR's Michele Kelemen reports.
MICHELE KELEMEN, BYLINE: The American Foreign Service Association is still trying to get a handle on the scale of the recall. Various lists are floating around with names of dozens of ambassadors, many in Africa. The official line from Secretary of State Marco Rubio's office is that this is a standard practice.
TOM SHANNON: This is not standard.
KELEMEN: That's retired diplomat Tom Shannon. He says the president has the right to remove any ambassador he chooses, but traditionally, administrations keep in place most career diplomats so that there's some continuity, at least until a new ambassador is named.
SHANNON: If this had been done at the very beginning of the administration, it still would have been considered extreme in terms of the numbers. But it would have been understood as, OK, the president gets to do this.
KELEMEN: But he questions why the administration is doing this now. News of the recall started emerging after Secretary Rubio's marathon end-of-year news conference when he dismissed a union survey about low morale and argued that he has empowered foreign service officers.
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MARCO RUBIO: We are changing this place so that it is our missions in the field that are not just driving directives from the top down, but also ideas from the bottom up. And I'm very proud of that, and I think that's going to lead and pay huge dividends for future secretaries of state long after I'm gone.
KELEMEN: This year, Rubio dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development and streamlined the State Department, laying off thousands of employees. Ambassador Shannon sees all of this as part of a much broader effort by the Trump administration to get rid of public servants who hold more traditional foreign policy views.
SHANNON: They're clearing the decks because they want to bring in a completely new mindset, and they want to shape that mindset, and they don't want to have to struggle with what came before.
KELEMEN: The State Department's union issued a statement saying the Trump administration is sending a message to public servants that their loyalty to the Constitution and their experience takes a backseat to political loyalty.
Michele Kelemen, NPR News, Washington.
(SOUNDBITE OF VULFMON AND JACOB JEFFRIES' "BLUE") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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