Johnson was a career member of the Senior Foreign Service and is president of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training. This article is written in her personal capacity, not as a representative of ADST.
This is part of a series offering a nonpartisan counter to Project 2025, a conservative guideline to reforming government and policymaking during the first 180 days of a second Trump administration. The Fulcrum's cross partisan analysis of Project 2025 relies on unbiased critical thinking, reexamines outdated assumptions, and uses reason, scientific evidence, and data in analyzing and critiquing Project 2025.
The history of the Department of State, one of the first Cabinet departments established, is intimately linked to our nation’s history and reflects the importance attached to managing our relations with foreign governments. Created in 1879, it is the bureaucratic home for two distinct cadres of nonpartisan career employees, under two congressionally mandated systems — the Foreign Service (FS) Schedule and the Civil Service (GS) General Schedule.
Foreign Service officers receive presidential commissions, and both cadres take an oath to uphold the Constitution. As career public servants, both are loyal to the presidency. Strengthening these career services rather than weakening them is critical in today’s complex, interdependent world, where managing relations and containing conflict are more important than ever.
Chas Freeman, one of our most articulate practitioners and writers on the art of diplomacy, explained the importance of a professional, nonpartisan diplomatic service:
“Diplomacy contributes to national well-being by exploiting unforeseen opportunities to advance state interests or reducing wasteful defense spending through détente, arms control, or disarmament accords. A great deal of diplomacy consists of ensuring that the natural frictions inherent in relations between states and peoples are minimized and restrained, that needless confrontations and blunders into warfare are avoided, and that when war does occur, its scope and level of violence are appropriately contained. … Diplomatic dialogue is the key to the fashioning of strategic relationships and the management of conflicting interests with foreign governments.”
Project 2025, the conservative Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for a second Trump administration, provides its own vision of American diplomacy and management. The chapter on the State Department — written by Kiron Skinner, who served as director of the Office of Policy Planning and as senior policy adviser to the secretary of state under Donald Trump — needs to be read in the context of the entire report. It rests on two main ideas: 1) the need for many more political appointees (vetted by Heritage for ideological conformity), and 2) the need to restructure and streamline the department to implement the president’s foreign policy agenda/vision.
In 1924, the Rogers Act established the United States Foreign Service as a professional, nonpartisan career cadre and the institutional backbone of the U.S. diplomatic service. Congress updated the legislation in 1946 and again with the 1980 Foreign Service Act, stipulating that “a career Foreign Service characterized by excellence and professionalism is essential to the national interest and must be preserved, strengthened, and improved to carry out its mission effectively in response to complex challenges of modern diplomacy and international relations.” Are not these challenges even more complex today?
The first part of the chapter in Project 2025 focuses on the need to ensure loyalty to the president’s agenda by installing appointees with established partisan credentials. The second part addresses the president’s foreign policy priorities. The third part covers reorganization strategy, consolidating foreign assistance and making public diplomacy “serve American interests.” I will focus on the first and third parts and then briefly comment on the foreign policy agenda.
Skinner highlights “one significant problem that the next President must address to be successful,” namely, a “tug-of-war between Presidents and bureaucracies,” asserting that “resistance is much starker under conservative Presidents” because “large swaths of the State Department workforce are left-wing and predisposed to disagree with a conservative President’s policy agenda.” No supporting examples are given. This statement misdiagnoses the reasons for the perceived “tug-of-war.” For career professionals, personal political leanings are not relevant to diplomatic practice or implementing foreign policy. Their job is to provide advice based on professional knowledge and experience and to implement whatever policy decision the political leaders make. Nonpartisan loyalty to the administration is the rule. Internal dissent or resignation over policy disagreement is rare.
In the subsection “History and Context,” Skinner states, “A major, if not the major, source of the State Department’s ineffectiveness lies in its institutional belief that it is an independent institution that knows what is best for the United States, sets its own foreign policy, and does not need direction from an elected President.” This may well be a perception in some quarters but does not accurately characterize the State Department I experienced.
The subsection “Political Leadership” proposes significantly expanding the number of political appointees and installing them without waiting for confirmation. This proposal harks back to the pre-1883 Pendleton Act era, doubling down on partisan patronage rather than on increased professionalism and expertise in service to elected leadership and presidential foreign policy.
The section “Shaping the Future” opens with the proposition that before developing a foreign policy “grand strategy” one must address structural reform and streamlining. It cites an earlier commission’s observation about the “ineffectual organizational structure in which regional and functional policies do not serve integrated goals” but doesn’t mention any of the subsequent reports and reform initiatives. Calls for restructuring have been made repeatedly over the decades since the report issued by that 1998 Hart-Rudman Commission on 21st Century National Security.
A better approach is a high-level bipartisan commission to examine institutional reforms that would best serve the demands of diplomacy today. Such a commission should include current and former members of the foreign and civil services, members of Congress, academics, and eminent personalities with understanding of foreign policy and diplomatic practice.
Finally, the section on the president’s foreign policy agenda posits “a world on fire” requiring heightened attention to several nations. Some pose “existential threats” to U.S. national security, others to “our economy”, and some “wild cards” are identified as China, Iran, Venezuela, Russia and North Korea. The overall mindset conveyed by this section –– “either you are with us or against us” — seems to be the underlying principle. Better would be George Shultz’s call to work for broad consensus on national security, framed by shared values. Shultz lamented the loss of nonpartisanship in our foreign policy and emphasized the dominant role that “earned trust” plays in determining cooperation or conflict in relations between and among nations. The most important first step would be to heed his call.
More articles about Project 2025
- A cross-partisan approach
- An Introduction
- Rumors of Project 2025’s Demise are Greatly Exaggerated
- Department of Education
- Managing the bureaucracy
- Department of Defense
- Department of Energy
- The Environmental Protection Agency
- Education Savings Accounts
- Department of Veterans Affairs
- The Department of Homeland Security
- U.S. Agency for International Development
- Affirmative action
- A federal Parents' Bill of Rights
- Department of Labor
- Intelligence community
- Department of State
- Department of the Interior
- Federal Communications Commission
- A perspective from Europe
- Department of Health and Human Services
- Voting Rights Act
- Another look at the Federal Communications Commission
Children watch a July Fourth Parade along the Walkway of Heroes and Independence Avenue on July 04, 2026 in Tappan, New York.
The Great American Grumpfest
Our nation’s 250th birthday party didn’t feel especially patriotic and wasn’t as much fun as the 200th anniversary was.
President Trump, who did his best to co-opt our holiday for his personal aggrandizement, was a major reason. The party he threw in Washington, D.C., was crankier than uplifting, and less about celebrating our shared past and a promising future than about reminding us how far we have strayed from our founders’ plan to create a republic that future Americans would keep in good working order.
Credit Trump this much. He has a singular gift for picking at scabs that other politicians would rather ignore and pushing us into reckonings we don’t need.
The thing is, Americans have seen all this before. Sometimes the makeover we were encouraged to undertake was more conservative, sometimes more liberal. Whatever direction we were pushing, however, the reckoning we had in mind this time had to be more forthright and the conclusion more definitive than it was the last time.
Our current discontents, the ones behind the reckoning President Trump has been trying to inspire, are not trivial. Included among them are immigration, birthright citizenship, exploding healthcare costs, election rigging, a gag-inducing national debt, how we educate our children, too many genders, racial differences we can’t move past, a lopsided economy that favors more well-off Americans, and historic levels of political corruption and graft. Add to these the several foreign adventures he has pushed us into or is anxious to undertake, and you have the makings of a national headache the likes of which we haven’t had in half a century.
All the elbow-throwing and overheated rhetoric we’re using today have begun to look almost normal in all the ways that bickering neighbors and feuding family members appear normal. But they have also made us look mean-spirited and have portrayed our differences as irreconcilable. To ourselves, of course, but also to many people outside the United States who might be forgiven for turning their heads and not looking at the national car wreck we Americans show no interest in avoiding.
The good news, as I suggested above, is that Americans have had a great deal of practice dealing with challenges and national car wrecks like these.
This essay begins to lay out the reasons why.
By way of illustration, we have our seemingly insatiable demand for more bad news about race in America.
Sixty years after being released from the legal constrictions that bedeviled both white and black Americans, many white people have come to believe the color that used to make them unassailable is now a sign of a moral inferiority born of a racial animus they can never wash off. Many black people, on the other hand, are insisting that America is as hopelessly stacked against them as the formerly unassailable white people’s ancestors used to tell their black ones.
The result is that many people today are buying into racist nightmares and mumbo jumbo that their black and white ancestors worked hard and effectively to put in each other’s heads.
This might be dismissed as crazy behavior if it weren’t so important to rituals Americans have long used to express their deepest fears about each other while figuring out what move they can make that won’t end with their world crashing down on everybody’s head.
Unfortunately, the kind of cultural sleight of hand we have used to ramp up our racial differences has been appropriated by people who have many other cultural fears and unresolved differences with each other. Their clumsy but culturally prescribed missteps are making all these other issues look as irremediable as our racial problems.
A good place to start an answer to how we back away from ledges is Alexis de Tocqueville’s writing on early-19th-century American democracy. He had an optimistic take on Americans’ unscripted displays of public bravado, recrimination, and payback.
For him, these were occasions when people tried to mitigate the effects of the unfair hand they were dealing someone else or had themselves been dealt by behaving in ways quite at odds with how they would otherwise be expected to act. These inversions of what Tocqueville called “the natural order of conscience” presented themselves as a loud but culturally muted challenge to the hypocrisies that people had built into the world they’d made together.
One of his favorite illustrations of early-American hypocrisy involved slave masters sleeping with their less-than-worthy slaves. To the best of my knowledge, he didn’t pick up on all the ways that slaves messed with their owners. Their well-chronicled and quiet resistance showed that even severely ill-treated people can exercise more control over their lives than outsiders appreciate.
Be that as it may, such inversions of a people’s “natural order of conscience” make a good public show of them wrestling with demons they can’t or may not want to shake off, but in any case, are nowhere close to figuring out how to cast out.
Implicit in these disruptions was the discomforting idea that people might flip the entire script and turn the world on its head in more permanent ways. That kind of flipping worked out better for us in our revolution against England than in our Civil War. These events taught us the value of stepping back from historically unprecedented ledges.
Americans of late have been giving loud expression to a long list of things they don’t like about each other and the last makeover they started but didn’t finish a half-century ago. The outcome of our fights today will be as revealing as they are embarrassing to everyone who imagined they could recast our country in a way that privileged their favorite kind of Americans.
Their disappointment with the accommodations they strike will be palpable, but the middling results they achieve with all their pushing and shoving won’t be anything they can’t live with.
Anthropologists who have written about such moments in other cultures less “advanced” than our own show that people find ways to work around their seemingly irreconcilable differences without ever fully resolving them. Indeed, the patches and repairs people make have the unheralded effect of reinforcing rather than undermining the legitimacy of the practices and values they thought were fundamentally flawed.
For example…
White guilt and black pessimism do more good than putting cash into the pockets of professional shamers and handwringers. They give the rest of us who don’t feel guilty or powerless more time to make the world less racially unequal. Good news.
Regarding illegal immigration, the entrance requirements for future immigrants will remain stringent. Americans will applaud the continued detention and deportation of the few illegal immigrants who commit serious crimes. Good news.
All the people who came to the United States without being legally vetted and were locked up for a time will be released in numbers small enough to avoid serious media attention. Along with the several million other good people who snuck in but avoided capture, the former detainees will go to school, find gainful employment, pay their taxes, and stay out of trouble. Many will eventually become citizens. Good news.
Investigations into election tampering and Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential loss will come to an unceremonious conclusion the day after his second term ends. Many Americans will grumble about this, but there will also be some quiet partying, too. Good and bad news.
Congressional hearings into all the grifting accomplished by people tied to the Trump administration will end without anyone having to pay a dime back to the American taxpayers. Bad news, we’ll learn to live with.
New laws and regulations will be created in the hope that the kind of corruption practiced by President Trump will not be repeated for another 250 years. Good news, I hope we’ll live long enough to enjoy.
Show trials for people who allegedly vandalized the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, if they happen, will get big television viewer ratings. Good news.
Trials for pardoned Capitol insurrectionists who committed serious crimes after their release should get more attention, but won’t. Bad news.
We will continue to hear nothing from most of the people who were pardoned for crimes they committed in the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. They will keep their mouths shut and their heads down for the rest of their life. Good news.
The gold-gilded ornaments that Donald Trump had plastered all over the White House will be shipped to Mar-a-Lago, where the former president will sell them on eBay. Fun news.
American taxpayers end up paying for most of the new East Wing, the removal of the miniature gladiatorial arena that was built behind the White House, and the restoration of the White House rose garden. Bad news.
The Triumphal Arch was never built. Good news.
Trad wives and gay couples raise perfectly lovely children. Good but unsurprising news.
Trans men and women learn that most Americans can’t figure out who they used to be. No one gives a second thought to their use of “family bathrooms” or “unisex bathrooms” in public settings, businesses, and schools. Communities will sponsor athletic teams that have trans boys and girls just to show they can. Good news.
Budget deficits will be kicked down the road for someone else’s children to pay down. Bad news.
Federal agencies that had their budgets and employee ranks slashed during President Trump’s second term are getting some of the money and lost positions back. Good news.
Elite universities will buy their way out of DEI purgatory by competing for conservative scholars whose inflated salaries dwarf those of their liberal colleagues, who will think about suing their institutions for reverse discrimination but won’t be able to figure out who would pay for it or care. More fun news.
Okay. I’ve probably missed some ways that Americans will step back from the ledges they have been making noises about leaping off. But to the extent that my predictions pan out, the best and most important moral of the stories about us stepping away is this: everything we lost and took back, or had returned to us, will have happened without our government collapsing, civic traditions crumbling, or our people beating each other up.
The reason why is that the differences Americans have with each other really weren’t as irreconcilable as we made them out to be. The empty-sounding bromide that Americans have more that unites us than divides us turns out to be true, not just metaphorically but in fact.
Now that is really something to celebrate.
Daniel J. Monti (danieljmonti.com) is Professor of Sociology at Saint Louis University and the author of American Democracy and Disconsent: Liberalism and Illiberalism in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter, and the Capitol Insurrection.