The Trump administration has quietly recalled nearly 30 ambassadors and other senior overseas diplomats, according to diplomatic sources. The move is part of a plan to promote appointees loyal to the new administration to higher levels of the State Department.
The recall of ambassadors or heads of mission is unusual for targeting career foreign service officers, who are generally left in place after a change in administration because they strive to be apolitical. The Trump administration had vowed to oust a 'deep state' of civil servants, a process critics have called a purge of professional government employees.
A senior State Department official said the recall is standard, as an ambassador is a personal representative of the president. The official confirmed that recalled ambassadors would not be fired but reassigned. The hardest hit region was Africa, with around a dozen ambassadors recalled from countries including Niger, Uganda, Senegal, Somalia, Côte d'Ivoire, Mauritius, Nigeria, Gabon, Congo, Burundi, Cameroon, and Rwanda. In the Middle East, heads of mission were recalled from Egypt and Algeria, and in Europe from Slovakia, Montenegro, Armenia, and North Macedonia.
The American Foreign Service Association (AFSA) expressed deep concern, stating that the process could politicise the foreign service. AFSA asserted that staff who executed policies of a previous administration should not be penalised by retroactively imposed changes to promotion criteria. Senator Jeanne Shaheen criticised the move, saying it gives away US leadership to China and Russia by removing qualified career ambassadors.
