Very few political appointees beneath the ranks requiring Senate confirmation—ambassador, assistant secretary, or above—have worked in the State Department and related agencies in modern times.

I’m one of them. Beginning in 1981, during the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, I was an aide to Ambassador to the United Nations Jeane Kirkpatrick at the junior level of GS-12 and later at the level of GS-15 for arms control advisor Edward Rowny and others. I was two starkly delineated levels below the “principal officers” who required Senate confirmation, with the Senior Executive Service (SES) being in between. That experience is my vantage point in proposing some reforms for these institutions.

The first proposal is for aligning the State Department’s accountability to the president and his political appointees as closely as is reasonable with the principle of “civilian control” of the military. In the Pentagon, a serving military officer cannot be a “principal officer”; that level of policy development and direction must be in civilian hands. By statute, even a retired military officer cannot become secretary of Defense without either a cooling off period of several years or a vote by both houses of Congress to waive that rule. Regrettably, President Trump in his first term got such a waiver for his first Defense secretary, Gen. James Mattis, and President Biden did the same for his choice Gen. Lloyd Austin.

In the State Department, the reverse of civilian control is in operation. Many assistant secretaries and most deputy assistant secretaries are career foreign service officers (FSOs). This is analogous to uniformed generals and colonels holding such posts in the Defense Department. It is a radical exception to the staffing of not only the Pentagon but also of the domestic cabinet departments.

The analogy between the Pentagon and the State Department’s senior staffing is not exact.

FSOs, as trained and experienced diplomats, should not be excluded from capping off their careers as ambassadors; many of the best qualified persons for certain ambassadorial posts are FSOs. At the same time, today’s FSOs are members of a labor union—the American Foreign Service Association—and have a powerful lobbying force to pressure presidents to sharply limit the number of political appointees named as ambassadors. There is, nota bene, no labor union for the military.

Especially when conservative Republicans take office as new presidents, AFSA wages propaganda campaigns demeaning ambassadorial nominees coming out of the private sector or domestic politics as “unprofessional.” The second Trump administration and future administrations should push back against such pressure.

A reasonable arrangement should be for FSOs nominated as ambassadors to have to resign their career appointments so that, like other presidential appointees, they serve only at the pleasure of the president without job protection. It would be appropriate, following ambassadorial service, to provide such persons a path towards reinstatement in the career foreign service without offering a pure entitlement to rejoin the service.

The foreign service does not deserve a downgrade; it needs a reset, a reform, even an enhancement. FSOs who now are wrongly posted in senior executive policy positions at State Department headquarters should be serving instead in foreign posts. While it is appropriate for FSOs to serve as “country desk officers” at headquarters, there are simply too many FSOs holding down headquarters posts and too few accountable political appointees holding those jobs.

Because the effective conduct of diplomacy can prevent or end wars and other situations of peril, there is a good argument for the United States having more foreign diplomatic posts—consulates outside of national capitals staffed with savvy political and public diplomacy officers—and thus a larger number of FSOs, properly directed. The payroll of the foreign service corps as a federal budget line item is minuscule compared with the Pentagon and civilian bureaucracies.

Today’s crop of FSOs contains many woke ideologues and insubordinate attention-seekers, such as those who sign radical public manifestos dissenting from President Biden’s support, such as it is, for Israel. A major weeding exercise is needed. In terms of workforce strength, however, we don’t have too many FSOs; some are too ideological to perform their duties properly, while FSOs in general are not being deployed correctly.

From my experience in the U.S. Mission to the United Nations in New York, at State Department headquarters, on diplomatic missions, and in living and working in business in Latin America and the Middle East, I have seen the dramatic difference in energy, keenness for service, and manifested patriotism between FSOs in challenging foreign posts versus those with 9-to-5 paper-pushing jobs, engaged in groupthink at Foggy Bottom.

The aspiration to serve abroad as diplomats is why young people take the foreign service exam. FSOs are at their best when they are serving in foreign countries.

Secretary-designate Marco Rubio and his incoming team will have a daunting job trying to steer away from the wokeness, green extremism, and other far-left currents that have driven the State Department during recent years. They will never be able to accomplish that mission without structural reforms such as those proposed above.

Shifting policy making power away from the career bureaucracy to capable political appointees will weaken the “Iron Triangle” that tends to thwart presidential administrations. The components of the triangle are the career bureaucracy; both parties on Capitol Hill, especially at the staff level in appropriations; and the mainstream media.

During my years as a rare political appointee at the so-called “working level” in foreign affairs, I observed that policies and programs at State and other foreign affairs agencies often were dictated and micromanaged by appropriations subcommittee staff, often from the opposition party to the president’s administration. Before the expression “deep state” came into vogue, that is what we had. When I joined her staff in 1981, Ambassador Kirkpatrick, referencing the Iron Triangle, warned me and other political appointees under penalty of something terrible happening to us never to have unauthorized contact with Capitol Hill. That’s not how it goes with the career bureaucracy.

Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, and their Department of Government Efficiency have vital work to do with the foreign affairs bureaucracies.

In the State Department, there is laughable redundancy in some of the bureaucratic structures. The department has “regional bureaus” and “functional bureaus.” Generally speaking, every regional bureau has an office corresponding to every functional bureau. During my time, for example, the international narcotics matters bureau had an office for near eastern affairs, while the near eastern affairs bureau had an office for international narcotics matters. The human rights bureau had an office for Latin American affairs, while the Latin American affairs bureau had an office for human rights, and so on.

The effect of this redundancy, besides wasteful spending, was to gum up the policy flow. The department could not adopt a policy or send out a cable of instructions unless and until petty and often feuding bureaucrats from the respective regional and functional bureaus agreed to “sign off.”

While the State Department needs to be made more efficient and accountable to the president, entire agencies in foreign affairs should be abolished. First on this list is the U.S. Agency for International Development. This is a monstrosity of spendthrift, left-wing social engineering policies and programs. A related foreign aid agency that should be zeroed out is an invention of George W. Bush called the Millennium Challenge Corporation.

Foreign aid is an industry that gets its support from propaganda appealing to sentimental humanitarianism. The foreign aid bureaucracy today is a force for cultural imperialism, an example of which is is promoting transgenderism in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Muslim world.

The Peace Corps, the National Endowment for Democracy, and the United States Institute for Peace are related government bureaucracies that should be euthanized. American interests are not served by these bureaucracies, and we can’t afford them. Musk and Ramaswamy also should cast a cold eye on American spending on multilateral foreign aid programs in the United Nations and the World Bank. U.S. foreign aid does little for the truly needy while it lines the pockets of odious Beltway Bandits and corrupt Third World despots.

Effective diplomats listen instead of lecturing. Only by listening to and understanding others can they get others to understand us and allow us, or cooperate with us, to advance our national interests.

The United States has a large amount of wasteful spending and bureaucracy to eliminate in our foreign affairs apparatus. This does not mean retreating from diplomatic activity. On the contrary, we need stronger and better diplomatic activity. We need an educated, focused, pragmatic diplomatic presence around the world. We need a capable, motivated, diplomatic corps to engage effectively with foreign governments and publics on the things that really matter—and to be accountable to leaders appointed by the president.