Abigail Williams at NBC
The State Department declined to provide exact numbers. According to the American Foreign Service Association, around 2,000 U.S. diplomats have left the Foreign Service over the last year, either through layoffs or forced retirements, taking with them decades of institutional knowledge, experience in crisis response and highly specialized language skills paid for by the U.S. government.
Their departure from a workforce that was estimated to be more than 13,000 in 2024 leaves the U.S. at a critical disadvantage, current and former State Department officials say, at a time when the nation is facing an escalating number of foreign policy crises.
...
The leadership vacuum is large. The ambassadorship in Moldova is still vacant, along with more than half of ambassadorships around the globe, including in the Democratic Republic of the Congo where a worsening Ebola outbreak began. There is no ambassador to Ukraine, and seasoned diplomat Julie Davis, who has been leading the embassy in Kyiv while simultaneously serving as ambassador to Cyprus, is stepping down next month to join others in retirement.
...
In the Middle East, where the U.S. continues to navigate a war with Iran and the fallout with regional allies, half of the U.S. missions, including four Persian Gulf countries, are without formal U.S. ambassadors. Pakistan and Qatar, where officials have taken on critical mediating roles in negotiations between the U.S. and Iran, are without ambassadors.
The absences contributed to the frantic effort to evacuate thousands of Americans who became stranded, and withdraw personnel when Iran began retaliating across the region in March, current and former diplomats say.
