WASHINGTON — The number that State Department officials now keep returning to is 115. That is how many of America’s 195 ambassadorial posts are currently vacant — missions led by acting charges d’affaires with constrained access to foreign heads of state, reduced leverage in negotiations, and no confirmation from the president or the Senate standing behind them. It is, by any measure, a figure with consequences.
The figure is the downstream result of a larger one: roughly 2,000 US diplomats have left the foreign service over the past year, either through layoffs or forced retirements, according to the American Foreign Service Association (AFSA). Their departures, from a workforce that numbered more than 13,000 in 2024, have gutted the corps of career expertise at a moment when the United States is navigating concurrent crises across the Middle East, Europe, and the Indo-Pacific.
NBC News, which first reported the 2,000 figure on Sunday, cited AFSA in detailing how the State Department declined to provide exact numbers on departures. The network’s reporting drew on the case of Stephanie Adams-Smith, a senior career foreign service officer nominated as ambassador to Moldova in 2024, whose nomination was pulled down by the Trump administration in February 2025. With no available positions to fit her skills in a system where, as in the military, officers must move up or be forced out, she became part of what AFSA has called an irreversible talent drain.
“My job, and the people who left with me, they had more runway,” Adams-Smith told NBC News. “They had expected to serve in those mentoring and leadership roles, and so it was devastating.”
The departures did not happen in a single sweep. They came in waves. In July 2025, the State Department sent termination notices to 1,107 civil servants and 246 foreign service officers stationed domestically, in what the Associated Press described as the most complicated personnel reorganization the federal government had ever undertaken. Employees were told positions were being “abolished.” By 5 p.m. that day, their access to State Department headquarters, email, and shared drives had been cut. Outside the building, dozens of former colleagues, former ambassadors, and members of Congress gathered on the sidewalk holding signs that read: “Thank you, America’s diplomats.”
Those firings were followed, in December 2025, by the recall of nearly 30 career ambassadors from overseas posts, diplomats who had survived the initial rounds of cuts. They received notices directing them to vacate their positions by January 15 or 16. A State Department spokesperson described the recalls as “a standard process in any administration.” AFSA’s response was direct: “These abrupt, opaque, and unexplained recalls sabotage diplomatic effectiveness and US credibility abroad.”
What distinguishes the current moment from prior administrations’ turnover is the structure of what replaced the departing diplomats — or rather, what did not. According to AFSA, 115 of 195 ambassador posts remain vacant. Only nine percent of Trump’s ambassadorial appointees are career diplomats, the lowest figure recorded since 1988. The remaining 91 percent are political appointees, many of them nominated from the donor and loyalist class, at a record high. Meanwhile, a CNN review published in May found that assistant secretary posts at State’s regional bureaus have been left vacant or filled by unconfirmed officials, several of them fellows in the Ben Franklin Fellowship, an organization committed, in its own words, to “advancing traditional American diplomacy based on national interests, US sovereignty, and secure borders.”
Inside the department, the criteria for survival have shifted in ways that sources describe as unprecedented. NBC News reported that officials have begun scrutinizing diplomats for political loyalty, reviewing social media accounts and political donations — with the scrutiny extended not only to employees but to their family members. Diplomatic missions abroad continue to languish under acting leadership, a status that, without formal presidential or congressional confirmation, limits a diplomat’s practical reach: access to senior officials in their host government becomes harder to guarantee, and the signal sent to foreign capitals is unmistakable.
“It tells our allies that America’s commitments may shift with the political winds,” AFSA said in a July statement. “And yet again, it tells our public servants that loyalty to country is no longer enough — that experience and oath to the Constitution take a backseat to political loyalty.”
The institutional cost of these departures is not easily quantifiable. Career foreign service officers, like military personnel, move assignments every two to three years, serving wherever the State Department sends them — often in war zones, conflict zones, and difficult postings where political appointees rarely go. They conduct consular operations for American citizens abroad, negotiate the release of detained nationals, and maintain the quiet, persistent relationships with foreign officials that formal diplomacy depends on. AFSA has estimated that the 2,000 who left took with them decades of specialized language skills paid for by the US government, crisis response experience, and institutional knowledge that cannot be trained into a replacement in a year or two.
David Kostelancik, who retired from the foreign service after 36 years, told CNN that what drove the departures was not just the firings but the closure of the upward path. “It was just unprecedented numbers of people choosing to leave,” he said. In the foreign service’s up-or-out system, a diplomat who cannot secure a promotion or an ambassadorship within a set window must retire. The Trump administration’s effective freeze on promotions for career officers, combined with the surge of political appointees to senior positions, left experienced diplomats with no viable future in the institution.
AFSA has also raised a legal challenge to at least some of the firings. The union argued that the layoffs violate the continuing resolution funding the federal government, which prohibits using federal funds to initiate a reduction in force to reduce the number of diplomats. Finalization of the December firings, originally set for an earlier date and then extended, was eventually moved to December 5. Whether the legal argument prevails remains an open question. What is not in question, according to multiple former officials who have spoken to CNN and NBC News, is that the corps is smaller, less experienced, and operating at reduced diplomatic capacity than at any point in recent memory.
The firing of more than 1,300 diplomats in July 2025 drew sharp criticism from foreign governments, with Russia’s Foreign Ministry using the occasion to mock what it called American human rights hypocrisy. Separately, Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s unveiling of an America First visa system in New Delhi signaled that the diplomatic overhaul extends beyond personnel to the foundational doctrine governing how the United States presents itself abroad. What that doctrine leaves unresolved — and what the State Department has not addressed publicly — is who fills the 115 vacant ambassador posts, and when.
What the administration has not offered is a comprehensive timeline for filling the vacancies. The Ben Franklin Fellowship participants moving into assistant secretary roles are, by their own organization’s description, committed to a particular vision of American diplomacy. Whether that vision translates into confirmed ambassadors in the 115 vacant posts — and whether those ambassadors will have the regional expertise, language skills, and local relationships that career diplomats accumulate over decades — is the question career foreign service officers say no one at the senior level of the department has yet answered.
—Inputs from Sputnik.
