WASHINGTON: (APP) US President Donald Trump has accepted the resignations of several senior State Department officials, the department said Thursday, clearing space for a new diplomatic team.
As a matter of tradition, incoming US presidents request and receive the resignation of the most senior officials hired by the outgoing administration of a different party.
Trump has nominated former ExxonMobil chief executive Rex Tillerson as his secretary of state, but the Texas oilman has yet to be confirmed by the Senate.
The top policy positions once held by allies of former secretary of state John Kerry have been empty since the January 20 inauguration, and now some senior managers have stepped down, too.
“Of the officers whose resignations were accepted, some will continue in the foreign service in other positions,” acting State Department spokesman Mark Toner said.
“Others will retire by choice or because they have exceeded the time limits of their grade in service.
“No officer accepts a political appointment with the expectation that it is unlimited,” he added.
“And all officers understand that the president may choose to replace them at any time.”
While the resignation procedure has become standard in US government transitions, the scale of the clear-out in the State Department has raised some eyebrows.
A report in Thursday’s Washington Post said an “entire level of management officials” was now missing, leaving a leadership vacuum and a hiring headache for Tillerson.
Officials confirmed to AFP that the under-secretary for management Patrick Kennedy and three more assistant secretaries or office directors had been let go.
But they insisted that the scale of the shake-up was comparable to previous transitions between presidents from different parties and did not amount to a purge.
Kennedy was appointed to the role in 2007 under then-president George W. Bush, a Republican, and was kept by former Democratic president Barack Obama. He was reportedly keen to remain in place under Trump’s Republican administration.
His role largely kept him out of the public eye but in 2012 he was questioned by Congress over the department’s alleged failures in the run-up to the deadly attack on the US mission in Benghazi.
In October, during the White House election campaign, Trump’s camp issued a statement demanding that Kennedy resign over an alleged attempt to hide email evidence.