WTF Is Up at State?

On his first three foreign trips, [Secretary of State Rex] Tillerson skipped visits with State Department employees and their families, embassy stops that were standard morale-boosters under other secretaries of state.

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Many career diplomats say they still have not met him, and some have been instructed not to speak to him directly — or even make eye contact.

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His distant management style has created growing bewilderment among foreign officials who are struggling to understand where the United States stands on key issues. It has sown mistrust among career employees at State, who swap paranoid stories about Tillerson that often turn out to be untrue. And it threatens to undermine the power and reach of the State Department, which has been targeted for a 30 percent funding cut in Trump’s budget.

Many have expressed alarm that Tillerson has not fought harder for the agency he now leads.

  WaPo

But surely they're not surprised. This is the entire Trump administration plan: put people in charge of agencies who don't want the agency to exist. That also seemed to be a George Bush II plan.

Tillerson remains the only Senate-confirmed official selected by Trump anywhere inside the State Department building. Weeks after the White House embarrassed Tillerson by rejecting the seasoned foreign policy hand he had selected for a deputy, Republican lawyer John J. Sullivan is the leading candidate. Sullivan held senior jobs in the George W. Bush administration but has no direct experience in the State Department.

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Rep. Eliot L. Engel (N.Y.), the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said Tillerson called him after the proposed cuts were announced. Engel said Tillerson seemed to share Engel’s concern that the cuts are “draconian” and counterproductive. But Engel said Tillerson seemed to signal his acquiescence when he called them “a glide path to what was about to happen.”

But, ambassadors can't even make eye contact with him!? His orders or the Inflatable Rooster's?

Some diplomats have begun meeting with each other to swap notes on how to decipher the fledgling administration’s policies.

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Tillerson’s political advisers have little foreign policy experience and little pull at the White House, current and former officials said. Their dealings with the department staff have sometimes been testy and unpleasant.

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“We’re rowing against the current, and the current has a Twitter account,” a foreign diplomat posted in Washington said.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.