Displacement & Retrenchment in US Foreign Policy: the Trump-Tillerson "Redesign"

• In Event: Poster Session: Politics and History & International History and Politics
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Politics and History

Abstract

Almost no scholarly work has considered the dynamics of political development in US foreign policy institutions in the modern period. Further, much APD research is hindered in its causal power by a lack of comparative, contrasting case studies that isolate elements such as bureaucratic autonomy, institutional culture, and political (de)legitimation. In this paper, I analyze the State Department and USAID Redesign, and the USAID Transformation (T3), conducted by the Trump administration under Secretary of State Rex Tillerson (and continuing today at USAID). Using Mill’s Method of Difference and the unique ”sister agency, sibling rivalry” cultural relationship between State and USAID, I show how two main differences - bureaucratic culture towards reform/operational efficiency, and presidential efforts to delegitimate/displace an ideologically opposed bureaucracy - led to divergent outcomes when the agencies simultaneously undertook major, coordinated reforms in response to the same government-wide Executive Order. The failure of Redesign and uncommon success of T3 underscore, respectively, the speed with which bureaucratic autonomy can be delegitimized and an agency retrenched, as well as the importance of mezzo/leadership convergence and communications in successfully reforming a national security agency.
These findings hold scholarly implications for those seeking to understand institutional development, bureaucratic autonomy, and retrenchment in the context of national security/foreign policy. Substantively, they help explain why Redesign failed in its prima facie aims - though succeeded in retrenching the State Department - while T3 at USAID succeeded, as well as the bureaucratic motivation behind diplomats’ resistance to President Trump as seen in the ongoing impeachment proceedings.

Author

• Ryan Dukeman, Princeton University