A Letter to America’s Discarded Public Servants
Dear Colleagues,
For three and a half decades as a career diplomat, I walked across the
lobby of the State Department countless times—inspired by the Stars and Stripes
and humbled by the names of patriots etched into our memorial wall. It was
heartbreaking to see so many of you crossing that same lobby in tears following
the reduction in force in July, carrying cardboard
boxes with family photos and the everyday remains of proud careers in public
service. After years of hard jobs in hard places—defusing crises, tending
alliances, opening markets, and helping Americans in distress—you deserved
better.
The same is true for so many other public servants who have been fired or
pushed out in recent months: the remarkable intelligence officers I was proud
to lead as CIA director, the senior military officers I worked with every day,
the development specialists I served alongside overseas, and too many others
with whom we’ve served at home and abroad.
The work you all did was unknown to many Americans, rarely well understood
or well appreciated. And under the guise of reform, you all got caught in the
crossfire of a retribution campaign—of a war on public service and expertise.
Those of us who have served in public institutions understand that
serious reforms are overdue. Of course we should remove bureaucratic hurdles
that prevent agencies like the State Department from operating efficiently. But
there is a smart way and a dumb way to tackle reform, a humane way and an
intentionally traumatizing way.
If today’s process were truly about sensible reform, career officers—who
typically rotate roles every few years—wouldn’t have been fired simply because
their positions have fallen out of political favor.
If this process were truly about sensible reform, crucial experts in
technology or China policy in whom our country has invested so much wouldn’t
have been pushed out.
If this process were truly about reform, it would have addressed not only
the manifestations of bloat and inefficiencies but also their causes—including
congressionally mandated budget items.
And if this process were truly about sensible reform, you and your
families wouldn’t have been treated with gleeful indignity. One of your
colleagues, a career diplomat, was given just six hours to clear out his
office. “When I was expelled from Russia,” he said, “at least Putin gave me six
days to leave.”
No, this is not about reform. It is about retribution. It is about
breaking people and breaking institutions by sowing fear and mistrust
throughout our government. It is about paralyzing public servants—making them
apprehensive about what they say, how it might be interpreted, and who might
report on them. It is about deterring anyone from daring to speak truth to
power.
I served six presidents: three Republicans and three Democrats. It was my
duty to faithfully implement their decisions, even when I didn’t agree with
them. Career public servants have a profound obligation to execute the
decisions of elected leaders, whether we voted for them or not; that discipline
is essential to any democratic system.
I could not have done my job as an ambassador, as a deputy secretary of
state, or as the CIA director unless my colleagues were straightforward about
their views. When I led secret talks with the Iranians more than a decade ago,
I needed the unvarnished advice of diplomats and intelligence officers to help
me navigate the complex world of nuclear programs and Iranian decision making.
I needed colleagues to question my judgment sometimes, and offer creative,
hard-nosed solutions.
There is a real danger in punishing dissent—not only to our profession,
but to our country. Once you start, policy can become an extension of court
politics, with little airing of alternative views or consideration of second-
and third-order consequences.
Like some of you, I’m old enough to have lived through other efforts at
reform and streamlining. After the end of the Cold War, budgets were cut
significantly, and the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency and the U.S.
Information Agency were absorbed into the State Department. Years later, when I
was serving as the American ambassador in Moscow, we reduced staff by about 15
percent over three years. None of those was a perfect process, but they were
conducted in a thoughtful way, respectful of public servants and their expertise.
Long before any of us served in government, amid the escalation of the
Cold War, in the 1950s, McCarthyism provided a vivid example of an alternative
approach, full of deliberate trauma and casual cruelty. A generation of China
specialists was falsely accused of being Communist sympathizers and driven
from the State Department, kneecapping American diplomacy toward
Beijing for years. Today’s “reform” process—at State and elsewhere across the
federal government—bears much more resemblance to McCarthy’s costly excesses
than to any other era in which I’ve served. And it’s much more damaging.
We live in a new era—one that is marked by major-power competition and a
revolution in technology, and one that is more confusing, complicated, and
combustible than any time before. I believe the United States still has a
better hand to play than any of our rivals, unless we squander the moment and
throw away some of our best cards. That’s exactly what the current
administration is doing.
We cannot afford to further erode the sources of our power at home and
abroad. The demolition of institutions—the dismantling of USAID and Voice of
America, the planned 50 percent reduction in the State Department’s budget—is
part of a bigger strategic self-immolation. We’ve put at risk the network of
alliances and partnerships that is the envy of our rivals. We’ve even gutted
the research funding that powers our economy.
If intelligence analysts at the CIA saw our rivals engage in this kind of
great-power suicide, we would break out the bourbon. Instead, the sound we hear
is of champagne glasses clinking in the Kremlin and Zhongnanhai.
Of course we should put our own national interests first. But winning in
an intensely competitive world means thinking beyond narrowly defined
self-interest and building coalitions that counterbalance our adversaries; it
requires working together on “problems without passports” such as climate
change and global health challenges, which no single country can solve on its
own.
At our best, over the years I served in government, we were guided by
enlightened self-interest, a balance of hard power and soft power. That’s what
produced victory in the Cold War, the reunification of Germany, the coalition
success in Operation Desert Storm, peace in the Balkans, nuclear-arms-control
treaties, and the defense of Ukraine against Putin’s aggression. The bipartisan
PEPFAR program is a shining example of America at its best—saving tens of
millions of people from the deadly threat of HIV/AIDS while also fostering some
measure of stability in sub-Saharan Africa, establishing wider trust in
American leadership, and keeping Americans safe.
We weren’t always at our best, or always especially enlightened, as we
stumbled into protracted and draining conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, or
when we didn’t press allies hard enough to contribute their fair share.
Criticism of the current administration should not obscure any of that, or
suggest a misplaced nostalgia for an imperfect past.
From the December 2022 issue: George Packer on a new theory
of American power
The growing danger today, however, is that we’re focused exclusively on
the “self” part of enlightened self-interest—at the expense of the
“enlightened” part. The threat we face is not from an imaginary “deep state”
bent on undermining an elected president, but from a weak state of hollowed-out
institutions and battered and belittled public servants, no longer able to
uphold the guardrails of our democracy or help the United States compete in an
unforgiving world. We won’t beat hostile autocrats by imitating them.
Many years ago, when I was finishing graduate school and trying to figure
out what I wanted to do with my professional life, my father sent me a note. He
was a career Army officer, a remarkably decent man, and the best model of
public service I have ever known. “Nothing can make you prouder,” my dad wrote,
“than to serve your country with honor.” I’ve spent the past 40 years learning
the truth in his advice.
I am deeply proud to have served alongside so many of you. Your expertise
and your often quietly heroic public service have made an immeasurable
contribution to the best interests of our country. You swore an oath—not to a
party or a president, but to the Constitution. To the people of the United
States.
To protect us. To defend us. To keep us safe.
You’ve fulfilled your oath, just as those still serving in government are
trying their best to fulfill theirs. So will the next generation of public
servants.
All of us have a profound stake in shaping their inheritance. I worry
about how much damage we will do in the meantime. There is still a chance that
the next generation will serve in a world where we curb the worst of our
current excesses—stop betraying the ideals of public service, stop firing
experts just because their statistics are unwelcome, and stop blowing up
institutions that matter to our future. There is still a chance that the next
generation could be present at the creation of a new era for America in the
world, in which we’re mindful of our many strengths but more careful about
overreach.
There is, sadly, room for doubt about those chances. At this pivotal
moment, there’s a growing possibility that we will inflict so much damage on
ourselves and our place in the world that those future public servants will
instead find themselves present at the destruction—a self-inflicted,
generational setback to American leadership and national security.
But what I do not doubt is the abiding importance of public service, and
the value of what you have done with yours. And I know that you will continue
to serve in different ways, helping to stand watch over our great experiment,
even as too many of our elected leaders seem to be turning their backs on it.
With appreciation to you and your families,
This article appears in the October 2025 print edition with
the headline “You Deserved Better.”
About the Author
William J. Burns
William J. Burns is a former career diplomat who
served as director of the CIA and deputy secretary of state. He is the author
of The Back Channel: A Memoir of American Diplomacy and the Case for Its
Renewal.
