Whether it’s incompetence or an intention to break the government, Donald Trump is leaving a huge number of top jobs in his administration unfilled—including some rather important ones like ambassador to South Korea. You know, the country next door to the country Trump keeps threatening with nuclear war. The Washington Post and the Partnership for Public Service are tracking nearly half the administration jobs requiring Senate confirmation:
The White House likes to blame Congress for dragging its feet, but that’s only part of the story: As of this morning, there is no pending nominee for 245 of the 626 jobs we're tracking. Among them: deputy secretary at Treasury and Commerce, director of the Census, director of ATF, director of the Office on Violence Against Women at Justice and commissioner of the Social Security Administration.
At Veterans Affairs, no one has been tapped to be the undersecretary for health or benefits.
The list goes on. And about that South Korea ambassador spot that’s empty. The good news is, there’s an experienced career diplomat temporarily in charge in the U.S. embassy in Seoul. But, as a former State Department and Senate Foreign Relations Committee staffer explained in 2015 when Senate Republicans were holding up President Obama’s ambassador nominations:
“First at a practical level, [not having an ambassador] really impedes the work of embassies on the ground,” he explains. “There have been many occasions, both when I was in the Senate, and also when I was at the State Department, when I would arrive in a country and hear the representative in charge, the charge d’affaires, say that in the absence of an ambassador, he or she just couldn’t do the work that the United States needed to have performed on the ground in order to advance our interests.”
“The second issue,” he says, “really goes to our credibility in the world. And this is a challenge that we face that to the extent that we delay in appointing these ambassadors, in many countries that’s seen as a message that we don’t take the relationship seriously. And over time that can do real damage in terms of our ability to cooperate with another government.”
Take all that and add Trump’s constant insults and threats to North Korea, plus the upcoming Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea. Aren’t you tired of all the winning?