New research has found that nearly a third of the U.S. State Department’s diplomats and professional support staff are considering leaving the department and are actively looking for new jobs, pointing to a crisis of morale and management inside America’s diplomatic corps.
The study, conducted by a team of graduate students at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and released on Friday by the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown University, surveyed nearly 3,000 foreign service officers and foreign service specialists, and found the projected attrition rate was higher than that projected by the State Department and nearly double the share of employees who left the department in 2016.
