By Humeyra Pamuk, Simon Lewis (JO:) and Gram Slattery

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President-elect Donald Trump’s aides have asked three senior career diplomats in charge of the U.S. State Department’s workforce and internal coordination to resign from their roles, two U.S. officials said. US familiar with this matter, in a possible signal deeper. changes ahead for the diplomatic corps.

The team overseeing the transition of the State Department to the new administration, the Agency Review Team, has requested that Dereck Hogan, Marcia Bernicat and Alaina Teplitz leave their posts, the sources said.

While political appointees typically submit their resignations when a new president takes office, most career foreign service officers continue from one administration to the next. All three officials have worked in both Democratic and Republican administrations for years, including as ambassadors.

Trump, who was inaugurated on January 20, promised during his presidential campaign to “clean up the deep state” by firing bureaucrats he deemed disloyal.

“There is a little concern that this could set the stage for something worse,” said one US official familiar with the matter.

In response to a request for comment, a spokesperson for Trump’s transition team said: “It is absolutely appropriate for the transition to find officials who share President Trump’s vision of moving our country forward. and working men and women of America. We have many failures to fix and that requires a committed team focused on the same goals.”

A State Department spokeswoman said the department has no personnel announcements to make. Hogan, Bernicat, Teplitz did not respond to requests for comment.

Trump is likely to adopt a more confrontational foreign policy and has promised to bring peace between Ukraine and Russia, and provide more support to Israel. He also pushed unorthodox policies such as trying to make Greenland part of the United States and pushing NATO allies for higher defense spending. A diplomatic workforce that faithfully implements rather than pushes back will be key to achieving his goals, experts say.

The decision to ask the three to step aside is reminiscent of the State Department staff shakeups during the first Trump administration, when several top officials in leadership positions were removed from their jobs.

According to two separate sources familiar with Trump’s plans for the State Department, the administration plans to appoint more political appointees to positions such as assistant secretary, which are often filled by a mix of career and political. bureaucrats.

These sources said Trump’s team wanted to get more political appointees deeper into the State Department because there was a widespread feeling among his aides that his agenda was “derailed” by career diplomats in his last term from 2017 to 2021.

The Agency Review Team is already interviewing candidates for those positions, two sources said.

According to the State Department’s website, Hogan is the State Department’s executive secretary, the official who oversees the flow of information between the department’s bureaus and the White House.

Bernicat is the director-general of the US Foreign Service and director of global talent leading the recruitment, assignment, and career development of the Department’s workforce.

Assistant Secretary Teplitz has been with the Department for three decades, serving overseas as well as in Washington. Most recently, he performed duties under secretary of administration, overseeing more than a dozen bureaus responsible for issues ranging from the budget to recruiting, procurement and human resources across the workforce. .

“These are not policy positions. These are all bureaucratic mechanics,” said Dennis Jett, a professor at Penn State’s School of International Affairs who spent 28 years in the foreign service. “But if you want to control the bureaucracy, that’s the way you do it.”

Choosing who fills the three roles will allow Trump’s team to shift resources to and from parts of the State Department, control information collected by multiple bureaus and embassies and oversee decisions among those staff, he said.

BREAKING THE ‘DEEP STATE’

The calls for the officials to resign came as Marco Rubio, Trump’s nominee for secretary of state, testified Wednesday before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for his confirmation hearing.

On his campaign website Trump outlined how, in 10 steps, he would “destroy the deep state” and “fire rogue bureaucrats and career politicians”.

The first of those steps is to reissue a 2020 executive order that will remove employment protections for some civil servants, making it easier to fire them.

Opponents of the plan — commonly referred to as “Schedule F” after the new class of civil servants it would create — say the removal of job protections from government workers is a Trump effort. politicize the federal bureaucracy to implement his policy agenda.

Normally, presidents can choose several thousand of their own political appointees to the federal bureaucracy, but the career civil service – nearly two million workers – is left alone. Schedule F would give Trump the power to fire up to 50,000 of them and replace them with like-minded conservatives.

State personnel management will “speed up” the process of appointing loyal officers, said Jett, the professor.

Unions and government watchdogs say they plan to sue Trump if he follows through on his promise to bring back a Schedule F.