NPR’s Joel Rose speaks with James B. Story, former U.S. ambassador to Venezuela, about the state of the State Department in the wake of the Kimberly Guilfoyle scandal.
Transcription
JOEL ROSE, HOST:
The US ambassador to Greece resigned under pressure this week. Kimberly Guilfoyle, the ex-fiancée of President Trump’s son, held the position for about a year until a Wall Street Journal article reported that she had asked a Trump donor to pay her credit card bill before being nominated. This scandal is a new blow for the American diplomatic corps, already understaffed during President Trump’s second term.
So what is the state of the US State Department? We called James Story, former U.S. Ambassador to Venezuela and State Department veteran, to answer this question. Ambassador, welcome to the program.
JAMES STORY: Thank you all so much for having me today. Enjoy it.
ROSE: I would first like to say that NPR has not confirmed the Wall Street Journal’s reporting, but I wonder what your reaction was to Miss Guilfoyle’s resignation.
STORY: I was simply amazed. As a diplomat, anyone in the Foreign Service – and certainly as an ambassador – we are subject to intense scrutiny over what gifts you can accept. Anyone seeking to work with the US government is prohibited from receiving gifts from them. The fact that someone allegedly spent $100,000 – or that there was a request for $100,000 to pay a credit card bill – really amazed me.
ROSE: You were a career diplomat under administrations of both parties and retired in May. How do you rate the State Department as you knew it compared to what it exists today?
STORY: So I think the current state of the State Department is in flux. We certainly lost a lot of really talented people. The fact that we are currently recruiting new people is indicative of the fact that we do not have enough people to carry out American diplomacy abroad. I mean, we are the first line of defense for the American people. And I think we need to be well funded. The State Department must be well funded. But again, you can certainly always improve an organization. You can always do better as an organization. But I think some of the changes that happened were ultimately very detrimental to the State Department.
ROSE: Very big events are happening around the world at a time when the top positions in some U.S. embassies around the world are vacant. And I’m thinking of Russia, Ukraine, Germany, and I could name many others. What is the impact on U.S. foreign policy when so many of these positions go unfilled?
STORY: Well, I can tell you, you know, the host government, first of all, views the top diplomat of the United States differently whether he’s an ambassador, meaning the personal representative of the president, or a charge d’affaires. The Saudi family, the kingdom, does not want to deal with a charge d’affaires. They want to have an ambassador, a sitting ambassador. So you have a little more power when it comes to organizing the interagency. Your direct engagement with the government, I think, comes down to having gone through the Senate confirmation process and being chosen and then going through all the scrutiny, financial and otherwise, that allows you to be overseas as an ambassador representing the United States. And when you don’t have that, sometimes you’re signaling to this country that we don’t prioritize you.
ROSE: What if we don’t have ambassadors in many countries in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf? What is the concrete impact, in your opinion?
STORY: The first impact is that you lose a great experience. When you don’t have that person, especially right now in the Middle East, I think it basically puts us in a bad position. There is this war in Iran that is spreading. This affects all the different countries in the region. This is now definitely a regional conflict. Who is the person who comes in, who carries the message – in Qatar or Kuwait or Iraq or wherever – to that host country? And does this message have the same resonance that it would have if this person had been the ambassador? And I would say no.
ROSE: A little less than 50% of American ambassadorial positions are vacant. Is it unusual for such a high number to be this high during a president’s term?
STORY: It’s certainly unusual. And unfortunately, it has become a bipartisan issue: Senate nominations for judges, ambassadors, and others are delayed for other reasons. And before, it was kind of a regular process where people came up and you got eliminated. In other words, essentially, by unanimous consent, the ambassadors were approved. Unless there are big problems, it’s pretty extreme right now to have so many empty embassies.
But it’s even more extreme to see so many ambassadors entrusted to political figures rather than people who have spent decades working in the foreign service, learning the language, learning the history, understanding bilateral relations and how Washington works. And when you put amateurs – and some political figures are good, let me be very clear. But when you put amateurs in charge, sometimes you get an amateur result.
And I think in the case of Ambassador Guilfoyle to Greece, we had a very amateurish outcome that was predicted based on all the issues that should have come out in her review before they were identified. The particular skills she brought to Greece – other than proximity, perhaps – remained a question mark for us. But for me, 80% of the ambassadors actually appointed in the field are political appointees – this is the most shocking statistic.
ROSE: Yes, help me understand what’s going on there, because other administrations have had political appointees to important embassies, right? What has been different about the way this administration is doing things?
STORY: Well, it’s not just for certain bilateral missions anymore where the expectations of the host country are that it’s going to be someone close to the president, right? The Court of St. James, for example, for Britain, is always assigned to a political person, someone who can pick up the phone and put the president on the line.
And wherever there is a stable bilateral relationship, there are a few countries that are sometimes appointed by politicians and sometimes by careerists. Brazil is an example. Most of the time it comes down to a career person and not a politician. What we’re seeing today is that countries that traditionally had more tense relations, let’s say, have opted for politics rather than the traditional route. At some point, this inexperience can be seen.
ROSE: The U.S. Agency for International Development, generally known as USAID, stopped operating as an independent entity in July and the State Department took over some foreign aid programs. How do you think this works?
STORY: Well, it’s like asking someone who buys vegetables at the grocery store to become a farmer, to be honest with you. We had a competitive advantage over every other country in the world because of the way we were developing. You know, we saved millions of lives through PEPFAR, a George Bush program – it was the President’s Emergency AIDS Program – millions of lives saved in Africa by providing HIV drugs.
So there were people who spent 20 or 30 years really understanding how to implement these programs, and now we’re supposed to replicate that with people who have good intentions but don’t have the experience. I think it will go down as one of the biggest own goals we’ve ever had.
I think USAID needed reform. I don’t disagree that it should have been housed within the State Department, for example. I think, you know, sometimes we needed to have more political control over some of the development programs that we do. But completely destroying an organization that has demonstrated so much goodwill and accumulated so much soft power for the United States is really something that – to me, doesn’t make a lot of sense.
ROSE: I spoke to former U.S. Ambassador James Story. Thank you very much for your time.
STORY: Thank you very much for having me today.
Copyright © 2026 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit the terms of use and permissions pages on our website at www.npr.org for more information.
The accuracy and availability of NPR transcripts may vary. The text of the transcript may be edited to correct errors or match updates to the audio. Audio on npr.org may be edited after its original broadcast or publication. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio recording.
Gn headline
