The State Department’s recent “therapy and listening sessions” to help employees cope with Donald Trump’s re-election have caught the attention of Congress, and not in a good way. Representative Darrell Issa, a senior Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee and a contender for its chairmanship, has fired off a scathing letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Issa’s concern? That taxpayer dollars are funding what he sarcastically described as political grief counseling for government employees too fragile to handle the outcome of a democratic election.
Issa pointedly reminded Blinken that Trump’s re-election represents the will of the American people, a decisive rejection of the Biden-Harris foreign policy experiment. Yet, instead of professionalism, he sees a State Department allegedly catering to officials distraught over Kamala Harris’s failure to secure the presidency. Issa questioned whether such employees are even capable of executing Trump’s mandate to overhaul U.S. foreign policy. His recommendation was blunt: if they can’t handle the job, they should resign and wait for a Democrat administration to bring them back.
Reports suggest the situation is worse than it sounds. According to sources, the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, a key player in Middle East diplomacy, held what insiders described as a “cry session” after Trump’s victory. Discussions allegedly revolved around frustrations over losing influence, particularly among officials critical of Israel’s actions in Gaza. This group had reportedly spent months trying to sanction Israel and restrict arms shipments. Now, with Trump poised to reassert a more pro-Israel foreign policy, their morale seems to have hit rock bottom.
Critics within the State Department see this behavior as emblematic of a broader problem: an obsession with personal feelings over advancing America’s interests. One U.S. official likened the atmosphere to a college campus, where emotional fragility sometimes takes precedence over hard-nosed diplomacy. With Trump’s return, they hope this culture will be replaced with a renewed focus on America’s strategic priorities, though some believe there’s significant work to do to untangle the policy mess left behind by the Biden administration.
The spectacle of taxpayer-funded grief counseling for government employees unable to handle a political loss has added a layer of absurdity to an already contentious transition. Issa’s critique underscores a broader conservative frustration with what they see as a bloated, overly politicized bureaucracy. For Trump’s supporters, these sessions are not just unnecessary but indicative of why the State Department needs a top-to-bottom shakeup to refocus on its core mission: advancing the interests of the United States, not indulging the sensitivities of its employees.
