Tech Diplomacy, Interrupted
The State Department wants agentic AI. It fired anyone who may know what that means.
In remarks at an AI event in April, the U.S. Department of State’s acting chief data and AI officer talked about the prospect of integrating agentic AI into State’s workflows. Earlier this year, State’s Chief Information Officer pointed to the Department’s general ‘tech-forward’ approach demonstrated by their growing AI-use case inventory and ‘widespread’ adoption of StateChat, the agency’s GPT-powered chatbot.
These sentiments from State Department leadership belie reality at the agency: the dubious mass firings of over a thousand civil servants from its diplomatic corps last year included, among other drastic measures, the dismantling of the Bureau for Cyberspace and Digital Policy (CDP). CDP housed the agency’s multi-layered, Congressionally mandated approach to advance American tech priorities on the world stage, enhance the public benefit of emerging technology, and bolster strategic economic and national security interests in an ever-changing technological world. For me personally, CDP represented something entirely future-forward in the brass button world of the State Department: a place where new ideas, innovation, and competition could create real change.
With the loss of CDP and the deflated dreams of many a bright-eyed tech-savvy civil servant left in Washington, I wanted to unpack what this setback means for the future of U.S. tech diplomacy and the workforce behind it.
Four Years Ago, Congress Got this One…Right?
In an attempt to square this administration’s sparkling view of AI sophistication with the facts, I spoke with my former colleague Brian Street, a decorated Foreign Service Officer who was ousted in the Department’s restructuring last year. Street’s latest role prior to his termination was serving as the Deputy Director for Communications and Congressional Relations at CDP.
As Street put it, CDP was one of those rare ideas that actually brought together mutual objectives across bipartisan and public/private sector interests. Before the Bureau’s creation, the U.S. was demonstrably losing its foothold in the international digital infrastructure race to China and drowning amidst a wave of malign cyber activity that targeted and weakened critical systems both overseas and at home. China was a first mover in positioning low-cost packages for cyber, software, communication and hardware development through their providers in developing economies. Congress, seeing the need to bolster U.S. capacity in the race for digital primacy, passed the Cyber Diplomacy Act in 2022 and created CDP at the State Department.
“CDP took a ‘full stack’ approach to national security in the interagency,” Street told me. As he described it, this meant getting international communications policy (ICP) - satellites, undersea cables, 5G policy, hardware - as well as cyber policy workstreams into the same arena. It also meant building shared language within the State Department and interagency around ‘tech diplomacy.’ CDP surfaced issues like attribution after cyber incidents, digital freedom and human rights, internet accessibility among underserved global populations, and shared competencies around a future of open internet; this approach brought nuance and deep diplomatic experience to an otherwise fractional approach spread thin across multiple parts of the U.S. government.
Indispensable to these efforts, as Street described, was the foreign assistance component. It would be nothing short of impossible to address threats by malign actors and avoid state capture without hardware alternatives and the ability to assist partners in other critical ventures - such as undersea cable landing, training, and resilience planning. Those alternatives, however, were almost always going to be more expensive than what China could offer countries across the global south. CDP built consensus globally on this approach: the Bureau’s foreign assistance shop funded programs to subsidize global hardware and project alternatives to China’s market advantage. Most of the time, the alternatives CDP worked with global partners to adopt weren’t exclusively American companies. “There was a shared understanding that we were all working towards the same goal of secure technology,” Street explains. “If that meant offering solutions built by Nokia and Ericssen, we were happy to strengthen those relationships. Because at the end of the day, if they were choosing a secure provider, they were selecting against Chinese alternatives, and that’s what mattered.”
By all measurable accounts, CDP was quite effective. In just under two years, the Bureau had already created critical new tech-focused relationships, deployed strategic global outreach in dozens of countries, and consolidated technology-forward programming across 100+ Embassies and Consulates worldwide. The global engagement strategy Street was building for the Bureau - to bring programming, communications, and interagency wrangling into strategic alignment with public diplomacy and communications - was finalized in early January 2025. That same month, the White House ordered an unprecedented suspension of U.S. foreign assistance worldwide, grinding all work at the Department to a halt overnight and quashing progress at CDP.
Diplomats Don’t Go to Jupiter
Alongside the carnage at the State Department, and the abandonment of bipartisan workstreams for essentially no reason at all - one of the questions needling me for the last year is one of technological readiness (or willingness) in the wider diplomatic workforce. I know every industry is having their own infinite carousel of meetings to figure out what AI means for them, but diplomacy is a tricky business, one where substituting a robot for human interaction is actually a net negative. But that doesn’t mean diplomats should be left behind in the intelligent chatbot arms race. Certainly, the future of diplomacy - which means a rising, new generation of diplomats - has to come to the table with more than a passing knowledge of emerging technology and its broader effects on the geopolitical order.
CDP was making that upskilling possible through a variety of learning paths. One effective (and popular) lever for that development was the Cyberspace and Digital Policy Tradecraft course the State Department began offering at the Foreign Service Institute (FSI) in 2022. Eric Geller at WIRED was invited to cover the February 2024 session of the course. His piece triangulates what the Department was seeing on the horizon for the tech-forward chops of its workforce - and how to best equip diplomats in environments constantly pushing the boundaries.
“From Russian election interference to Chinese industrial dominance, the US faces a panoply of digital threats. Fighting back will require skillful diplomatic pressure campaigns on every level, from bilateral talks with individual countries to sweeping appeals before the 193-member United Nations. But this kind of work is only possible when the career Foreign Service officers on the front lines of US diplomacy understand why tech and cyber issues matter—and how to discuss them.”
Geller noted the real stakes for the future of tech governance and diplomacy that the Department had been keen to address with the creation of the course.
“Diplomats without tech training might not even realize when their Russian and Chinese counterparts are using oblique rhetoric to pitch persuadable countries on their illiberal visions of internet governance, with rampant censorship and surveillance. Diplomats with tech training would be able to push back, using language and examples designed to appeal to those middle-ground countries and sway them away from the authoritarians’ clutches.
‘Our competitors and our adversaries are upping their game in these areas,’ [Ambassador-at-Large] Fick says, ‘because they understand as well as we do what’s at stake.’”
Geller finds that diplomats who completed the course shared overwhelmingly positive feedback and lauded both its relevance and accessibility. Reports on host countries’ tech agendas and approach to emerging technologies back to Washington increased after diplomats completed the course; a testament to the utility of investing in professional development and continued education of America’s ‘eyes and ears.’
In a fate of cruel irony, Geller’s piece concludes with former Ambassador-at-Large
Nathaniel Fick discussing what might change under a new administration if the Biden-Harris ticket fails to secure reelection. Fick sparks optimistic, noting that in his discussions with Trump-era counterparts, CDP’s mandate crossed party lines, and the FSI course gave the Bureau a sense of ‘permanence.’
Ah. Permanence.
Without CDP, the Department has a serious gap. Not just as a function of a tech-starved foreign policy agenda, but as a damaging blow to building a diplomatic corps willing and equipped to meet the tech-heavy challenges of the geopolitical future. I saw this up close - the State Department workforce was beginning to bifurcate in real time between the tech-haves and the tech-have-nots. CDP was serving a real purpose trying to bridge the inevitable gaps that proliferate in a public service workforce that spans nearly every age and technical capability.
Alongside the FSI course, CDP had created a training program with external institutions - universities, think tanks, and advisory organizations - to host civil servants and FSOs in professional development ventures spanning cybersecurity, emerging technologies, and tech diplomacy. After nearly four years of tinkering with the digital tools available to me - primarily Microsoft’s Power Platform - to enhance the capabilities of my own foreign assistance portfolio, I saw the opportunities that CDP offered as way to cohere all the things I wanted in my career at the State Department - a deep understanding of emerging technologies, the effect of the AI race on the very human conflicts that still plagued our world, and a future as a public servant that brought the goals of human progress on real-world problems and technological goals into alignment.
I was accepted to complete a CDP-sponsored year-long fellowship learning about tech diplomacy set to start in August 2025. After the fellowship, I was to return to the Department for a minimum of three years, bringing everything I had learned back to work serving the American public. But following the chaos of the administration’s attack on USAID and knowing the likelihood that my Bureau would be next, I made the painful decision to withdraw from the fellowship and separate from the Department in June 2025. In July, my office was eliminated, and CDP was dismantled.
The Look Ahead
My experience, as I’m learning from my ousted colleagues at CDP, is far from unique. It points to the contradiction at the heart of State’s posture on tech diplomacy: an agency claiming readiness for the technological future and building the U.S. diplomatic machine alongside global tech advancements cannot declare victory while mutilating itself.
CDP was a focal point of progress for U.S. global interests in the tech world both at home and abroad. It delivered cost-effective, highly impactful results under a bipartisan mandate. At the same time, it was investing in the next generation of the diplomatic corps, directing resources and trainings to boost the Department’s in-house capability to meet evolving challenges and build a generational pipeline of talent. Discarding it all but guarantees a loss of strategic positioning and talent that will be nearly impossible to recover.
Talking points and fireside-chat sentiments aren’t enough. Congress already has legislation that requires these functions be recovered and reactivated in the State Department; and not as a fractional set of teams sprinkled throughout the agency, balancing competing workloads under different principals, but as a coherent body fulfilling the objectives laid out in the Cyber Diplomacy Act. In short, Congress needs to figure out how to enforce a law it has already passed.
The State Department stands to lose nearly all its capability of conducting global tech diplomacy with the interests of the American public at its core. And after the last year and a half of global chaos, the cost of pretending otherwise is one Americans can’t afford to keep paying.