A handful of senior U.S. diplomats are resigning their posts during President Donald Trump’s first week on the job, creating more high-level openings that the new president must fill.

"Current and former senior officials were clear that the turnover is unusual even for a new administration"

"The memo is being sent through the state department’s “dissent channel”, set up at the time of the Vietnam war to allow alternative points of view to be aired inside the institution. Under its foreign affairs manual, dissenters are strictly protected from reprisals, but the White House spokesman, Sean Spicer, warned the signers they should resign if they did not like the policy."

A transition plan would install Mike Pompeo, the C.I.A. director, as secretary of state, and tap Senator Tom Cotton to lead the spy agency.

The move reflects the Tillerson-Trump view of human rights as a low priority in foreign policy.

As a result, not one of the 23 analysts working in the department’s Global Engagement Center — which has been tasked with countering Moscow’s disinformation campaign — speaks Russian, and a department hiring freeze has hindered efforts to recruit the computer experts needed to track the Russian efforts.

“It's almost beyond comprehension that a state, an organized state would do something like that,” Rex Tillerson said on a trip to Africa, hours before being fired.

High on the agenda of the two men — George Nader, a political adviser to the de facto ruler of the U.A.E., and Elliott Broidy, the deputy finance chairman of the Republican National Committee — was pushing the White House to remove Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson, backing confrontational approaches to Iran and Qatar and repeatedly pressing the president to meet privately outside the White House with the leader of the U.A.E.