Robert C. Rasmussen’s Post

Today was my last day at State before going on Admin Leave under the Deferred Resgination Program. I am just one of 1,500 Foreign Service Officers and Civil Service Officers who departed today out of our total direct hire workforce of 17,000, or about 8.8%. Before I separate at the end of September, I will have completed 12 years of service to the American people as a Civil Service Officer, where I reached the grade of GS-14, equivalent to a Colonel or Captain in the Armed Forces. I am one of the lucky ones, in that I will be paid to leave, while others are being summarily fired. I want to share my story for them- give you a face to the faceless bureaucrat. A graduate school professor once said that pursuing foreign policy and national security is like a love affair. For me that started as a five-year-old picking up on CNN reporting on the Second Chechen War in 1993 and wondering if my dad, then an Army Captain, would go fight. That is when I learned about countries, got “My First World Atlas”, and within six months I had memorized all of the countries, their capitals, and their flags, following this calling ever since. It's not a bad run so far for the four-month-old whose young mother by herself (dad was in the field) was told point blank and unemotionally by the Chief Ophthalmologist of the U.S. Army that her kid was permanently blind in one eye and would have no chance at a normal life. I am glad having the opportunity to prove him wrong every day. I see the same passion when I look into the faces of my colleagues as they meet the mission, and it has been an honor to serve alongside them. I come from a public service family- we have generations of cops, firefighters, schoolteachers, nurses, military service members, and civil servants. Continuing down the pathway into college, I was medically disqualified from serving in the U.S. Army and commissioning through Army ROTC. I later went on to serve instead with the New York Guard and Virginia Defense Force. Some highlights of things I have done to support national security include: -As an Enforcement Analyst with Commerce/BIS, I developed a project with Treasury to combine AML and Customs Data to identify illicit export activity. This has since evolved into the BIS/FinCEN Joint Alerts to the financial industry. -At DOE/NNSA, I served as the Secretary of Energy’s representative to the interagency End-User Review Committee, which makes decisions of the Entity List. I was in this role when Russia invaded Ukraine and we proceeded to cut off the Russian Military Industrial Complex’s access to international markets. We are the reason why Russian tanks run on washing machine electronics. -In my most recent role, my team has worked on rulemaking around space and targeted revisions, as well as support for AUKUS and Defense Services. We will see what the next chapter holds, but I plan to stay close to the sanctions/export controls community in whatever comes next.