14 NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 2026 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL for Albania, Australia, Belize, Brazil, Cyprus, The Gambia, and Norway. At the same time, several additional ambassadorial nominations remained pending before the Senate, including Azerbaijan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, El Salvador, Indonesia, Lithuania, Paraguay, and Trinidad and Tobago. There has been some encouraging movement on career appointments. While no career Foreign Service officer had received an ambassadorial nomination earlier in the year, career members of the Foreign Service were nominated during the summer for chief of mission roles in Benin, Chad, Gabon, Kenya, the Kyrgyz Republic, Madagascar and Comoros, Malawi, Malaysia, Mauritania, Nicaragua, Sierra Leone, Togo, and Tonga. These nominations represent a welcome, if overdue, recognition of the Foreign Service’s professional cadre. The Senate also made progress on senior department leadership positions. In August, following the spring confirmations of several assistant secretaries, it confirmed leaders for the bureaus of Intelligence and Research, Western Hemisphere Affairs, European and Eurasian Affairs, Near Eastern Affairs, Legislative Affairs, and Political-Military Affairs. In a surprise, there was excellent news in late July when the Senate confirmed more than 560 Foreign Service promotions and tenures. AFSA welcomes such swift action on these important lists. In late September, AFSA was tracking 98 vacancies among the 196 positions included in its Ambassador Tracker, a slight improvement from the 109 vacancies reported in May but still an extraordinarily high number almost two years into the administration. The vacancy rate continues to reflect the unprecedented recall of at least 32 career ambassadors since the beginning of 2026 and the slow pace of nominations and confirmations that followed. Although the administration has recently begun nominating some career
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