51st State to 50 First Dates

Public Service Cuts in Washington Will Impact US-Canadian Relations

The recent news of personnel cuts at the US State Department was painful to hear. Through my work with the Office of Canadian Affairs, the US Embassy in Ottawa, US Consulates in Calgary, Halifax, Montreal, Quebec City, Toronto, Vancouver, and Winnipeg, and by teaching at the US Foreign Service Institute, I’ve come to admire those who represent the United States and its policies to Canadians.

And having been DOGEd out of a job at the Wilson Center, I empathize. The State Department is just the latest federal institution to face cuts. In February, President Donald Trump issued an executive order mandating that all federal departments submit workforce “optimization” plans and implement a hiring freeze.

According to US Office of Personnel Management data through March 2025, the federal workforce has declined only one percent overall. But as Elizabeth Byers and Brandon Lardy at the Partnership for Public Service point out, that figure understates the true scale of workforce reductions.

Most reductions have come from attrition, early retirements, and the dismissal of probationary employees—those not yet tenured after one or two years in service. A further driver is the narrowing of activities to those explicitly authorized by statute. At the Wilson Center, our congressional charter authorized us to host fellows and maintain a memorial to Woodrow Wilson, but not to run research programs like the Canada Institute, which relied on private funding. So, while the Center remains open, the Canada Institute was shut down.

Now the State Department plans to eliminate several bureaus deemed “non-core,” including functional ones like the Bureau of Energy Resources, which regularly engaged Canadian officials at all levels.

As Joni Mitchell sang in Big Yellow Taxi, “you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.” Even the OPM unit responsible for tracking federal employment saw deep staffing cuts in April, affecting its ability to report accurately. A helpful department-by-department tracker is available on the Government Executive web site.

These changes are big news within the Washington DC Beltway but will matter beyond it for many US international relationships. I predict that public service cuts will significantly affect US-Canada relations in at least three ways: fewer points of contact with the US government, increased risk of overloading downsized US institutions, and loss of experience and memory as veteran officials leave public service.

1. Fewer Points of Contact

International relations are a small slice of federal government work, and Canada is just one of many countries the US engages with. As with understaffed customer service lines, Canadians may find themselves waiting longer for responses. Officials are already forced to triage, prioritizing more urgent issues like the war in Ukraine or the collapse of Haiti’s government.

But Canada isn’t just a foreign policy matter. Nearly every US federal government department and agency interacts with Canadian counterparts, often in areas considered “domestic.” Unlike Canada’s constitutional framework with its enumerated powers under sections 91 and 92, American federalism is competitive. When the federal government steps back, citizens look to state and local governments to step up. Shrinking the federal workforce risks triggering a chain reaction of triage across all levels of government, keeping Canada waiting on hold.

One reason Canada features so heavily in US government work is economic integration, shaped by NAFTA and the USMCA. These agreements rejected the EU model of shared sovereignty, opting instead for informal mechanisms. As a result, constant communication and coordination across borders are essential. A smaller federal workforce imperils that.

2. System Overload

American officials working with Canada often feel outnumbered. Even at full staffing under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, the US side might send just one or two people to meetings where Canada fields a dozen, including someone from its embassy.

This imbalance makes sense. For the United States, Canada is one of many bilateral partners; for Canada, the US is the primary one. Given that bilateral issues often span departments and federal-provincial jurisdictions, multiple Canadian officials must attend. Every Canadian official at the table is highly capable, and competition to be involved is intense.

But this creates problems when action items are assigned equally. Canada can deploy an army to follow up; the US side often cannot. Moreover, US agencies may lack the staff or seniority to participate fully in meetings. The State Department or the US ambassador might try to convene them, but overextension means some departments simply won’t show up.

In best-case scenarios, missing stakeholders are briefed afterward. In worst cases, the principle of “nothing about us without us” halts progress entirely.

Picture a virtual meeting where every Canadian participant speaks to justify their presence. Meanwhile the US side, outnumbered and overworked, is tempted to “play the clock” in meetings allowing everyone to speak until time runs out on a session before anyone can assign homework or ask for a decision. That strategy results in more meetings—and more friction.

Canadians in such meetings aren’t just negotiating with Americans—they’re negotiating with each other. Each department has distinct perspectives. Canadian positions are not always reconciled before engaging Washington. The Prime Minister or Canadian ambassador can set priorities, but federal-provincial dynamics make internal alignment difficult.

US officials are not the only ones to manage meetings through delaying tactics. Canadians can be masterful at “ragging the puck”—defensively stalling to sort out internal disagreements on the Canadian side and to avoid prematurely arriving at decision points that trigger maximum US pressure for closure on a dispute or negotiation.

Some future US officials may conclude “the juice isn’t worth the squeeze”—that working with Canada costs more effort than it’s worth. I’ve seen this firsthand in settings where the US chose to proceed bilaterally with Mexico, or excluded Canada from a security dialogue with other partners, fearing delays with minimal returns. Expertise can help reduce delays and help officials to make efficient use of every meeting. When time and personnel are scarce, the opportunity cost of engaging a partner becomes decisive. And personnel are going to be scarcer as public service cuts proceed.

3. Memory Loss

Recently, I’ve heard from several US public servants retiring or accepting early-out offers—some reluctantly, others involuntarily. Many are Baby Boomers or Gen Xers who were already nearing retirement. But with shrinking teams, the loss of promising younger hires, and a political climate that vilifies “the swamp,” they’ve moved up their timelines.

Because of the hiring freeze, most won’t be replaced anytime soon. Some may never meet their successors, either because their positions are eliminated or because younger generations are less likely to pursue public service.

This exacerbates two interrelated, long-standing issues in government: knowledge transfer and institutional memory.

Governments, especially those with low turnover, often neglect formal knowledge-sharing. Public servants tend to learn through informal mentorship and eventually replace their predecessors. But with sudden retirements and unfilled roles, that chain breaks.

Improving US-Canada relations will be difficult without that experience. Deepening economic integration is rapidly advancing. Our best US officials working on this relationship today learned about Canada on the job. Support from the State Department’s Office of Canadian Affairs is crucial for many decisionmakers, but those resources are limited, and demand will grow as newly hired US public servants at the federal and state levels take up the responsibility for aspects of this relationship.

At a minimum, I hope some outgoing officials will leave notes for successors—or stay in touch as alumni. I’ve been conducting informal “exit interviews” with some of them, and welcome readers of the US Canada Eye to help me to identify more veteran officials leaving public service. My notes can’t replace decades of experience, but they could help.

The deeper issue is that US-Canada policy lessons are poorly remembered by those of us outside government. Public servants are generalists, and few specialize in Canada for long. Political appointees above them often lack context, requiring career officials to start from scratch in every administration. In the past, they could rely on the foreign policy scholars in US think tanks and universities to help them to quickly acquire the essential details they needed.

This is how Washington works for most foreign relationships—but for Canada the problem is acute. Since the Clinton era, Canadian affairs have often been lumped with Mexican or Western Hemisphere portfolios. Over time, even smart officials approach Canada through the Latin American or European lenses more familiar to them, but that don’t quite fit.

US officials navigating other international relationships can rely on expertise at think tanks and universities for support. Canada policymakers? Not so much. Few US universities offer Canadian studies, and few US think tanks focus on Canada. The Wilson Center’s Canada Institute is gone. The Center for Canadian Studies at Johns Hopkins SAIS remains, and I hope to expand it (I’m the current director), but more institutional support is needed in this period of change.

Losing a Canadian Crutch?

At times, US officials have relied on informal resources like Canadian friends, experts, and media for context. That can work well—particularly when issues are complex, technical, or when both countries are aligned. In such cases, an official needs facts and data or the qualitative evidence of perspectives on the ground when neither are contested.

But US trends often influence Canadian policy. Kathryn May at the Institute for Research on Public Policy in Montreal (I’m an IRPP board member) reports on public service reforms in Ottawa under the Carney government and notes that public service reductions are coming to Ottawa as well in a somewhat gentler version of the US public service downsizing strategy.

If policy capacity erodes in both countries, managing the bilateral relationship—already under strain—will become even harder.

After six months of taunts about Canada becoming the “51st state,” Canadian nationalism has surged. The US-Canada relationship is being tested just as the number of professionals managing it is shrinking, sources of expertise are dwindling, and institutional memory within government is being lost. The trajectory is worrying.

In the 2004 film *50 First Dates*, Drew Barrymore’s character loses her memory each night. Adam Sandler’s character wins her heart anew every day. It’s charming as a love story, but a poor model for diplomacy: the US-Canada relationship could easily devolve into a series of awkward first encounters with new staff, no historical perspective, inadequate institutional support from within government and too little outside the government from universities and think tanks. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

There’s still time to act. To build capacity. To preserve knowledge. To invest in people and institutions who understand the relationship and can carry it forward.

Let’s heed Joni Mitchell’s warning and remember what we’ve got before it’s gone, so we can adapt or rebuild.