After the 2012 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya killed four Americans, Congress passed a law requiring that the State Department's chief of security have unfettered access to the Secretary of State.
But an explosive report in the New York Times this weekend revealed that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has "turned down repeated and sometimes urgent" requests from security staff. When the chief of security was finally granted a meeting, it was only for five minutes.
That's one of many unnerving details in the report, which alleges that there has been a mass exodus of career diplomats from Rex Tillerson's State Department in the nine months since he took office.
"It is a full-blown crisis at the State Department in terms of staffing," said Charles Sennott, executive director of The GroundTruth Project . "You can't diminish your staff this much and be a nation that leads the world diplomatically."
Sennott believes that Tillerson has not been able to transition from the CEO of a private company to working in a large bureaucratic organization like the State Department.
"This is not corporate cuts to staff to improve the efficiencies of an organization," Sennott said. "This is starting to gut diplomacy in America at a really important time for diplomacy."
Click the audio player above to hear more from Charles Sennott.
