If there is one salutary development that should come from the Trump administration, it is to explode for all time the conceit that business leaders with no experience in politics are best qualified to run the government.

It’s not just the overall struggles of President Trump himself, coping with record-low approval ratings. For further confirmation that business experience does not necessarily translate into government success, look no further than the State Department, which is being run by ExxonMobil’s longtime CEO, Rex Tillerson.

By all accounts, Tillerson was very successful as an oil-company executive. He is proving less successful as secretary of state, a job he gives no signs of having mastered.

He ignores the press—one of the most potent instruments that any secretary of state has to spread his message, shape public perceptions, and enhance his own standing with the administration and Congress.

He acquiesces in a White House budget that calls for cutting State Department funding and foreign aid by almost 30 percent—a budget that Sen. Bob Corker, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and a Trump supporter, called so Draconian that it would be a “total waste of time” to even review it.

He does little to motivate his own personnel or explain his vision to them and, when he did, he gave a talk widely seen as denigrating the importance of “values” in U.S. foreign policy.

He seems to be losing out in a battle for influence over Middle Eastern policy with White House aides such as Jared Kushner and Jason Greenblatt. He often seems tripped up by the president’s own tweets and pronouncements. For example, in the current crisis in Qatar, Tillerson is trying to play the role of honest broker while the president appears to be offering 110 percent backing to Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states blockading Qatar.

Granted, not all of these snafus are entirely Tillerson’s fault. Like many administration officials, he is struggling to keep up with the policy being set, willy-nilly, by Trump’s Twitter feed. He did try to appoint a well-qualified deputy—my Council on Foreign Relations colleague Elliott Abrams—but had that request rejected by the president, apparently at Steve Bannon’s instigation, because Abrams wrote one mildly critical article about Trump last year. But Tillerson can’t blame the White House for his failure to fill most of the critical policy jobs at the State Department. That’s on him.

Tillerson is treating the State Department as if it were a poorly run conglomerate that is in need of an urgent overhaul by a new CEO who is waiting for the management consultants to tell him which lines of business to keep and which to sell. According to the Washington Post, Tillerson has “sketched a lengthy timeline for his internal review that would include a period of study and planning through 2017 and changes to the department’s structure and staffing next year. In some cases, senior jobs will remain vacant until then, if they are filled at all.”

This is bonkers. By refusing to fill senior State Department jobs for a year or more, Tillerson is not just hindering the process of policy formation. He is also reducing his own influence in both the administration and the world as a whole.

The New York Times reported: “Three foreign ambassadors — one from Asia and two from Europe — said they had taken to contacting the National Security Council because the State Department does not return their calls or does not offer substantive answers when it does.”

The Times offered some examples of just how dangerous this policy vacuum can be:

Mr. Tillerson, for example, recently shut down the office of the special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan — whose role had been diminished since Richard Holbrooke had the job during President Barack Obama’s first term — and has yet to appoint an assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asian affairs, at a time when the Taliban’s return and Pakistan’s instability are major concerns.

When he attended a series of recent meetings on Afghanistan, Mr. Tillerson was accompanied by only his chief of staff, Margaret Peterlin, who is a former United States Patent and Trademark official and technology executive with no diplomatic experience.

There is also no one in line for the Asia policy job, just when there is talk about whether the North Korea crisis will be defused by negotiation or steam toward conflict.

This is, quite simply, no way to run a foreign policy. Tillerson’s struggles stand in stark contrast to the surer hand at the Defense Department—Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis. Mattis has no business background, but he does have a lifetime of military service that has exposed him to the ins and outs of government and how it operates. That is something Tillerson utterly lacks—and it shows.

Business experience can be valuable if combined with government experience. A good example is George Shultz, one of the most respected secretaries of state, who ran the engineering giant Bechtel in between service in the Nixon and Reagan administrations. But Tillerson, along with Trump, is proving that it’s a lot harder to translate private-sector experience into the government than it may appear from a distance. That is something that voters should keep in mind when, inevitably, the next crop of business leaders seek high office.