Mustard's first government role, from 1982 to 1986 was as an agricultural economist at the Foreign Agricultural Service of the Department of Agriculture, in Washington DC. From 1986 to 1988 he was an assistant agricultural attaché at the U.S. embassy in Moscow, USSR. During that period, the soviets withdrew all local staff from the embassy, so Mustard's ability to touch-type in Russian saw him doubling up in a clerical support role. In 1988 be became an agricultural trade officer at the Consulate General in Istanbul, Turkey, serving there until 1990. He was back at the Foreign Agricultural Service from 1990, first as deputy coordinator for Eastern Europe and the Soviet Secretariat, being promoted to deputy director of the Emerging Democracies Office in 1992. From 1996 to 2000 he served as agricultural counselor, at the U.S. embassy in Vienna, where he had responsibility not only for Austria, but also Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia and Slovenia. This was followed by another period in Washington DC, first as assistant deputy administrator for foreign agricultural affairs at the Foreign Agricultural Service and then as a Fellow in the Senior Seminar in Foreign Relations at the Department of State. From 2003 to 2008 he served as Agricultural Minister-Counselor, back at the Moscow embassy, and from 2008 to 2011 in the equivalent position at the U.S. embassy in Mexico City, Mexico. From 2011 he was in New Delhi, India. At the embassy there he had responsibility for programs in India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, including food aid in the latter. He was sworn in as Ambassador to Turkmenistan on November 25, 2014. In October 2015 he was joined at a groundbreaking ceremony for a new embassy building in Turkmenistan's capital, Ashgabat, by the city's mayor. Following his June 2019 retirement, he was succeeded by Matthew Klimow. In June 2020 he was one of 612 former diplomats, senior military officers, and other government officials who signed an open letter expressing alarm at calls by President Donald Trump and others for the use of U.S. military personnel to end Black Lives Matter protests on U.S. soil.
Support for open content projects
During his ambassadorship, Mustard was a proponent of OpenStreetMap, as well as being an active volunteer mapper. At the North American Cartographic Information Society's annual banquet in 2019, he gave a keynote address on his mapping in Turkmenistan. He also gave keynote presentations at the OSM annual conference, State of the Map in 2016 and 2020. In December 2019, he was elected chair of the board of the OpenStreetMap Foundation, He describes himself as a Wikipedian.
Mustard is married to Ann Anderson Mustard, a former CBS Radio News correspondent, whom he courted at the University of Illinois. They have one daughter. He sits on the advisory board of the Caspian Policy Center. Mustard speaks Russian, German and some Spanish.
