Trump’s State department firing begins: Over 1,300 jobs slashed in latest layoff wave

The US State Department is moving forward with its plan to fire more than 1,300 employees in line with a dramatic reorganization plan unveiled by the Trump administration earlier this year. Officials say the cuts will align their mission with Donald Trump’s vision of America first.

Commonly called reductions in in force (or RIFs), the layoffs along with voluntary redundancies, will affect nearly 15% of the state department’s domestic staff. The US State Department is sending layoff notices to 1,107 civil servants and 246 foreign service officers with domestic assignments in the United States, a senior State Department official told AP.

The restructuring will also see several hundred bureaus merged or eliminated entirely. The department advises the president and leads the US in foreign policy issues. All the foreign service officers will be placed immediately on administrative leave for 120 days after which they will formally lose their jobs, reported news agency AP citing an internal memo.


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Layoffs at US State Department

“In connection with the departmental reorganization … the department is streamlining domestic operations to focus on diplomatic priorities,” the notice says. “Headcount reductions have been carefully tailored to affect non-core functions, duplicative or redundant offices, and offices where considerable efficiencies may be found from centralization or consolidation of functions and responsibilities.”

The US State Department went ahead with the layoffs after the Supreme Court sided this week with the Trump administration against a federal judge’s hold on plans for mass government firings that could affect hundreds of thousands of federal employees. The layoffs have been praised by the President, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and their Republican allies as 'overdue' and 'necessary to make department leaner'. But Democrats and former Diplomats are up in arms against the job cuts who say they will weaken U.S. influence and its ability to counter existing and emerging threats abroad.

The Trump administration has undertaken sweeping efforts to reshape American diplomacy and significantly reduce the size of the federal government. This includes mass staff reductions and moves to dismantle entire departments such as the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Department of Education.

Last week, the six-decade-old USAID was officially merged into the State Department following deep cuts to foreign aid funding.

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Why are the layoffs happening?

State Department officials said they aimed to cut overlapping roles and streamline operations, pointing out that three separate offices were currently handling sanctions policy. They also noted that many of these offices had “proliferated” during the post-Cold War expansion under President Bill Clinton.

“It was looking at what are the functions that are redundant, are overlapping or are no longer aligned with the president’s foreign policy priorities in a post-cold war world,” said a senior state department official who briefed reporters on the restructuring. “In an era of great power competition, what should a state department look like?”

“A lot of this covers redundant offices and takes some of these cross-cutting functions and moves them to the regional bureaus and to our embassies overseas, to the people who are closest to where diplomacy is happening,” the official told The Guardian.

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The American Academy of Diplomacy, an association that includes hundreds of former senior diplomats, said the State Department layoffs “will seriously undermine the ability of our government to understand, explain, and respond to a complex and increasingly contested world.”

“At a time when the United States faces unprecedented challenges from strategic competitors and adversaries, ongoing conflicts in Central Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, and emerging security threats, the decision to gut the Department of State’s institutional knowledge and operational capacity is an act of vandalism,” the organization said in a statement last week before the cuts were announced.

It added that Rubio’s explanations for the cuts are “disingenuous, pernicious, and false.” Michael Rigas, the department’s deputy secretary for management and resources, said in a notice Thursday that staffers would be informed “soon” if they were being laid off.

“First and foremost, we want to thank them for their dedication and service to the United States,” he said.

“Once notifications have taken place, the Department will enter the final stage of its reorganization and focus its attention on delivering results-driven diplomacy,” Rigas added.

(With AP inputs)