The State Department is firing roughly 1,300 employees by email as part of the Trump administration’s plans to radically overhaul American diplomacy, starting with dramatically scaling down global efforts to promote democracy and combat human rights abuses.
American diplomats and civil servants will receive layoff notices “in the coming days,” and “every effort has been made to support our colleagues who are departing,” according to a memo issued Thursday.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio told Congress in May that the department planned to shred its workforce by more than 15 percent — roughly 2,000 people — to downsize what he called a “bloated bureaucracy that stifles innovation and misallocates scarce resources.”
Rubio has also accused bureaus and employees within the agency of advancing “radical political ideology.”
Critics have warned that the administration’s dramatic restructuring and wholesale closure of critical diplomatic efforts will have far-reaching global consequences.
“Weakening U.S. human rights promotion and contracting the department’s humanitarian assistance offices is not reform, it is retreat,” said Francisca Vigaud-Walsh, director of advocacy and strategy at the Center for Engagement and Advocacy in the Americas.
The department’s reductions will significantly impact efforts to combat prevailing human rights violations and humanitarian crises, she said in a statement shared with The Independent.
“It strips away expertise and institutional memory, impairing mission-critical functions and putting countless lives at risk,” she said.
Former State Department diplomat Uzra Zeya, now president of Human Rights First, called the mass layoffs a “Friday morning massacre.”
“These mass layoffs mean abandonment of human rights reformers abroad who challenged dictators, termination of conflict resolution support that stopped wars, repudiation of U.S. humanitarian leadership that staved off famine, and more kleptocrats, war criminals, and human traffickers escaping justice,” Zeya said.
The Independent has requested comment from the State Department.
Layoff notices are being delivered to more than 1,000 civil servants and another 246 foreign service officers with domestic assignments in the U.S., according to a senior State Department official who spoke anonymously to the Associated Press.
Targeted foreign service officers will be immediately placed on administrative leave for 120 days, after which they will formally be out of their jobs, according to the notice. The separation period is 60 days for most other affected civil servants.
“In connection with the departmental reorganization … the department is streamlining domestic operations to focus on diplomatic priorities,” the notice states. “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.”
A bulk of those “reduction in force” efforts in the newly structured State Department target bureaus that focus on promoting human rights and democracy abroad and diplomatic conflict resolution, including the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, and the Bureau for Conflict and Stabilization Operations.
On Tuesday, the Supreme Court opened the door for the Trump administration to begin mass firings of federal workers across 19 agencies and departments while legal challenges continue.
A decision from the court’s conservative majority lifted a lower-court order that temporarily blocked the administration's plans, which were not approved by Congress.
Officials took “a very deliberate step to reorganize the State Department to be more efficient and more focused,” Rubio told reporters in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, this week.
“It’s not a consequence of trying to get rid of people. But if you close the bureau, you don’t need those positions,” he said. “Understand that some of these are positions that are being eliminated, not people.”
President Donald Trump, with support from the so-called Department of Government Efficiency embedded across the federal government, has launched a government-wide effort to fire workers and dismantle entire agencies, including the U.S. Agency for International Development, which has been absorbed by the shrinking State Department.
Last month, The Independent discovered the State Department was funneling $250 million from refugee services to pay immigrants to leave the country.
The money is being moved from the State Department’s Migration and Refugee Assistance, which is overseen by the Bureau of Population, Refugee and Migration, with a mission to “reduce illegal immigration” and aid refugees “fleeing persecution, crisis or violence and seek durable solutions for forcibly displaced people,” according to its website.
But under Rubio’s radical restructuring of the department, the refugee bureau’s mission is now explicitly focused on efforts to “return illegal aliens to their country of origin or legal status.”
Regional offices of the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration are now expected to be eliminated.
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