On July 11, the State Department fired 1,107 civil service employees and 246 foreign service officers who had domestic assignments.
In all, about 3,000 workers are expected to depart from the State Department. This includes those voluntarily resigning under a deferred resignation plan. The Supreme Court made it clear these mass firings were legal.
Those fired include highly trained foreign service officers. Some were working on Syria, which is at a critical juncture in its history, as it recovers from the brutal rule of former dictator Bashar al-Assad. Experts on nuclear testing, verification, and proliferation have been terminated, even though a notable objective of the second Trump administration has been to prevent Iran from developing a functional nuclear weapon.
There were also many cuts from the areas of the department that were anticipated, including its energy resources and conflict and stabilization operations wings, the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons and the Office of Global Women’s Issues. Other impacted areas include Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, the Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs, the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, and the Bureau of International Organization Affairs, officials said.
ABC
The mass firings and bureau reorganizations are the fruits of a State Department document that was found on May 29. This document called for a radical plan to fire thousands of employees and to eliminate or consolidate entire bureaus. Contrary to ABC’s reporting, the intense cuts hardly come as a surprise.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that the dramatic reorganization plan will go into effect on July 14. The memo that features this announcement gives instructions to the remaining workers regarding the transition.
In consistency with the incompetence of this current administration, several employees were wrongfully fired.
While top State Department officials have celebrated this as the removal of an excessive bureaucracy, they have yet to make the case that this somehow benefits American interests, or that the Department will be any more efficient than it is now. A transition impacting the entire agency appears to be the opposite of efficient.
