State department planning to lay off hundreds of US-based staff

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The state department is planning to lay off hundreds of US-based staff in the coming weeks as part of a major reorganisation, in a move career diplomats say will harm America’s foreign policy interests.

AFSA, the foreign service labour union, said it was “firmly and unequivocally opposed” to the proposed plans. It said they were coming as the state department’s workforce was “already stretched thin and under-resourced for the effective conduct of American diplomacy”.

The union’s concerns were expressed in a message to its members seen by the Financial Times. People familiar with the plans say 1,600 US-based foreign service and civil service staff could lose their jobs in the shake-up.

“Inevitably, a lot of the people who will be laid off will be experienced diplomats with hard-earned skills in language and area knowledge,” said Geoffrey Pyatt, a former assistant secretary of state and US ambassador to Greece and Ukraine. “There’s always a case for institutional reform but you don’t do it with a meat cleaver.”

The lay-offs are part of a wide-ranging reorganisation of the state department which was unveiled by secretary of state Marco Rubio in April, at a time when the country’s foreign policy establishment was reeling from the dismantling of USAID, the primary US agency for delivering foreign aid.

Rubio said the reorganisation was needed to streamline a department whose size and costs had “soared” over the past 15 years and to align it more closely with President Donald Trump’s “America First” agenda.

“In its current form the department is bloated, bureaucratic and unable to perform its essential diplomatic mission in this new era of great power competition,” Rubio said. “The sprawling bureaucracy created a system more beholden to radical political ideology than advancing America’s core national interests.”

Officials said Rubio’s plan would cut roughly 15 per cent of the state department’s US-based workforce and include the closure of 132 offices, some focused on human rights and the promotion of democracy. Employees affected by the move are expected to receive notices by July 1, though details have not been publicly announced.

Diplomats worry that the lay-offs will not follow the established rules for a “reduction in force” laid out in the Foreign Affairs Manual, the authoritative source for state department regulations and policies.

Under the current FAM, when any kind of reorganisation occurs, employees are grouped together with their colleagues of the same rank and points are awarded according to their work performance, language skills, whether they are a disabled veteran, or other criteria. If lay-offs occur, the people with the fewest points are the first to be laid off.

According to a draft version of the FAM in circulation, employees would lose their jobs based on which office they’re currently assigned to, rather than their performance or skills, people familiar with the matter said. This means that if their offices are being eliminated, they would not automatically be reassigned but would simply be dismissed.  

“FSOs [foreign service officers] move jobs every couple of years, so laying them off based on their current position amounts to a Squid Game version of musical chairs,” said one state department official.

In a recent memo to its members, AFSA said it had communicated to the department’s leadership “the importance of preserving the institutional architecture of a global Foreign Service, one that is not contingent on a member’s current assignment or position”.

One person familiar with the matter said there was a clash within the state department between political appointees loyal to Trump, who wanted to implement the cuts according to “function and region”, and career human resources managers who wanted to adhere to the old FAM rules.

The state department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The planned shake-up comes at a time when the state department’s ranks have already been severely depleted. Many foreign service officers decided to quit in response to the infamous “fork in the road” email sent by the US Office of Personnel Management to roughly 2mn federal workers in late January, shortly after Trump’s inauguration, urging them to accept a redundancy offer.

The planned “reduction in force” was “huge in a year when they already had record numbers of people leaving because of ‘fork in the road’,” said one official. “What they’re doing — especially changing the rules for carrying out reductions in force — is unprecedented.”

AFSA said in the message to members this week that it was urging Rubio to “seriously consider” whether the staffing cuts were necessary, “given the large number of recent departures from the department”.