Veteran U.S. diplomats baffled after mass layoffs at State Department
More than 1,300 employees were forced out of the State Department on Friday, leaving their offices with small boxes of plants and old coffee mugs and taking with them decades of specialized skills and on-the-job training as part of the United States diplomatic corps.
The massive overhaul of the federal agency has been in the works for months, with the Trump administration informing Congress in late May that thousands of State Department employees would lose their jobs as part of the largest reorganization of the department in decades.
Still, the details of whose jobs would be cut remained closely held, and many were shocked to find they were a part of the 15% cut to domestic agency staff. Several career employees who unexpectedly found themselves with pink slips told NBC News they were asked to write speeches and prepare talking points for political appointees on critical issues just days before.
“It’s so hard to work somewhere your entire life and then get treated this way,” one veteran civil servant with more than 30 years working at the department told NBC News. “I don’t know how you treat people this way. I really don’t.”
As the termination notices hit inboxes throughout the day, employees could be seen crying in the courtyard and huddling in corners in the hallways, as those who had been laid off lined up to hand in their laptops, phones and diplomatic passports.
“The manner in which things were done … they were not done with dignity. They were not done respectfully. They were not done transparently,” Olga Bashbush, a laid-off foreign service officer with more than 20 years of experience, told NBC News.
A senior State Department official briefing reporters on behalf of the agency ahead of the cuts told reporters Thursday that the restructuring was intended to be “individual agnostic.”
“This is the most complicated personnel reorganization that the federal government has ever undertaken,” the official said. “And it was done so in order to be very focused on looking at the functions that we want to eliminate or consolidate, rather than looking at individuals.”
Michael Duffin, a civil service employee with the department since 2013, spent nine years as a policy adviser with the counterterrorism bureau developing some of the first programs to counter white supremacy and other forms of violent extremism.
“No one at the State Department would disagree with the need for reform, but arbitrarily laying off people like me and others, irrespective of their performance, is not the right way to do it,” Duffin said as the closing speaker at a rally outside the department late Friday.
A general notice was sent to foreign service officers Friday announcing the reduction in force. It said the department is “streamlining domestic operations to focus on diplomatic priorities.”
“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 notice obtained by NBC News said.
A State Department website was also set up with a list of links and documents for affected employees with categories like “retirement sources” and “Federal Employee Retirement System,” but several fired employees leaving the department Friday expressed confusion and frustration to NBC News about the lack of available information on next steps.
“Yes, there was a congressional notification sent out, but the information that employees have received is literally nothing,” Bashbush said.
Impacted foreign service officers will be placed on administrative leave for 120 days, according to the notice, while most civil servants will have 60 days before being formally terminated from their positions.
The clap out
By late Friday afternoon, hundreds of civil servants and foreign service officers whose numbers had not been called gathered in the front lobby to “clap out” their less fortunate colleagues, in a tradition generally reserved for honoring departing secretaries of state.
Diplomats wheeling out boxes stacked on office chairs and cradling grocery bags stuffed with books wiped away tears amid echoing rounds of applause and shouts of support that lasted for nearly two hours.
Bashbush said the solidarity and collegiality filled her heart with gratitude and joy, and she thanked her colleagues for the extraordinary act.
“They clapped us out,” Bashbush said. “Everybody came here in front of the main State Department building and celebrated everybody’s service and their pride in their country.”
The long lines of applause spilled onto the front step outside of the building, where dozens of former career and political diplomats stood among other demonstrators with signs reading, “Thank you America’s diplomats.”
Democracy, human rights and labor
“Our entire office is just … gone,” said a senior civil service officer from the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor standing in front of the department late Friday as fired employees left the building. He spoke anonymously as one of the more than 1,500 State Department employees who have chosen to take deferred retirement.
The employee described the devastation felt by his colleagues, including one who is just about to have a baby and another who provides the sole income for their household.
“That’s just on the personal side. I’m not even talking yet about the way this is going to disrupt foreign policy,” he said.
Under the new structure of the State Department, the DRL bureau will be greatly reduced and the few remaining offices will be placed under a new deputy assistant secretary for democracy and Western values. One of the more acute changes will be the elimination of the many dedicated human rights positions for different regions of the world.
“There are specialties. You had a cadre of people that were experts at good governance and human rights and international labor affairs,” the DRL official said. “You can’t have a group of people that don’t know the region trying to make human rights policy for that specific region, because they won’t get it and they won’t advocate for it when more important issues come into play.”
Enrique Roig, a former deputy assistant secretary in the DRL bureau, said he agreed. Roig, who served in the Biden administration, was one of a handful of former democratic political appointees speaking in front of the department as diplomats filed out.
“It will allow authoritarians around the globe, both on the left and the right, to continue to abuse civic space, to jail and to lock up journalists and civic activists and increase the number of political prisoners we see around the world that my bureau was helping to release,” Roig said.
Science and research
A group of women laid off from the State Department’s Office of Science and Technology Cooperation walked out wearing T-shirts over their office clothes with the message, “Science is Diplomacy. Diplomacy is Science.” The women cried and hugged each other as they exited the building in front of the gathered crowd. Their office is one of over 300 offices or bureaus being eliminated or merged under the sweeping reorganization.
“What’s clear is that the Department of State doesn’t care about science and research,” said one of the women, a foreign service officer who was laid off from the office as part of the cuts.
She described the office as having some of the best emerging tech professionals “in whole of government, not just in the Department of State,” and called it a travesty that the talent would be lost.
“When it comes to supporting research, basic research, the research that helps us have things like iPhones, have pacemakers, we have no expertise in this building right now because of the layoffs of our staff and other offices like ours,” she said, adding that they had just found out the officials who they thought would be taking over their important work had also been laid off. “It’s shocking, and it’s baffling that the government doesn’t seem to care about keeping that kind of expertise.”
“Diplomacy is not a short-term gain. It’s a long-term gain,” another laid-off official from the office said, summing up the damage caused by the cuts. “The connections we make now in our youth are with those officials who will be world leaders one day. Now those connections will be lost.”