CNN
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The State Department will begin firing personnel “soon” as Secretary of State Marco Rubio implements his dramatic overhaul of the agency, according to an email from a top State Department official to staff Thursday evening.
“Soon, the Department will be communicating to individuals affected by the reduction in force,” the email from Deputy Secretary of State for Management and Resources Michael Rigas said.
Sources said the cuts, known as reductions in force (RIFs), could happen as soon as Friday.
They come after the Supreme Court on Tuesday cleared the way for the Trump administration’s effort to carry out mass firings and reorganizations across the federal government.
The State Department told Congress in May that it planned to fire up to 1,873 people in its domestic workforce of 18,730. Up to 1,575 additional people had indicated they would voluntarily depart.
The firings will include members of the civil and foreign service who worked in offices that are now being eliminated or rehauled. The planned reorganization impacts more than 300 offices and bureaus, the agency told Congress in May.
The pending RIFs, which have loomed over the agency for weeks, have left the workforce in limbo and demoralized as they wait for final notice about the fates of the careers to which many have devoted years or even decades of their lives.
Opponents of the cuts say they will take a toll at a time when the role of diplomats and foreign affairs experts is as important than ever, particularly as the Trump administration tries to broker ends to wars in Ukraine and the Middle East.
Rubio said Thursday that the RIF plan was being implemented in “probably in the most deliberate way of anyone that’s done one.”
“We went very specifically through and reorganized the State Department,” he told reporters in Kuala Lumpur. “When you reorganize the State Department, there were certain bureaus we wanted to empower, the regional bureaus, and there were certain bureaus, these functional bureaus, that were closed.”
There are fewer foreign service officers than civil servants based in the Washington, DC, offices. They are often highly trained, speak multiple languages, and serve around the world on behalf of the US. If they were working in a now-eliminated office on May 29, the day Rubio approved the reorganization plan, they may be cut.
A senior State Department official said the RIF plan “looked at the functions that were being performed, not at individuals.”
“If a particular function was being performed that was no longer aligned with what the department was going to be doing going forward, that function was being eliminated,” the official said. “It was personnel agnostic.”
They said that there aren’t plans for cuts at overseas posts as of now.
Thomas Yazdgerdi, the president of the American Foreign Service Association, said that forthcoming firings come “at a particularly bad time.”
“There are horrible things that are happening in the world that require a tried-and-true diplomatic workforce that’s able to address that,” he told CNN on Wednesday. “The ability to maintain a presence in the areas of the world that are incredibly important, dealing with issues like Ukraine, like Gaza, like Iran right now that require great diplomatic attention.”
Yazdgerdi, a career diplomat, said he does not believe the RIF plans take “the unique nature of the foreign service” into consideration.
“We’re like the military. We have personal rank and an up-or-out personnel system. We’re not tied to any particular position,” he explained. “If you’re going to RIF an office, we’re not tied to that office.”
He noted that even prior to the Trump administration, the diplomatic corps was “stretched thin” and “could not staff up appropriately our embassies overseas at a time when China, our biggest rivals, had no problem doing that.”
Yazdgerdi believes the firings will have an impact not only on morale, “but also on recruitment and retention.”
Asked about decreased morale at the department because of the RIFs, the senior official attributed it to the delay caused by court action that “kept this uncertainty, unfortunately, over the workforce.”
The State Department told Congress that it intended to complete its reorganization by July 1. Those plans were held up by rulings from a lower court.
The official said they want to handle the RIFs “in a manner that preserves, to the maximum extent, possible the dignity of federal employees and foreign service officers and civil servants who are affected by this.”
“It’s not easy for anyone, even if you say, it’s only affecting 15% of the workforce or 10% of the workforce, when it affects you, it affects you 100%,” they said. “We want to be sensitive to that process and make sure that folks have the resources that they need.”
