The US state department has begun issuing the first of more than 1,350 termination notices as part of a huge reorganisation of America’s diplomatic corps under the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, according to internal documents and US diplomats at the state department on Friday.
Career diplomats and other staff began to receive the notices on Friday morning, days after the supreme court lifted a ban on the Trump administration moving forward with mass firings of government employees that will affect hundreds of thousands of federal workers.
“Hearing ‘I got mine!’ around the floor,” one current state department employee told the Guardian.
In an internal email obtained by the Guardian on Friday, state department workers were told that nearly 3,000 employees would leave as part of a vast reorganisation meant to align the department’s goals with Donald Trump’s stated goal of putting America first.
“This [Reduction in Force] comprises 1,107 civil service and 246 Foreign Service employees with domestic assignments,” read the email. Another 1,600 employees are believed to have left the service via a voluntary redundancy scheme in recent months.
The state department had confirmed on Thursday that it planned to move forward with the layoffs.
The cull of approximately 15% of the state department workforce is unprecedented for the diplomatic corps, and confusion over the process as well as the temporary court injunction against mass firings of government employees have made the rollout even more chaotic.
“At a moment of great global instability – with war raging in Ukraine, conflict between Israel and Iran, and authoritarian regimes testing the boundaries of international order – the United States has chosen to gut its frontline diplomatic workforce,” said a statement from the American Foreign Service Association, a professional group that represents US diplomats. “We oppose this decision in the strongest terms.”
“Morale has been rock-bottom since they announced [the reorganisation],” one US diplomat told the Guardian. “I think for some people the fact it is finally happening is a relief but it’s awful,” the person added.
Some advocacy groups reported that the state department was unable to process the hundreds of RIFs simultaneously due to the limitations of internal systems.
“The state department has apparently encountered a problem with the RIF software that caps the number of emails that can be sent out at a time, so rather than one big RIF at 10.30am tomorrow, we may see ‘Rolling RIFs’ throughout the day,” wrote Karl Stoltz, co-president of the Public Diplomacy Council of America, in an email to members.
A senior state department official said: “This is simply not true. Email systems always take time to roll these out, and the timeline has been consistent with expectations. We did not have plans for one big email blast at a specific time, and did not indicate any such time to the workforce.”
Members of the PDCA and other groups that support federal employees were expected to meet at the state department at 4pm on Friday in order to “clap out” employees who had received RIFs and to “protest the department’s actions”.
A senior state department official on Thursday told journalists that the department was “going to work to handle this 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,” the official said.
The layoffs were also criticised by Democratic senators, who said that the administration’s decision “undermines our national security”.
“While there are targeted reforms that our government can pursue to maximize the impact of every tax dollar, that’s not what this is,” read the statement, which was co-signed by 10 Democratic senators, including Senator Jeanne Shaheen, ranking member of the US Senate foreign relations committee.
“There are active conflicts and humanitarian crises in Ukraine, Sudan, Gaza, Haiti and Myanmar – to name a few. Now is the time to strengthen our diplomatic hand, not weaken it. From pursuing peaceful resolutions to out-competing China diplomatically and economically, we can’t afford to not have experienced diplomats at the table.”
