A SENSIBLE LOOK AT THE STATE DEPARTMENT CUTS. On Friday, the Trump administration laid off about 1,350 employees at the State Department. A number of news reports described the staff cuts as “devastating.” Others suggested that the downsizing will endanger U.S. national security. The New York Times said the cuts “demote longtime U.S. values,” while the Washington Post said they “will degrade America’s standing in the world and curb U.S. soft power.”
First, a little perspective. According to State Department documents, the total number of department employees has grown significantly over the years. In 2007, there were 57,340. By 2015, there were 72,895. By 2024, there were 80,214. That is an increase of 22,874 employees over 17 years. After the addition of 22,874 employees, can a cut of 1,350 be “devastating”?
Nearly three months ago, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said big changes were coming. The hiring of thousands of new employees over the last decade and a half, Rubio said, not only made operations cumbersome and less efficient, but it also distracted from the department’s core goals.
“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 in a statement on April 22. “Over the past 15 years, the department’s footprint has had unprecedented growth and costs have soared. But far from seeing a return on investment, taxpayers have seen less effective and efficient diplomacy. The sprawling bureaucracy created a system more beholden to radical political ideology than advancing America’s core national interests.”
The cuts are focused and not across the board. A significant number appears to be at the department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, known as DRL. “Our entire office is just … gone,” a senior official who took deferred retirement told NBC News late Friday. The administration had already cut most of DRL’s funding, so it was no surprise that the bureau’s staff was next.
Rubio has long believed that the State Department has become sidetracked from its main mission. In 2023, when he was in the Senate, he published, along with Rep. Brian Mast (R-FL), a brief report titled “Diversity Over Diplomacy: How Wokeness is Weakening the U.S. State Department.” Rubio noted that the Biden State Department seemed to be more concerned with promoting diversity than with dealing with the threat posed by China.
“Why did the Biden administration create internal Offices of Diversity and Inclusion at both the State Department and USAID?” Rubio asked. “Why did State and USAID request $83.3 million from Congress for their FY2024 budget, a full 26.9 percent increase from their 2023 budget request for diversity recruiting initiatives? Surely such resources would be better spent countering Beijing, yet to date there has been no institution-wide messaging in the State Department on China.”
Rubio and Mast listed some of the same questionable expenditures from the State Department that, two years later, were eliminated by the Department of Government Efficiency effort. There was the funding for drag theater in Ecuador; support for an “LGBT activist group supporting prostitution in Colombia”; the “film festival featuring incest and pedophilia in Portugal”; the memo from then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken that “could be construed to classify Sweden, Finland, and the United Kingdom as human rights abusers for their association with ‘conversion therapy’ treatment for gender dysphoria”; the grant to “promote social acceptance of LGBTQI+ persons” in Botswana; and more.
Projects like that “distracted State Department leaders from their duty to protect and promote America’s national security,” Rubio wrote. And not just leaders — in the State Department, workers got ahead by “behavior that advances DEIA core values,” Rubio added. “Until the State Department reprioritizes national security and recommits itself to its stated mission — to protect and promote U.S. security, prosperity, and democratic values — our diplomats will continue to lose focus, cohesion, and morale.”
Now, Rubio, with a mandate from President Donald Trump, is in a position to act on his beliefs.
A few of the laid-off workers left messages taped to walls and mirrors. “Here sat America’s experts on democracy, human rights (yes, which includes women’s, LGBTQ+, & minorities’ rights), elections security, freedom of expression, privacy, on countering corruption, violent extremism and disinformation, and more,” one message said. “You’ve just released them and hundreds of their colleagues into the wild … in the United States of America.”
Another message was more succinct: “Colleagues, if you remain: RESIST FASCISM. Remember the oath you vowed to uphold.”
It seems likely the creators of those flyers were not totally on board with Rubio’s new direction. Maybe it is best that they leave.
In any event, the cuts, which amount to about 1.6% of State Department staff, can hardly be described as “devastating.” Of course, they are upsetting for those who lost their jobs. But this kind of thing happens every day in the private sector, sometimes involving many more people, without the kind of hand-wringing that has characterized media coverage of the State Department.
Now, as he takes the heat in the coverage, it’s time for Rubio to keep going, to put into place the reforms he envisioned for the department. In politics, such opportunities do not last long.