State Dept lays off 1,350 employees as reorganization nears final phase

The State Department laid off over 1,350 employees on Friday, as part of its biggest reorganization plan in decades.

An internal notice from the State Department’s Bureau of Global Talent Management states 1,107 civil service and 246 Foreign Service employees currently in the United States will receive RIF notices.

Employees who received reduction-in-force notices left the department’s headquarters Friday afternoon, some carrying boxes and office supplies. Staff and protestors at a rally outside applauded RIF’d employees as they walked out.

Michael Duffin, senior policy advisor at the Bureau of Counterterrorism, said at the rally that the Office of Countering Violent Extremism, where he worked, was eliminated, and that he was laid off. Among its duties, the office combated antisemitism, white supremacy and other forms of violent extremism.

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“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.

Walking out of the department’s headquarters for the last time, Duffin held a sign up to the crowd that said, “Diplomacy matters. Feds matter.”

The State Department told some employees on Friday that they received RIF notices in error.

“We understand that you may have erroneously received a Reduction in Force (RIF) letter earlier today. That was an administrative error. Please disregard that notification. Your position is not being abolished as part of the Department reorganization,” Lew Olowski, the senior bureau official in charge of the Bureau of Global Talent Management, wrote in a notice shared with Federal News Network.

Foreign Service employees will be separated 120 days after receiving their RIF notices. The department says separation periods may vary for civil service employees, but are generally about 60 days after receiving their RIF notices.

“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 department told employees in a notice Friday morning.

The department trimmed back the overall scope of its layoffs, compared to what it told Congress last month.

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The State Department told lawmakers in June that it plans to lay off nearly 1,900 employees through a reduction-in-force. In earlier versions of these plans, as many as 700 Foreign Service offices would’ve received RIF notices.

Between the RIFs and departures under the deferred resignation programs, the department told Congress in June that it was looking at an 18% cut to its workforce.

A Supreme Court ruling on Tuesday cleared the way for the Trump administration to resume its plans to shrink the federal workforce and reorganize agencies.

In total, the department expects nearly 3,000 employees will leave as part of a major reorganization — approximately 15% of its total workforce. About 1,600 employees have already agreed to leave the agency through voluntary incentives, including both rounds of the “deferred resignation” program.

The American Foreign Service Association warned that these layoffs come at a time when the Foreign Service is under-resourced and stretched thin.

AFSA estimates that the State Department has shed at least 20% of the Foreign Service workforce so far this year, through “shuttering of institutions and forced resignations.”

AFSA President Tom Yazdgerdi said that prior to these cuts, the Foreign Service was already short-staffed to the point where more junior staff were taking on positions and responsibilities beyond their experience and qualifications.

“Even before this administration, we were facing a situation where there was burnout overseas. There weren’t enough mid-level officers to staff our embassies,” Yazdgerdi said in an interview. “That’s the kind of situation that this administration came into. And they, of course, wanted to cut even further.”

Yazdgerdi said a Foreign Service officer recently promoted to become the deputy chief of mission at a post overseas was among those laid off. AFSA’s incoming president, John Dinkelman, also received a RIF notice, as did all other members of the State Department’s Diplomats in Residence program.

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“They say this is all merit-based. It’s not. It’s kind of just Russian roulette. You happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and you get RIF’d,” Yazdgerdi said.

AFSA said there were “clear, institutional mechanisms available to address excess staffing, if that had been the goal,” as part of the Foreign Service’s “up-or-out” system, but that these traditional procedures weren’t followed.

“Instead, these layoffs are untethered from merit or mission. They target diplomats not for how they’ve served or the skills they have, but for where they happen to be assigned. That is not reform,” AFSA wrote.

Michael Rigas, the deputy secretary of state for management and resources, told the workforce in an email Thursday evening that once the RIF notifications have gone out, “the Department will enter the final state of its reorganization and focus its attention on delivering results-driven diplomacy.”

The reorganization plan will impact more than 300 bureaus and offices, and will eliminate divisions that department leaders have deemed unnecessary or duplicative.

The Public Diplomacy Council of America told members in an email Thursday evening that the State Department “has apparently encountered a problem with the RIF software that caps the number of emails that can be sent at a time.”

PDCA Co-President Karl Stoltz wrote that instead of most RIF notices going out Friday morning, “rolling RIFs” are expected throughout the day.

Stoltz said that Foreign Service officers recently recommended for promotions and officials serving on promotion panels are among those who will receive RIF notices.

A former State Department official familiar with the reorganization plans told Federal News Network that the workforce cuts will impact many mid-career and senior executives.

“It’s not how many, it’s who is getting RIF’d that is the story,” the former department official said.

The former State Department official said many bureau-level executives are expected to receive RIF notices, as part of consolidations happening under the office of the under secretary for management.

“A lot of those directors at that level are being RIF’d,” the former department official said. “And these are people that have 15 years there.”

According to the former official, about 200 non-RIF-eligible employees will be offered another position at a lower grade, with the expectation that they will voluntarily leave the department.

Rigas called the RIF a “targeted reduction” in the department’s domestic workforce. The State Department previously told employees, in a frequently asked questions document, that the RIF to domestic offices and functions “will impact both civil and foreign service personnel.”

The department, in preparation for the layoffs, told civil service employees to upload their resumes and to “confirm and update their employment information.”

“Every effort has been made to support our colleagues who are departing, including those who opted into the Deferred Resignation Programs,” Rigas said.

The former State Department official said many civil service employees were eligible for voluntary separation incentive payments that were offered ahead of the RIF notices. But the department was limited in who could take the offer, because of the cost of paying out unused leave as part of employees’ severance.

Last year, the former official said, the State Department hit its ceiling on funds allowed for domestic workforce salaries.

“We couldn’t hire because we had reached our ceiling, and the ceiling was dependent on how much money we’d get from the government to pay for salaries. There’s a real limit there,” the former official said.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on Thursday that officials “took a very deliberate step to reorganize the State Department to be more efficient and more focused,” and that “our plan that we notified to Congress is what we intend to do.”

“It’s not a consequence of trying to get rid of people. But if you close the bureau, you don’t need those positions,” Rubio said.

State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce told reporters on Thursday that the reorganization will “ensure that the department moves at the speed of relevancy and restores the department to its roots of results-driven democracy.”

“It’s sometimes difficult, as any enterprise in America has learned, that when change is necessary — but in this case, we’ve inherited a dynamic that needed reform, and we are taking and implementing reform,” Bruce added.

State Dept lays off 1,350 employees as reorganization nears final phase

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