The United States Department of State began to fire more than 1,350 local employees on Friday when the administration of President Donald Trump advances with an unprecedented review of his diplomatic corps, a measure that critics say they will undermine Washington to defend and promote their interests abroad.
The dismissals will cover 1,107 Civil Service and 246 Foreign Service officers based in the United States, according to an internal notice of the State Department sent to the workforce and seen by Reuters.
“The department is rationalizing national operations to focus on diplomatic priorities,” the notice said. “Personnel reductions have been carefully adapted to affect non -basic functions, duplicate or redundant offices and offices where considerable efficiencies can be found,” he added.
The total reduction in the workforce will be around 3,000, including voluntary departures, of the 18,000 employees based in the United States, according to the notice and a senior state department official.
The measure is the first step of a restructuring that Trump has tried to guarantee that the foreign policy of the United States is aligned with its “America First” agenda. Former diplomats and critics say that the dismissal of foreign service officers runs the risk of the capacity of the United States to counteract the growing assertiveness of adversaries such as China and Russia.
“President Trump and Secretary of State [Marco] Rubio is once again making the United States less safe and less safe, ”said Democratic Senator Tim Kaine de Virginia in a statement.
“This is one of the most ridiculous decisions that could possibly be taken at a time when China is increasing its diplomatic footprint worldwide and establishing a network abroad of military and transport bases, Russia continues its brutal assault from a sovereign country of a sovereign country, and the Middle East is taking crisis to the crisis,” Kaine said.
Trump ordered Rubio in February to renew the foreign service to ensure that the foreign policy of the Republican president is implemented “faithfully.”
He has also repeatedly committed to “clean the deep state” shooting bureaucrats whom he considers unfair. The shaking is part of an unprecedented impulse of Trump to reduce federal bureaucracy and reduce what he says is a wasteful expense of taxpayers’ money.
‘Swollen’
Rubio announced the plans for the shaking in April, saying that the State Department in its current form was “swollen, bureaucratic” and could not carry out its mission “in this new era of great competence of power.”
He imagined a structure that said he would return power to regional offices and embassies and get rid of programs and offices that are not aligned with the central interests of the United States.
That vision would see the elimination of the role of the high official for civil security, democracy and human rights and the closure of some offices that monitored war crimes and conflicts worldwide.
The reorganization was expected to be completed largely before July 1, but did not proceed as planned in the middle of a ongoing litigation, since the State Department waited for the United States Supreme Court to intervene in the Trump administration commitment to stop a court order that blocks mass employment cuts.
On Tuesday, the court cleared the way for the Trump administration to continue with the employment cuts and the reduction of personnel from numerous agencies. Since then, the Office of the White House lawyer and the Office of Personnel Management have been coordinating with federal agencies to ensure that their plans comply with the law.
Last week, more than 130 retired diplomats and other former US officials issued an open letter criticizing the planned review.
