The sweeping layoffs that hit the State Department last week have triggered confusion and disruption at the agency, gutting some offices unexpectedly and forcing staff to scramble, multiple sources told CBS News.
The significant reductions and wholesale elimination of several key offices have heightened meaningful risks to U.S. national security, current and former officials said.
“It is frustrating that someone who does not know the worth of what they’re breaking, breaks it,” a U.S. official who was laid off Friday told CBS News.
The Trump administration cut 1,353 domestic State Department staffers on Friday, part of a long-planned effort to reorganize the agency and slash its U.S.-based staff by around 15%. The administration says the layoffs — along with thousands of voluntary departures — were necessary to streamline a department it argues had become bloated and bureaucratic.
“We took a very deliberate step to reorganize the State Department to be more efficient and more focused,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters last week.
Multiple State Department employees who spoke to CBS argued the cuts were arbitrary and poorly executed, and could damage U.S. foreign relations while also weakening the country’s diplomatic corps. And sources described last week’s layoffs as chaotic, with some of the department’s bureaus and offices — including staffers who work on passport fraud — facing cuts despite earlier indications to Congress that they would be left alone.
Many foreign service officers have stories of sacrifice that Americans may associate more with the military than with the diplomatic corps. Those include stories of being deployed abroad when their parents died, separation from their families while on long tours to places deemed too dangerous, or uprooting families from schools and homes every few years to work on behalf of the United States.
“I always felt it was worth it even when it was hard and difficult,” the official said of the sacrifices made during more than a decade of service as a foreign service officer. “It is a calling.”
“If this were the military, people would be up in arms,” the official told CBS News. “I just want people to know that we’re also the people who help keep you safe. We get you passports for travel, evacuate you when stuck abroad, and get your family members home when they die abroad.”
Unexpected layoffs rattle diplomatic ranks
Laid-off staffers received their reduction-in-force (or RIF) notices on Friday, and their emails and badges were deactivated at 5 p.m. But some managers of those departments weren’t sent lists telling them who was laid off, leaving bosses to piece together who is and isn’t still on their teams, according to two current State Department employees and one U.S. official.
Some employees received their layoff notices and were cut off from their government emails while on official travel, a department employee and a U.S. official said. In some cases, laid-off staffers had to use social media to get in touch with foreign counterparts to cancel meetings, and scrambled to book their own return tickets to the United States.
The entire staff of the Office of Casualty Assistance, which assists the families of State Department employees who die overseas, was fired, said a U.S. official and two department employees. Last week, the U.S. Consulate in Monterrey, Mexico, confirmed an American diplomat had been killed in a car accident. Department staff who were working to repatriate the employee’s remains had to stop after being laid off Friday, a State Department employee said.
Asked about the Office of Casualty Assistance by Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire in a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing Wednesday, the department’s top official for management Michael Rigas said he “was aware that function is being folded into another office.”
The new head of the Office of Israel and Palestinian Affairs was laid off, according to a U.S. official, a congressional aide and a State Department employee. The official had come to the office in June, but because the State Department selected May 29 as the cut-off date for reductions-in-force, they were dismissed based on their previous position. The layoff came on the same day that a Palestinian-American was killed in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, and as the administration presses Israel and Hamas to agree to a ceasefire.
At least six analysts from the Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, known as INR, were also laid off, three sources familiar with the matter said. The office, which employs roughly 250 analysts and is part of the broader 18-agency U.S. intelligence community, provides diplomats and policymakers with assessments to guide American foreign policy. Ellen McCarthy, who led INR from 2019 to 2021, said in a post on LinkedIn that the cuts were “short-sighted.”
“This isn’t just about jobs, it’s about weakening a critical capability at exactly the wrong time,” she wrote. “We need strong, steady intelligence to inform foreign policy decisions.”
Some offices hit by surprise cuts
Some of the layoffs were expected. The Trump administration notified Congress earlier this year of its intent to eliminate or merge hundreds of State Department offices, with those focused on humanitarian issues, migration and foreign aid slated for the deepest cuts. A report to Congress took particular aim at human rights-focused offices, which it said were beset by “radicalism.”
But when the layoff notices came out on Friday, they included several surprises and did not fully match the cuts that were listed out in the State Department’s notification to Congress, according to four sources, including department staffers and a congressional aide.
Some of the reductions-in-force hit offices that weren’t slated to be closed down, and other staffers who expected to get pink slips were spared, sources said.
The administration told Congress the reorganization “will not impact personnel within Consular Affairs’ passport or visa operations.” But on Friday, the staff who work on passport fraud investigations faced deep cuts, according to a U.S. official, a department employee and a congressional aide. The move came as a surprise because the department’s Consular Affairs section is largely funded through passport and visa fees, and isn’t reliant on taxpayer money.
Rigas told lawmakers Wednesday that staff who process passports were “not touched,” but the State Department did consolidate “other functions which have sort of a management remit and can be combined into other offices.”
The cuts hit virtually all civil service officers in the Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration’s office of admissions, which handles refugee resettlement efforts, CBS News had previously reported. Plans to Congress called for that office to be “rescoped,” and Friday’s layoffs were a surprise, two State Department employees said.
Meanwhile, foreign service officers in the Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration’s Europe and Near East office weren’t laid off, even though the administration’s notice to Congress called for the office’s elimination, according to a State Department employee.
Asked at a press briefing whether Rubio planned to address the workforce directly about the cuts, State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce said Wednesday, “The secretary is … very vocal and likes people and engages with them as often as he can. He cares very much about this department and to the point where – look, he undertook something that others had talked about or wished could be done but just didn’t.”
In an internal town hall on Tuesday, a video of which was obtained by CBS News, one State Department staffer asked whether any more RIFs were expected for State’s overall workforce, to which Under Secretary for Management José Cunningham replied, “I know of no RIFs that are being planned, for domestically, or overseas”.
In response to another staffer in the town hall who had pointed out that the website careers.state.gov is still encouraging people to apply, the head of the department’s Global Talent Management bureau Lew Olowski plugged the department’s new branding.
“I do encourage everybody to visit the recruiting page. It’s been intentionally redesigned to focus on one of the new themes of the Secretary’s vision for recruiting in the Foreign Service, which is patriotism,” he said. “A lot of us know patriotism because that’s what motivated us to join the workforce. But you might be surprised to know that that actually was not previously an intentional theme of the Department of State in encouraging patriots to come join us in this mission.”
TV screens seen at the State Department Wednesday advertised a new “America First Branding Policy” with instructions on how to access guidelines on “visually aligning Department activities with the U.S. flag” at the website brand.america.gov.
The layoffs are part of a broader gambit by the Trump administration to trim the size of the federal government through a combination of layoffs and voluntary buyouts.
The layoffs have drawn lawsuits. But last week, the Supreme Court let the administration move forward with its reduction-in-force plans while those legal battles play out, allowing the State Department to start laying off domestic staff.
In Wednesday’s Senate hearing, Rigas said the Trump administration’s goal is to make the department “better able to advance the core interests of the American people and accountable to the American taxpayers.”
“We want to empower our ambassadors and diplomats in the field and our regional bureaus in Washington to push forward the president’s America First foreign policy agenda and deliver results for the American people,” Rigas said.
