The Trump administration began firing more than 1,000 State Department employees on Friday, as it moves to downsize the federal government’s diplomatic arm in what critics say is a risky retreat from America’s global engagement.
The layoffs are part of a reorganization plan devised by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who says his department is too costly, cumbersome and ideological. Continuing President Trump’s drive to slash a federal work force he inherently distrusts, the job cuts will drain the department of expertise and batter the morale of those who remain, critics say.
But the plan also has global implications, veteran diplomats say. It refocuses American diplomacy around Mr. Trump’s narrow and transactional sense of the national interest while downgrading priorities such as human rights, democracy and refugees. In doing so, critics argue, it undermines a moral purpose that, however imperfectly and inconsistently applied, has been a source of pride for generations of Americans and has distinguished the United States from more coldblooded global competitors such as Russia and China.
Democrats and diplomats also warned on Friday that Mr. Rubio’s plan to cut the department’s U.S.-based work force by about 17 percent, including through about 1,400 layoffs announced on Friday, would leave the department short handed — especially after the recent elimination of the U.S. Agency for International Development, whose relatively few surviving programs will be transferred to the State Department.
“As the U.S. retreats, our adversaries — like the People’s Republic of China — are expanding their diplomatic reach, making Americans less safe and less prosperous,” said a statement signed by the Democratic members of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.
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