Now on to the main event…

“You all are lucky to be here,” said the emcee to the State Department employees gathered at a Tuesday town hall for the M Family, the departmental equivalent of a C.O.O.’s office. The speaker was referring to the fact that the audio wasn’t working well for those tuning in virtually, including from State Department posts overseas, and that those attending in person were fortunate to be able to hear the proceedings at all. But the emcee could just as well have been referring to the fact that many of those present had somehow survived the mass layoffs that swept the department last Friday.

After months of languishing in bureaucratic purgatory as the planned firings of federal workers wound their way up to the Supreme Court, the reduction-in-force (RIF) notices were finally sent out last week. As crowds in the building’s iconic lobby clapped them out, over 1,300 career civil servants and foreign service officers handed in their badges and exited the turnstiles into the midsummer heat, where crowds of supporters cheered them some more. The fired Staties cried, hugged their colleagues, and, most of all, they tried to look dignified despite what many saw as their bosses’ diligent efforts to humiliate them. People who had in some cases served their country for decades were given four hours—five, tops—to clear their desks and get the hell out. There was no thank-you-for-your-service message from the Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who was, as always, somewhere else.

Rubio has been the public face of the department overhaul, even though he has had very little to do with actually designing and implementing it, as Staties have long suspected, and even some of the secretary’s defenders will admit. “Marco’s never managed anything; he’s not a manager,” said one of his close allies. “And I don’t think anyone should have thought he would’ve gone in and spent time micromanaging the organization. He’s a policy guy.”

Instead, the reorganization has been carried out by an agglomeration of staff he brought over from the Senate, as well as some MAGA acolytes and the O.M.B. under Project 2025 mastermind Russell Vought. On Tuesday, Michael Rigas, undersecretary for management and resources, admitted the White House’s role at a hearing in front of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, saying the personnel cuts had been carried out “in consultation with” O.P.M., the Office of Personnel Management.

When Rubio did speak to the press about the re-org, he characterized it as “a very deliberate step … to be more efficient and more focused.” He and other political appointees have defended the cuts as “personnel-agnostic,” meaning that it was positions, rather than people, being cut. This was, of course, not quite true. People who worked in offices that had been entirely eliminated, like the Global Engagement Center or the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration, expected to be RIFed, but when last Friday came, some were laid off and some weren’t, and no one could quite discern why. “Fucked if I know,” one of them told me.

And so, all of this week, State has been holding town halls for employees, divvied up according to bureaucratic “family,” and allowing the shell-shocked diplomats who remain to ask questions of their bosses. Were there more RIFs planned? Would there be cuts to positions abroad? Would there be a thaw on the hiring and promotion freezes? How would the newly created gaps in expertise be filled, and why hadn’t leadership anticipated them? The answer portions of the Q&A sessions, at least according to the transcripts and notes circulating among State Department employees and veterans, all sounded the same: scripted, vague, and deeply unsatisfying. “They were mostly non-answers,” grumbled one senior State Department official who had survived the cuts.

In the meantime, furious Staties posted anonymous and acerbic comments in the town hall virtual chats, some screenshots of which were shared with me. “Why are we stuck with [Ben] Franklin [Fellowship] diversity hires leading [Consular Affairs] when some of the best leaders in the foreign service were RIFed?” one wondered. “Did Franklin fellow [John] Armstrong get to be [senior bureau official] over Franklin fellow [Matt] Pierce because his baldness helps highlight that he is a white male?” snarked another. “How long,” wondered a third, “do you have to go to clown school to become a clown?”

The Consular Affairs town hall broke down completely as viewers flooded the comments with laughing emojis. “The questioning was so aggressive and hostile that the session was cut from 45 to 30 mins and the afternoon session was changed to a prerecorded [one],” one participant noted on one of the many Reddit threads dedicated to the RIFs. “The ‘leadership’ has been notified that they’ve got a full-on revolt on their hands.” Indeed, some of the purged had, before they left, taped signs in State Department bathrooms and stairwells exhorting those that stayed to fight. “Colleagues, if you remain: FIGHT FASCISM,” it said. “Remember the oath you vowed to uphold.” The State Department did not respond to a request for comment.

The agonizing uncertainty and waiting might be over, but it hasn’t brought relief—only more rage, fear, and despair. No one believes that the RIFs are over; in the town halls, leadership offered only carefully worded assurances that they weren’t aware of any more RIFs planned at the current time.

People were angry at the way they and their colleagues had been treated and the haphazard nature of the firings. People who expected to get RIFed weren’t, and vice versa. Some people had been assured repeatedly that they wouldn’t be fired, only to get a RIF notice in their inbox last Friday morning. Others were told that they were being reassigned but were fired instead. At least one person received a RIF notice that was addressed “Dear N/A,” and full of identifying information that didn’t correspond to the recipient.

Adding to the confusion, some 30 people were able to get un-RIFed through a process known as “reclama” that no one had heard of until this week. “This process never existed, it’s not written down anywhere, it’s not in the Foreign Affairs Manual,” the senior State Department official marveled. “It’s not a thing. But the building has to have that process because errors have been made.” (When I asked retired senior officials about it, their response was, essentially, huh?)

Others wondered if the reversals were just thanks to connections to the right people in the new regime: Each undersecretary was apparently running a reclama list and, once word got out, scores of people were trying to get on them. RIFed civil service officers, who made up the bulk of the cuts, are meanwhile mulling whether to join their union’s class-action lawsuit against the indiscriminate firings.

In his H.F.A.C. testimony on Tuesday, Rigas said that the posts eliminated on July 11 were domestic, his emphasis. “The department had over 1,500 office units in the United States alone,” Rigas said. “This is for an organization that implements foreign policy.” How ridiculous was it, in other words, that an organization focused on the world outside our country’s borders had offices inside the country? It was a strange statement, as if other outward-oriented agencies like the Pentagon or C.I.A. don’t have massive headquarters here in Washington to coordinate their activities abroad.

Whether this was naive misunderstanding or cynicism, the decision to go after domestic offices has sent out strange ripples. Gutted were things that one might expect the Trump administration to care about, like the office that tracks passport and visa fraud—it was based here in Washington. Gone, too, were the employees in the Consular Affairs office responsible for the passport supply chain. Half the staff was fired from the office that handles the complex logistics behind moving its employees to embassies and consulates overseas. Also RIFed were several senior foreign service officers who were in training to take up deputy chief of mission (D.C.M.) posts at American embassies overseas. They had been caught in the crossfire because they happened to be rotating through a domestic post on May 29, when the organizational snapshot of the State Department was taken by those implementing the re-org. “It’s just dumb luck that they were in these two-year domestic assignments out of their whole 20-year career” that may have been spent mostly overseas, a second senior State Department official told me. “It’s totally not merit-based.”

And for all of Rubio’s insistence that the reorganization will empower regional bureaus and diplomats in the field, some of his deputies were caught flat-footed in the town halls when questioned on just that subject. “Will there be an increase in bureau-level discretion on workplace flexibilities as some of us now have expanded portfolios and need to fill those gaps mentioned earlier?” one Statie asked Allison Hooker, the undersecretary for political affairs. “I hadn’t thought about that,” she responded, according to a transcript that a participant shared. “I’ll take that question back [to leadership]. … Thanks for raising it. I would not have thought of that otherwise.”

In any event, despite the administration’s messaging—to Congress, to the public, to the president—that this re-org is about making the notoriously slow, bureaucratic, and small-c conservative department leaner and meaner, the reality on the ground looks far different. Said the second State Department official, “It’s definitely not making things more efficient, I’ll tell you that much.”

Rigas proudly told H.F.A.C. in his testimony that the State Department is asking for its budget to be cut by $26 billion, or 48 percent. Asking for less money for your own department is unheard of in Washington, let alone asking Congress to slash your budget in half. It’s especially striking because the State Department has had to fight for years to receive any budget increases. Over the last two decades, its budget has only grown by 6 percent when adjusted for inflation.

In the meantime, the Pentagon’s budget has ballooned. And for all the administration’s talk of cutting “waste, fraud, and abuse,” the Department of Defense was largely exempted from DOGE cuts despite notoriously having never once passed an audit. (Remember when they “found” $6 billion for Ukraine by, as one source put it, taking some zeroes away in a spreadsheet?) Just two years ago, it was reported that the Pentagon couldn’t account for two-thirds of its $4 trillion in assets. At that point, the D.O.D. had failed its sixth audit in a row. But that was hardly news. “D.O.D.’s lack of accountability over government property in the possession of contractors has been reported by auditors as far back as 1981,” the G.A.O. chided in a 2023 report. The department failed a seventh audit the following year.

But it’s not entirely the Pentagon’s fault. The department is regularly forced to buy stuff—often tens and tens of billions of dollars’ worth of stuff—because someone in Congress doesn’t want a factory in their district to shut down and piss off their constituents. And yet, despite being Washington’s most obvious candidate for cost-cutting, D.O.D.’s 2026 budget is set to grow by 13 percent, to a total of over $1 trillion. And while State is getting cut in half—which, Staties point out, likely means even more RIFs—ICE’s budget is set to treble.

Money talks, especially in Trump’s world. And it’s pretty clear what it’s saying: Brute force and physical violence, not diplomacy, are how this government is going to deal with the world. Meanwhile, the real warriors understand what cutting State means. “If you don’t fund the State Department fully,” Marine General Jim Mattis (and Trump’s first secretary of Defense) told the Senate back in 2013, “then I need to buy more ammunition.” It seems that Trump, who successfully avoided military service during Vietnam, is dead set on buying more bullets—and having other people’s children shoot them.

That’s all from me, friends. I’ll see you back here next week. Until then, good night. Tomorrow will be worse.

Julia

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