State Department starts laying off 1,300 staff in major purge

Courtney McBride and Eric Martin, Bloomberg News on Jul 11, 2025

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The State Department began laying off more than 1,300 U.S.-based diplomats and other employees on Friday, after the Supreme Court ruled that the Trump administration could go ahead with plans to slash the size of the federal workforce.

The layoffs affect 1,107 civil servants and 246 foreign service officers on domestic assignments, according to a notice dated July 11 and seen by Bloomberg News. They are expected to be notified via email and placed on administrative leave immediately. Nearly 3,000 employees will leave the department as part of the reorganization, the document said.

“The objective from the start was clear: focus resources on policy priorities and eliminate redundant functions,” Deputy Secretary of State Michael Rigas said in a separate memo.

Senior State Department officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, told reporters the reorganization is meant to unwind a proliferation of Cold War-era offices they said are ill-suited to President Donald Trump’s “America First” foreign policy. They said it will consolidate redundant human resources, finance and accounting jobs.

Earlier reorganization plans had called for downgrading the office that oversees democracy and human rights and shutting offices responsible for women’s issues, global health security, and diversity and inclusion.

The move came as Secretary of State Marco Rubio left Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, after meeting with counterparts from Asia on issues including trade and security. He spoke Thursday with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov about the administration’s efforts to broker peace between Russia and Ukraine.

The department’s plans had been on hold pending the resolution of legal challenges to the Trump administration’s authority to conduct mass firings of federal workers. But the Supreme Court ruled that Trump can move ahead with those plans, lifting a court order that had blocked more than a dozen federal departments and agencies — including State — from slashing their workforces.

The American Foreign Service Association, both a union and a professional organization for foreign service officers, said the move would gut the department’s “frontline diplomatic workforce.”

“There were clear, institutional mechanisms available to address excess staffing, if that had been the goal,” AFSA said in a statement. “Instead, these layoffs are untethered from merit or mission.”

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

President Donald Trump took office aiming to reshape the federal government, targeting what he and allies refer to as “deep state” bureaucrats hostile to his agenda. The Department of Government Efficiency effort previously led by billionaire Elon Musk has worked to slash federal jobs, including through a deferred resignation plan that provides payments to workers who depart their agencies voluntarily.

The State Department has already weathered the dissolution of the U.S. Agency for International Development, which Musk derided as corrupt and irrevocably broken. Rubio, whom Trump tapped as the acting administrator of USAID, in March directed the cancellation of 83% of the agency’s projects and the absorption of the rest into the State Department. The agency was formally closed earlier this month.

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