Swinging At American Diplomacy

Why Friday's State Department Layoffs Matter

Last Friday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the State Department had eliminated 1,300 positions—more than 1,000 civil service employees and approximately 250 Foreign Service officers, recently in departments that were eliminated or merged. The 250 diplomats represent more than 3% of America's 8,000 foreign service officers, who rotate across global assignments. Collectively, these 1,300 lost foreign affairs professionals are not fat-trimming; it's an amputation.

Having served as an American diplomat, the layoffs strike a deep chord (partly because I thought I could see this coming 15 years ago). Personal feelings aside, Americans need to understand what's at stake: the State Department is not a "nice to have." It's an essential component of American power, influence, and security.

Institutions Break Faster Than They Build

There's an apt analogy with higher education, which has also been under government attack. The loss of a relatively small percentage of top faculty can reduce a world-class university to mediocrity in short order—with the path to recovery taking decades. The same principle applies to diplomacy. Institutions that took generations to build can be permanently disabled in months.

The cuts eliminate entire divisions, including the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor—the Department’s primary channel for tracking humanitarian abuses and individual liberties abroad. But the damage extends beyond targeted departments. Secretary Rubio claimed these cuts are people agnostic, targeting only programs deemed inconsistent with administration priorities:

“It’s not a consequence of trying to get rid of people,” Rubio said.

“But if you close the bureau, you don’t need those positions. Understand that some of these are positions that are being eliminated, not people.”

This is a fundamental mischaracterization of how the State Department works.

Foreign Service officers serve in rotating 2-3 year tours as generalists. The diplomat currently working on climate policy might have spent the previous decade managing community or political outreach, in Afghanistan and Iraq. When you eliminate their current position, you don’t just lose a "climate bureaucrat"—you lose access to a career spent dealing with complex issues across multiple countries and organizations.

These cuts create a dragnet effect: anyone currently in a targeted position as of X date is gone, regardless of their prior experience or future potential. This isn't trimming programs; it's removing institutional memory.

The Myth of Bloated Bureaucracy

The perception that the State Department is bloated with pet projects and DEI initiatives is a gross distortion: First, the number of positions devoted to some of the activities the Trump administration finds offensive are in absolute terms, tiny. The entire State Department budget is less than 1% of federal spending (.6% of total federal spending of $6.78 trillion). Further, the "savings" from the cuts are minuscule compared to the 600-700 billion in ‘unenforced’ tax obligations of corporations and the ultra-wealthy. More importantly, the costs of not having effective diplomacy—measured in the net cost of conflicts, lost or diminishing influence, trade wars, and proliferating security threats—far exceed any conceivable savings.

Consider the broad-stroke influence plays by America’s competitors and adversaries: China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has shaped global infrastructure and development in Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia since 2013. In the last decade Russia has dramatically grown armies of mercenaries to project power and secure infrastructure and resource deals across Africa. The last major Africa initiative was a republican program, PEPFAR, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, directed at reducing HIV infections (whose future is uncertain). Since then, the United States has been distinctly uncreative, ceding influence and access across large geographies to adversaries who understand the value of being present on the ground, and offering something useful.

Does this mean the State Department is not in need of reform and restructuring? Not at all. The impact of past political interferences, outdated technology and procedures, gaps in training, an outdated assessment, recruitment and promotion process, and other failings are known and have been debated for years — without much serious action taken. The way this is best done, and where the necessary political pressure comes from, are perhaps the most relevant questions.

What Diplomats Actually Do

The public rarely sees diplomatic successes—conflicts prevented, alliances maintained, and American citizens protected abroad. But we do see the failures: hostage crises, surprise attacks, lost influence. Most foreign policy achievements, from the Camp David Accords to the end of the Cold War, and even the Trump-sponsored Abraham Accords, required years of patient relationship-building by career diplomats who understood local dynamics.

Greater knowledge in service to good intentions hardly guarantees success. As I’ve pointed out in this blog, sometimes they are even obstacles to hoped-for outcomes. But on balance, and over time, these capacities, underpinned by progressive values have been the foundation for a foreign policy that has long served American interests while arguably (with some clear exceptions) making the world both a better and safer place. To believe otherwise is to subscribe to a “smash and grab” view of international affairs.

Last week’s cuts take us away from that always imperfect, but aspirational world. When the next crisis erupts—and it will—we will have fewer people who spent years understanding unwritten cultural rules and political dynamics (key in all of the current conflicts in the middle east), who speak local languages, who can pick up a phone and reach the right person at the right moment, and who can get others to follow us, because they believe we advocate for higher principles, and value our alliances.

The Acceleration of Decline

The push to downsize American foreign policy and national security capacity isn’t new. Since 9/11, the State Department has been eroded through politicization/ the increase in political appointments to newly created posts, budget cuts (particularly those affecting security), and the concentration of decision-making in partisan bodies. I describe this process in great detail in my 2022 post mortem of the Benghazi attack, and its consequences for US foreign policy — and 2016 election, for which the failure to correctly assess the nature of those actions fed deep-seated partisan prejudices for nearly four years.

Previous administrations chipped away at diplomatic capacity in service to specific, often highly political ends; last week’s cuts, along with previous dismantling of USAID, and high uncertainty regarding the futures of educational exchange programs like Fulbright (which like the Peace Corps, have been robust feeders into American foreign affairs posts, and have created goodwill among foreign counterpart alums) feel more like blunt trauma. And it comes at precisely the moment when complex global challenges—from AI governance to climate migration to great power competition—demand more soft power, more strategy, and more human contact, not less.

A Superpower’s Last Hurrah?

Empires rise and fall, often for reasons that seem incomprehensible at the time. We're watching the voluntary dismantling of the very infrastructure that made American global leadership possible. While some celebrate the destruction of the "deep state," our adversaries celebrate something else: the prospect of America retreating from the sophisticated statecraft that shaped the postwar world.

No American institution or bureaucracy is perfect, and many including the State Department are long overdue for serious reforms, if not overhauls. But to do this right this requires intentionality, strategy, consensus, and significantly greater resources — not the opposite. Once a threshold is passed, one no longer has the same institution, capabilities or level of morale.

Trump didn’t start this process, but his second term administration has been behind the most intentional effort to accelerate it. Continuing in this direction will have impacts that will likely require a few years to be visible, when it will also be far more difficult — if even possible — to reverse the consequences.

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Dr. Ethan Chorin is a former U.S. diplomat and author of "Benghazi: A New History" (Hachette, 2022) and the forthcoming "Red Sea: A History of the World's Most Volatile Waterway."