Purge at State

 

More than 1,300 employees were forced out of the State Department on Friday, leaving their offices with small boxes of plants and old coffee mugs and taking with them decades of specialized skills and on-the-job training as part of the United States diplomatic corps.

The massive overhaul of the federal agency has been in the works for months, with the Trump administration informing Congress in late May that thousands of State Department employees would lose their jobs as part of the largest reorganization of the department in decades.

  NBC

If we ever shake off the shackles of the Trump regime, we will be decades in restoring our country.

Several career employees who unexpectedly found themselves with pink slips told NBC News they were asked to write speeches and prepare talking points for political appointees on critical issues just days before.

[...]

A senior State Department official briefing reporters on behalf of the agency ahead of the cuts told reporters Thursday that the restructuring was intended to be “individual agnostic.”

“This is the most complicated personnel reorganization that the federal government has ever undertaken,” the official said. “And it was done so in order to be very focused on looking at the functions that we want to eliminate or consolidate, rather than looking at individuals.”

Michael Duffin, a civil service employee with the department since 2013, spent nine years as a policy adviser with the counterterrorism bureau developing some of the first programs to counter white supremacy and other forms of violent extremism.

“No one at the State Department would disagree with the need for reform, but arbitrarily laying off people like me and others, irrespective of their performance, is not the right way to do it,” Duffin said as the closing speaker at a rally outside the department late Friday.

I guess it wasn't obvious that the Trump regime would shut down the department countering white supremacy and violent extremism.

“Our entire office is just ... gone,” said a senior civil service officer from the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor standing in front of the department late Friday as fired employees left the building.

[...]

Under the new structure of the State Department, the DRL bureau will be greatly reduced and the few remaining offices will be placed under a new deputy assistant secretary for democracy and Western values. One of the more acute changes will be the elimination of the many dedicated human rights positions for different regions of the world.

“There are specialties. You had a cadre of people that were experts at good governance and human rights and international labor affairs,” the DRL official said. “You can’t have a group of people that don’t know the region trying to make human rights policy for that specific region, because they won’t get it and they won’t advocate for it when more important issues come into play.”

Oh, sweetie. They're not going to be replaced.

“It will allow authoritarians around the globe, both on the left and the right, to continue to abuse civic space, to jail and to lock up journalists and civic activists and increase the number of political prisoners we see around the world that my bureau was helping to release,” Roig said.

Yeah. We're not that country anymore.

A group of women laid off from the State Department’s Office of Science and Technology Cooperation walked out wearing T-shirts over their office clothes with the message, “Science is Diplomacy. Diplomacy is Science.” The women cried and hugged each other as they exited the building in front of the gathered crowd. Their office is one of over 300 offices or bureaus being eliminated or merged under the sweeping reorganization.

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[T]hey had just found out the officials who they thought would be taking over their important work had also been laid off. “It’s shocking, and it’s baffling that the government doesn’t seem to care about keeping that kind of expertise.”

They don't plan on needing it.

“Headcount reductions have been carefully tailored to affect non-core functions, duplicative or redundant offices, and offices where considerable efficiencies may be found from centralization or consolidation of functions and responsibilities,” the notice obtained by NBC News said.

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Impacted foreign service officers will be placed on administrative leave for 120 days, according to the notice, while most civil servants will have 60 days before being formally terminated from their positions.

By late Friday afternoon, hundreds of civil servants and foreign service officers whose numbers had not been called gathered in the front lobby to “clap out” their less fortunate colleagues, in a tradition generally reserved for honoring departing secretaries of state.

[...]

“Everybody came here in front of the main State Department building and celebrated everybody’s service and their pride in their country.”

And they'll be the next to go.

Diplomats wheeling out boxes stacked on office chairs and cradling grocery bags stuffed with books wiped away tears amid echoing rounds of applause and shouts of support that lasted for nearly two hours.

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The long lines of applause spilled onto the front step outside of the building, where dozens of former career and political diplomats stood among other demonstrators with signs reading, “Thank you America’s diplomats.”

Self awareness is rare in Republican world.