Secretary of State Rex Tillerson wants to cut 2,300 jobs from the State Department, according to a new report.
Tillerson’s plan would cut the number of Americans in the workforce by nearly 10 percent, with an eye toward saving money on personnel costs, such as housing for diplomats overseas. “The majority of the job cuts, about 1,700, will come through attrition, while the remaining 600 will be done via buyouts, according to Bloomberg.
That will help the State Department hit its targeted budget cuts, as President Trump’s budget request calls for cutting the diplomatic budget by nearly one-third. Much of those cuts would be targeted at foreign aid, although Congress might provide more money than Trump’s team wants.
“The president’s budget goes in the waste basket as soon as it gets here,” Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Bob Corker, R-Tenn., said in March.
Corker made the comment as former diplomats wanted that Tillerson is taking an imprudent budgetary approach. “I think the concern we have is, it seems [to be an] across-the-board meat ax, rather than pursuant to a plan and it seems to be premised on the notion that we don’t need these non-military elements as part of our national security toolkit,” former national security adviser Stephen Hadley told the committee.
The prospective workforce reductions prompted similar criticism. “Just cutting without deciding what change you want to make is simply mindless,” Columbia University’s Stephen Sestanovich, a former U.S. ambassador-at-large for the former Soviet Union, said of the idea.
Tillerson’s team maintained that any cuts will come in the context of a studied reorganization. “This is what we work out through the budget process,” Tillerson spokesman R.C. Hammond told Bloomberg. “Our plan is to start with priorities and work backwards. You start with the resources you do have and you prioritize your choices.”
