Defense Secretary Mark Esper confirmed on Wednesday the Trump administration’s decision to trim the United States’s troop presence in Germany. The number of U.S. troops on German soil will drop from roughly 36,000 to about 24,000 personnel. About 6,400 of those troops will return stateside, and another 5,600 will be deployed to other parts of Europe. The headquarters of U.S. Africa Command and U.S. European Command will also be relocating from Germany, as will an F-16 fighter squadron and two U.S. Army battalions.

As expected, Republican and Democratic lawmakers immediately condemned the decision. Sen. Mitt Romney called it “a gift to Russia,” a country that has long considered U.S. troop deployments in central and eastern Europe as detrimental to its own national security. Sen. Dianne Feinstein tweeted that a U.S. troop reduction in Germany would weaken NATO and European allies at a delicate time.