WASHINGTON — Full-blown famine is now unfolding in Gaza, thanks to Israeli aid restrictions backed by the U.S. Experts anticipate “rapidly accelerating mortality” — hunger that will kill many more Palestinians, adding to the toll of at least 111 who have already starved to death, including children with no preexisting conditions.
The key to stemming the bleeding is Israel lifting its siege of the Palestinian territory, which will likely only occur through an agreement with the Palestinian militant group Hamas, over the fate of its dozens of Israeli hostages. U.S. officials have been hoping to seal a deal by convincing the two sides to compromise on details of prisoner swaps and Israeli troop deployments. A bargain also, however, hinges on the broader question of Israel-Palestine’s future, and whether the parties feel the terms of an accord leave them well-positioned for what comes afterward. Gaza’s pain is the most urgent matter in the region, but other big concerns are looming too: Israel is moving to demolish 12 more Palestinian villages in the occupied West Bank, further hurting the prospect of establishing a future Palestinian state and undercutting hopes of long-term Israeli-Palestinian peace.
Observers of Israel-Palestine say Washington should be doing far more to prevent further devastation and future conflict, particularly as Israel’s chief and diplomatic backer. “It is in the absence of effective American leadership that we have seen the humanitarian situation in Gaza deteriorate, settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank rise, and Israeli hostages continue to suffer,” the advocacy group New Jewish Narrative said in a Wednesday statement.
The group noted that the foreign ministers of 25 other countries close to Israel this week issued a joint call to end the war in Gaza, saying: “As important as this collective statement is, the nations who issued it do not have the same level of influence as the United States of America.”
But for the last two weeks, the State Department’s office of Israeli Palestinian Affairs has had no director, because the person in that job was fired along with more than 1,300 other employees on July 11. Andrew Miller, the top State official for the region under President Joe Biden, told HuffPost the role was crucial, serving as the “desk officer” for the region and, given the significance of the Gaza war, producing a “disproportionate amount” of State Department analysis.
Six months into his tenure, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has slashed dozens of significant positions and offices at the department in the most sweeping changes to State in decades, while nudging more than 1,500 officials to quit. Counting the mass firing, the department has lost nearly 3,000 staff.
The result is a weaker, demoralized diplomatic corps facing mounting global crises. As President Donald Trump escalates his international trade war, negotiating with major economies and pledging huge new tariffs by Aug. 1, State has lost officials working on matters from energy markets to the delicate interplay between trading hubs in Southeast Asia.
With Russia’s war on Ukraine ongoing despite Trump’s promises he would bring peace, the department cut intelligence officers focused on the region and personnel set to join the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv. And as the Trump administration has attacked major international players from Brazil to European governments, alleging they mistreat Trump’s right-wing ideological allies, the department has lost hundreds of officials with unique relationships internationally and experience explaining and defending heavy-handed American policy moves to sustain U.S. ties abroad despite shifting political winds.
“It’s not a reform of the State Department so much as it is just a broad degradation of function,” a former senior State department official told HuffPost.
The agency now feels like “a ghost town,” a still-employed State official told HuffPost. Rubio and his advisers “wanted us to feel the pain and ultimately they succeeded [in creating] an environment where people wake up and don’t want to come in to work.”
A senior State Department official told HuffPost via email: “Secretary Rubio, under President Trump’s leadership, is working to consolidate and strengthen the State Department workforce.”
Many observers see a different goal: ensuring officials do not dissent, even if they are doing so on the basis of expertise or rigorous analysis. One effect of the overhaul is undercutting American diplomacy. (The country’s other chief force in global affairs, the military, is meanwhile getting a surge in funding). By shrinking the State Department’s previously 18,000-strong domestic work force, Rubio created “a head on a pike situation,” the current State official said. “They see us as the enemy, or at the very least impediments to a MAGA foreign policy, and it’s things like this which will get us in line.”
HuffPost discussed the mass layoffs with more than 25 current and former State Department officials, nearly all of whom would only speak anonymously for fear of retaliation, as well as lawmakers and others familiar with the department. They described a confusing, secretive and political process with devastating consequences. Few were optimistic about the agency’s future.
“I missed Christmases, I missed weddings, and I missed saying goodbye to dying family members. I supported a parent through cancer treatment and recovery mostly by phone. I paid a high price to serve my country,” a fired diplomat wrote in testimony shared with HuffPost by a Democratic congressional office. Saying they had accepted a Washington posting for the first time in a decade and so became one of the 246 foreign service officers who were terminated, they added: “I do not expect to be replaced… I expect that injured and ill Americans may never come home, because no one will be there to help navigate the local language and laws.”
Arguing the department was dominated by red tape and liberal thinking, the Trump administration claims State will be leaner and more effective. “We look forward to having a workforce that moves at the speed of relevance and works to advance the America First foreign policy mandate given to President Trump,” a senior State Department official told HuffPost via email on Thursday. Last month, an official argued in a separate email to HuffPost that the overhaul was transparent, writing: “Leadership from the Department has been to dozens of congressional briefings and hearings regarding the reorganization … Consultation with Congress will continue to ensure a State Department that best reflects America’s core national interests.”
Appearing before legislators in Capitol Hill hearings this month, State’s top management official Michael Rigas projected confidence about the agency’s future and capabilities.
“We want to empower our ambassadors and diplomats in the field and our regional bureaus in Washington,” Rigas told senators, also claiming State will ensure that the U.S remains the world’s top donor of humanitarian aid through its controversial absorption of the former U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). “Our goal is to create a State Department that is accountable to the American people and effective in unleashing the potential of the world’s most talented diplomatic workforce.”
‘Targeting And Demonizing’
Rigas’ testimony to Congress set off a fresh firestorm among some State Department personnel, who said his statements ignored how the “reduction in force” (RIF) process involved little logic or precision.
Rigas said, for instance, that the department cut no officers in the consular affairs bureau. Though he clarified he meant no staff making decisions about passports or visas were cut, the bureau fired 104 staff, including at its so-called “nerve center” for passports, along with a quarter of personnel working on passport fraud, and had already lost nearly 100 through resignations, current and former State employees told congressional Democrats. While Rigas said the department prioritized clarity about cuts, some staff who were told they would not be affected were later fired, while some positions State said it would reassign were abolished — leading to situations in which personnel were preparing to take over work from colleagues who anticipated layoffs, then were fired themselves. And though Rigas claimed the cuts did not affect U.S. overseas posts, the cuts hit multiple foreign service officers who were recently dispatched abroad, meaning taxpayer money must now be spent to return them and their families and potentially move replacements.
Days after the RIF, the Department asked staff at bureaus covering South Asia and Africa to disregard termination notices and acknowledged errors in 3% of firings, according to The Washington Post. “We noticed a very small number of discrepancies that were addressed in real time,” the senior State official told HuffPost.
For months, State Department staff and others expressed alarm about decision-making by Rubio and his advisers, and the toll of a sense of impending doom.
By the second month of the Trump administration, personnel were debating matters like whether to sign their children up for summer camp or save that money, one recently departed official told HuffPost. In April, the secretary tapped a new head of the bureau of Global Talent Management (GTM): Lew Olowski, who had joined the foreign service four years prior. “This would be akin to placing a junior military officer, who has not yet completed a command tour, in charge of the Pentagon’s personnel system,” the American Foreign Service Association said at the time. After Olowski’s appointment, “respected career folks in GTM were cleared out or left in solidarity,” the still-serving State Department official told HuffPost, including the bureau’s senior-most official.
As Rubio fine-tuned and then released his plan, advocates for State Department reform saw little sign he was addressing longstanding complaints about the agency or accounting for the loss of institutional knowledge.
“There’s a phrase in government called Retired In Place (RIP) … You’ll probably catch some of those, but you’re also going to catch some deeply knowledgeable people who understand where the bodies are buried and have particular relationships with foreign leaders or particular expertise of, ‘We can’t do it that way because we’ve tried it before,’” Dan Spokojny, a former foreign service officer who founded fp21, a nonprofit focused on U.S. foreign policy reform and officially partnered with the State Department, told HuffPost via email in June.
When congressional officials pressed State Department representatives this spring for details on Rubio’s outlined reorganization, State officials struggled to explain how the department would sustain particular tasks assigned to teams that were slated to be cut, a congressional aide told HuffPost. In public remarks, Rubio focused on calling State inefficient, telling legislators in May that he had seen a memo that needed clearance from 40 people before reaching his desk. One former official noted to HuffPost that less oversight is not the only, or even best, measure of a clearing process.
To many current and former State staff, the decision-making appeared limited to a small cohort of aides around Rubio. The group included Rigas, his counselor Michael Needham — a conservative operative involved with the Tea Party movement and the Heritage Foundation — and Jeremy Lewin, a 28-year-old hired from Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE). Lewin was tapped to run State’s foreign assistance work, which swelled as Musk’s shuttering of USAID meant U.S.-funded programs it oversaw were transferred to the department. Rolling Stone reported in April that 10 people who knew Lewin accused him of racist comments and violent outbursts. Lewin did not respond to requests for comment by the magazine.
Lewin was “coming at things with a very big knife” and saw much of State’s work as wasteful or not in line with Trump’s thinking, a State Department official familiar with his activities said.
“Some reforms … are a long time coming,” the official told HuffPost. Still, administrations rarely cut whole functions at government agencies, and Rubio’s circle did not seem to account for global volatility. “You don’t want to focus on just efficiency because often the more efficient a government is, the less flexible it is,” a former senior State Department official said. “You need spare capacity, expertise on hand that perhaps isn’t necessarily being fully used at the moment, in case there is a crisis where you have to surge. There were years of the Palestinian crisis not being important until October 7,” 2023.
Meanwhile, career officials played little role in the talks and evidence grew that the overhaul was in part ideologically motivated, aimed at programs that had bipartisan support but the Trump administration was now deeming “woke.”
“Anyone who shows any willingness to push an agenda around human rights or other issues than what this administration is prioritizing gets excluded [while] people with decades of experience [are being] told you should retire be fired, because you’re going to get [fired],” another former senior State Department official told HuffPost earlier this year.
Officials described immense fear of Needham and even officials beyond State, like Russ Vought, a defender of Christian nationalism now running the Office of Management and Budget. HuffPost obtained a questionnaire Vought’s office circulated earlier this year probing whether government contracts for foreign aid discuss environmental justice, transgender rights or other matters. Earlier this year, the Free Press reported that Michael Anton, a far-right figure now serving as the State Department’s chief of policy planning, personally interviewed nearly all of Trump’s national security appointees. Many State Department officials were stunned to see Rubio in February hire Darren Beattie — who last year tweeted, “competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work,” and was fired by the first Trump administration — then again when the department’s Substack in May published an essay by Trump appointee Samuel Samson lauding “Western civilization.” On Friday, Rubio tapped Beattie for another powerful post: atop the government-funded U.S. Institute for Peace think tank.
Additionally, officials noted that many new State leaders were involved in the Ben Franklin Fellowship, a group of current and former State employees promoting nationalist ideas and criticizing diversity efforts. In June, the association received a $100,000 prize from Heritage — Needham’s former employer — as one of several groups “doing what the Left fears most,” per Heritage’s president.
Meanwhile, most of the department’s offices lacked Senate-confirmed leaders even as they were redesigned to meet Rubio’s target of a 15% cut in State’s domestic staff.
By June, one official told HuffPost the situation felt “like a funeral in the building.”
“They are used to shifting policy priorities [but] this administration is really targeting and demonizing career public servants in ways we’ve never seen before,” a third former senior State official said. In early July, the department issued new criteria for promotions and tenure including a section on “fidelity.”
Sources described the sense of foreboding and uncertainty affecting State’s work, with officials avoiding meetings with foreign officials and others, while spending time trying to plan how to continue their work with fewer staff, or making calculations about whether to quit.
“They decided to get rid of whole offices based on not much more analysis than what a college Republican might think is worthy of scorn.”
– Former State Department official
The day of the actual layoffs only brought more pain and confusion.
Amid shock firings and added security stationed on each floor of the department, some managers had no idea some of their staff were laid off and some officials lost access to government email before they could finalize travel plans back to the U.S. or cancel planned meetings with international counterparts, according to CBS.
HuffPost attended a “clap-out” ceremony that day for fired employees. One young woman who walked out of State teary and confused said her termination “came out of nowhere” and her team was “hit hard” despite focusing on Americans’ safety.
“It’s comforting to see people showing up for us. I’ve been feeling so forgotten,” she said, standing near demonstrators carrying pro-diplomacy signs. Asked if she would consider returning to public service, she did not hesitate: “If they would ask me back. I took an oath to this country and that has not changed.”
That day, Rubio promoted Lewin — the DOGE staffer with no prior foreign policy experience — to State’s third-highest rank, making him potentially the youngest person ever in the job, per the Washington Post. Asked about the decision, a senior State Department official told HuffPost: “The State Department leadership team, across our bureaus, is talented and results driven regardless of age.”
State Under Trump
New limitations at State because of the firings will likely become clear soon.
Some officials who were not expecting to be terminated, like intelligence analysts, had no time to pass on knowledge to remaining colleagues, current and former State staff say, while even those who knew they were leaving because they chose to quit or Rubio indicated their team would disappear could not be certain their functions would continue.
SAUL LOEB via Getty Images
The reorganization involved the closure or merging of nearly half of the department’s domestic offices, among other cuts. Among the hardest-hit teams were those focused on human rights, aid programs and diplomacy at the multilateral level, meaning at international forums. “They decided to get rid of whole offices based on not much more analysis than what a college Republican might think is worthy of scorn,” one former State official told HuffPost.
There’s a ticking clock for when the impact of those reductions will be felt. Several fired officials focused on multilateral and nuclear affairs and a decimated team at the rights bureau would normally do major preparatory work for meetings around the annual United Nations gathering of governments, in the fall, two former officials said.
One added that the disarmament officials would also be key to a planned summit next year on the nuclear nonproliferation treaty — a tool that is vital to the effort by U.S. presidents, including Trump, to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon.
Meanwhile, despite the president’s talk of promoting American workers and business, State cut most officials specializing in international labor standards, a former senior State Department official argued, telling HuffPost: “They’re literally hanging out to dry American companies that relied on the U.S. government to promote these standards abroad to level the playing field for them.” And the department lost a team of negotiators already involved in Trump’s signature diplomatic policies, like engagement with the new government in Syria, per Crooked News.
The Trump administration perhaps feels less diplomacy is beneficial. Briefing reporters last week, a senior State official spoke of hearing from a minister from a country in the Persian Gulf — home to authoritarian monarchies with appalling labor rights records — that their nation and the U.S. had “huge diplomatic tension” under the Biden presidency as State Department officials promoted unions. Now, the official continued, the minister “was delighted and wants to work with us on shared prosperity and trade agreements that aren’t trying to be patronizing.”
Avoiding such dynamics is precisely why the State Department and lawmakers have over decades designed distinct offices focused on rights and other issues of universal standards, like preventing international crime. U.S. embassies and State bureaus focused on particular parts of the world have long experienced “clientitis”: seeking warm relationships with foreign partners to the degree they almost echo their perspectives. That makes it hard to, say, nudge other governments not to jail critics or violate international law.
“That was the beauty of our office: not being caught up in other interests,” said a recently departed State Department employee who spent several years in the office monitoring and combating human trafficking. Their “kneecapped” office has lost nearly half of its staff, and the employee believes it is extremely unlikely remaining personnel will be able to continue to produce detailed analysis for the U.S.’s annual Trafficking in Persons report — the most prominent assessment globally of what governments are doing about the problem.
“Trafficking is a transnational criminal enterprise [with] victims coming to the U.S. and traffickers using their proceedings to finance other illicit activities, so it’s a domino effect,” the official said, noting that Trump in his first term became the first president to attend an interagency task force meeting on trafficking and to appoint an anti-trafficking official at the White House National Security Council.
The former official fears that without U.S. government involvement, progress will be lost on matters like engaging with survivors of trafficking and including their perspectives in global discussions. “It wasn’t just a job but a mission to hold governments accountable and advocate for the vulnerable and for victims and survivors,” they continued.
Earlier this year, State Department officials watered down the agency’s annual human rights reports, according to The Washington Post, removing references to countries that engage in government corruption or deport people to places where they could face abuse for their political ties.
Trump aides argue they can remedy unintended problems that arise from the layoffs. At an internal town hall last week, State’s undersecretary for political affairs Allison Hooker told staff the department will identify gaps and fill them — prompting one attendee to ask her why that analysis was not done before laying people off, a current State official told HuffPost. Speaking to Congress, Rigas noted that fired State Department officials can still apply for openings at the department, but then added: “The caveat being, there is a governmentwide hiring freeze.”
Bloomberg via Getty Images
The former anti-trafficking official and a congressional aide both told HuffPost U.S.-funded programs abroad will probably shut down simply because of a lack of skills needed to keep payments running. “The programs will be retained on paper, but if money’s not going out the door, they won’t in practice,” the aide said.
Some decry the shrinking of U.S. soft power as deliberate. “The administration’s plan is to disappear America from the world,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) recently told HuffPost. “It’s a terrible outcome for the country. They’re obviously willing to spend huge amounts of money on defense because it pads the pockets of their donors, but diplomacy doesn’t pad the pockets of their donors.”
Build Back… Never?
Most observers of the State Department overhaul have little hope the agency can regain lost strengths, even through action by Congress or under a new president who wants to woo back talent.
Over Trump’s remaining years in office, the administration will likely leave State to wither, given the president’s disdain for the agency and preference for entrusting international initiatives to aides he is personally close to, like special envoys Steve Witkoff and Tom Barrack or trade adviser Peter Navarro.
The president and Rubio “have a vision of State that really doesn’t allow it to do what it does best: alliances, working together, helping create a nuanced view of other countries. To the extent we’re telling every other country to suck eggs, why do we need all that?” one former senior State Department official argued. They predicted Trump’s team will largely use the department to send political signals about combating liberal ideology or bureaucrats: “State has become a place where you can do these performative initiatives.”
Meanwhile, in the emerging discussion on Capitol Hill about government funding plans for 2026, influential Republican lawmakers in the House of Representatives envision a 22% cut to the department and other internationally focused agencies. The Trump administration wants to nearly halve State’s budget.
Years of mistreating diplomats will likely have a self-reinforcing effect on the department’s staffing.
Consider the administration’s claim that vital U.S. humanitarian work formerly run by USAID can still occur with the agency absorbed into State. That vision would likely benefit from tapping the knowledge of those who formerly did that work, and perhaps even hiring them back, another former State official said, but “even in the best case scenario … you still have an entire generation, decades and decades of international practitioners who have now left — and why would they return? They’ve been dragged through the mud by their own government. The loss of experience, institutional memory and human capital is going to have a huge cost to U.S. foreign policy for decades to come.”
A State staffer who recently accepted a buyout told HuffPost many younger hires choose that route, likely because it is easier for them to, say, leave the Washington area or attempt a change in career. They and several other officials feel the overhaul of the agency will undermine future attempts at recruitment, including efforts to make the traditionally “pale, male and Yale” institution reflect the range of American society.
Should hiring resume, it will likely be shaped by Trump’s movement, the staffer argued, predicting Rubio “filling all these positions with people that are quite ideologically similar, who then will never leave because they now see [State] as Heritage Foundation 2.0.”
Several former officials also noted that specialized work conducted by terminated teams and employees will not occur for several years or will be far less thorough due to staffing limitations. That has a knock-on effect: it will be harder for State to, a few years down the line, produce a comparative analysis of, say, human rights conditions in specific countries or the trajectory of international climate negotiations, if there are years-long gaps in its tracking of those matters.
Additionally, the combination of self-selection among staff who quit, the targeting of offices likely to question Trump’s agenda and fear among those still at the department will shrink the chances State staff will document and report possible misconduct or abuse, the former staffer argued. Accountability around the biggest changes at the department in decades may never come.
As some State Department personnel discuss attempts to win back their jobs and plans for restoring their agency, the chances of internal or external support in doing so remain slim.
“They can do what they want at State with impunity because State does not have any domestic political allies and it doesn’t affect the markets,” one former senior official said.
Igor Bobic contributed reporting.