Last week, kicking off a 15 per cent reduction in the US state department’s workforce, more than 1300 officials received termination notices. Those considered surplus included officials with expertise in arms control, human rights and multilateral affairs. In previous generations, they might have been considered among the cream of the crop of American diplomacy.
In March, Congress received one of the more staggering budget proposals in American history: a proposed 85 per cent cut to international affairs funding. This was designed to overhaul America’s foreign service agency, slash funding for the United Nations and effectively rewire the machinery of American global influence — all at a time when the world’s crises are demanding more of diplomatic officials, not less.
There was at least a fight in Congress. Democratic members of the Senate foreign relations committee warned the cuts would undermine American diplomatic efforts. “During a time of increasingly complex and wide-spread challenges to US national security,” they wrote, “this administration should be strengthening our diplomatic corps — an irreplaceable instrument of US power and leadership — not weakening it.”
Despite these objections and a brief procedural delay in the Senate, the bill passed largely along party lines. The reduction-in-force notices issued on 15 July signalled not just the start of layoffs but also the unravelling of a diplomatic architecture that had taken generations to build. What began as a budgetary line item has turned into a demolition of American diplomacy.
To be fair, the state department is no stranger to budgetary pressure. Towards the end of the cold war, without a clear antagonist, Washington “let its diplomatic muscles atrophy,” as former secretary of state Bill Burns wrote in his memoir. Between 1985 and 2000, funding for international affairs almost halved.
The state department didn’t fare well during Trump’s first term either. As the journalist Ronin Farrow outlined in War on Peace, key ambassadorships were left vacant, career diplomats sidelined, and budgets on foreign aid repeatedly targeted for steep reductions just as global challenges were intensifying.
But the current cuts are part of a bigger transformation: the surgical removal of people and programs that don’t align with the administration’s “America First” foreign policy.
The details were set out in secretary of state Marco Rubio’s April plan for the department, which takes aim at the “radical ideologues” and “bureaucratic infighters” he says have turned the department into a “platform for left-wing activists to wage vendettas” and “pursue their projects at the taxpayer expense, even when they were in direct conflict with the goals of the secretary, the president, and the American people.” In this worldview, the state department is a bastion of elite, politically correct civil servants, far removed from the day-to-day life of middle America, peddling views and values that are both controversial at home and alienating abroad.
This realignment was first flagged in Project 2025, a policy blueprint produced by a coalition of conservative think tanks outlining a sweeping reconfiguration of the federal government to ensure ideological conformity across agencies. In line with that plan, one of the administration’s primary targets has been foreign aid, with 90 per cent of contracts cut since President Trump announced a freeze on US foreign assistance. The federal agency responsible for foreign aid no longer exists.
But the changes go beyond aid, with officials instructed to cease initiatives and programs considered “counterproductive to American interests, wasting taxpayer money and provoking resentment abroad.” This includes reporting on political prisoners, women’s rights, persecution of LGBTQIA+ individuals and other human rights issues, a dramatic change from a worldview that saw democracy, human rights and civic freedom as underpinning America’s attempt to fashion a global order that suits its interests and goals.
Beyond specific activities, the administration’s plans for the state department focus on who is doing the work, extending deep into the department’s organisational structure. Across the board, the department is being reorganised into new offices and functions that align more closely with the administration’s ideological agenda.
The senior official for democracy and human rights, for example, is struck from the chart, and their bureau replaced with three officers under a deputy assistant secretary of state charged with “advancing the administration’s affirmative vision of American and Western values.” Similarly, the bureau of conflict and stabilisation operations, the agency once responsible for resettling refugees, must now support the return of “illegal aliens to their country of origin or legal status” as part of the bureau of population, refugees and migration.
Beyond the organisational chart, it is being made abundantly clear that loyalty trumps expertise, with political loyalists rather than seasoned civil servants being given senior roles. The role of director-general of the foreign service — a typically experienced role responsible for the state department’s diplomatic recruitment as well as overseas evacuations — is currently being performed by an inexperienced young lawyer, Lew Olowski, a staunch Trump loyalist with one foreign assignment to his name. Importantly, Olowski’s is “acting” in the role, so he won’t have to appear for confirmation before the foreign relations committee, bypassing the established bureaucratic process of an examination by Congress.
Another case in point is Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, a friend and former real estate executive with no diplomatic experience who is now the leading US negotiator on several high-stakes conflicts. The recent Iran nuclear crisis is one of those times when we can all see the importance of diplomatic skills, including clear communication, efforts to avoid misunderstandings, knowledge of de-escalation mechanisms and an ability to understand others’ perspectives.
Politically charged appointments to the rank and file of the state department are also on the cards. Under Executive Order 13957, issued in January this year, certain roles in the federal public service, including those “of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating character,” would fall within the “excepted service” under Schedule F of the federal employee classification system. In effect, this means the president can hire and fire public servants at will, side-stepping established procedure and filling experienced career roles with political appointees. Another of Trump’s executive orders, which bans unions within some federal departments, means state department employees have effectively been left without representation. The result is a department in turmoil.
The impact of all these changes is not abstract. In an era of multiplying crises, the Trump administration will find out the hard way that business deals are no substitute for diplomatic skills. Dealing with the world — managing allies and adversaries alike — requires expert diplomacy. America’s global reach is founded on more than aircraft carriers: it depends on credibility, consistency and conversation. A retreating United States is a less reliable partner, ceding ground to competitors.
Six months into Trump’s second presidency, Australians won’t be surprised to see another tool of American power being dismantled, but the damage to the state department may be among the hardest to reverse. A cadre of highly skilled diplomats is difficult to rebuild. The danger lies not just in what’s being cut, but also in what’s being forgotten: that diplomacy is how nations survive each other. •
