'If You Can Keep It': One Year After Massive State Department Layoffs

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0:21It's been nearly a year since the Trump administration's major reshaping of the State Department. The administration said it was part of their effort to overhaul the federal government and streamline and reduce redundancies. On July 8th of last year, the Supreme Court cleared the way for the administration's massive reduction in force plan, just a part of what was known as Elon Musk's Doge plan at the time. Days later, the State Department began laying off over 1 ,350 employees, including foreign service officers. And only a week prior, U.S. aid was effectively dismantled. What remained was absorbed into the State Department.

0:58The mass firings outraged current and former diplomats. The American Foreign Service Association said this, losing more diplomatic expertise at this critical global moment is a catastrophic blow to our national interest. I'm Jen White. And I'm Todd Zwilling. You're listening to the What A Podcast. As part of our If You Can Keep It series, where we look at the state of our democracy, we ask what this reshaping has meant for the U.S.'s global power, aid, and diplomacy. Also, how is the agency operating today? and what happened to all those former employees. We'll be back with those answers and more after this short break.

1:34Stay with us.

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2:19Author Isaac Butler takes us back to when the Christian right mobilized against provocative art. Listen to Fresh Air on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to the 1A podcast. Let's get our conversation started and meet our guests. Joining us in studio is Akbar Shahid Ahmed. He's a diplomatic correspondent at Notice and author of the forthcoming book, Crossing the Red Line, Biden, His Advisors and Israel's War in Gaza. Akbar, it's always great to have you. Thanks for having me. Also with us is Ambassador Larry Andre. He's a professor at the University of Texas at Austin's LBJ School of Public Affairs.

2:58He worked in USAID and served in the State Department for 33 years as the U.S. Ambassador to Somalia, Djibouti, and Mauritania. Ambassador Andre, welcome back to the program. Thank you. Thank you for asking me back. And Miriam Sefi, a Foreign Service officer for 17 years. She served in Cairo during the Arab uprisings in 2011. She later served in Baghdad during the U.S. military withdrawal from Iraq, and she most recently served as a senior advisor to the State Department's chief artificial intelligence officer before being part of the July 11th purge. Miriam, welcome. Thanks for having me. Akbar, let's just start with a reminder of what happened a year ago.

3:36What did that original reduction in force look like for the State Department? Absolutely. So the Trump administration wasn't shy about their intentions for the State Department from the get-go. They made it clear they didn't, they felt in their telling it was a bloated agency. They felt it was doing work they didn't want it to be doing, specifically human rights work, specifically work around countering disinformation, for instance. These are some of the ideological bugbears, right, of the entire MAGA movement. What they did then was they kind of offered folks two options. One was a fork in the road where you could take a package to be let go or sort of wait and see what would happen to you.

4:14And that was where this was especially brutal, Jen, this kind of mass layoff that did happen last July, because many people who weren't expecting to be removed, I remember that day being outside the State Department, you know, and you'd see people coming out in tears who would say, look, I was in this extremely sensitive intelligence position, right? I was working on Russia and China. The Trump administration says they care about great powers. This doesn't make sense. And a lot of the people who were also let go were in this kind of weird gap where they just didn't have jobs because of bureaucratic reasons, right?

4:47This wasn't something based on any kind of clear performance metrics, interviews, a direct process. It was really a number that Secretary Rubio wanted to hit. We remember the images at the time of State Department employees leaving through the front doors, the Hall of Nations, their fellow employees applauding them as they left. It was an emotional time at the department. Miriam, you were there, you experienced those firings. What was your sense of how the administration decided who would be fired and who would be spared? So thank you again for having me. And this is the one year anniversary of the purge.

5:22And I use that term very deliberately that it was a purge rather than sort of a bureaucratic reorganization because of how indiscriminate the process was. So foreign service officers, as Akbar mentioned, were not tied to our positions. We're commissioned officers like the military. So even if our position is eliminated, we would just rebid on another job. And that happened recently. For example, there was a closure in Peshawar and those foreign service officers who lost their jobs just rebid on assignments for whatever reason. And I think my guess is the reason we were indiscriminately and arbitrarily eliminated is to send a message that this could happen to anyone.

6:00So it created a chilling effect within the organization. So that day, I'll never forget, I was working on artificial intelligence. This is a bipartisan issue that everybody cares about. And I had just built a training float, actually, to send diplomats for a full year, civil and foreign service officers, to get smart on AI, quantum and biotech at universities like Boise State, Georgia Tech, Stanford, all over the United States, across the country. And it was actually an idea that Colin Powell, a Republican, seated 20 plus years ago. And it took that long, the bipartisan support to build it. And now we've eliminated the ability for our diplomats to be trained in technology and to be, that's our superpower, right, is that we have a presence all over the world.

6:47And now we're ceding to China. And so this is an example. My job was critical. It was congressionally mandated. It was bipartisan supported. So as Akbar mentioned, it was, you know, done in a very haphazard way. And others have said, you know, the way it was done was sort of not strategic. It was just a headcount reduction just to kind of put heads on a stick, basically. And my head was on a stick. Well, we did reach out to the State Department for comment on the effect of these cuts and did not hear back in time for the program. We'll provide an update to the website if a comment is provided.

7:21And Ambassador Andre, I want to tap into your experience. What did you make of these decisions to reduce the State Department, to dissolve U.S. aid? Were there redundancies or bloat that needed to be addressed? Yes, but not in this way. I completely agree with everything Mariam just said about the arbitrariness of how this was done. Those who had the most power over the process had the least knowledge of how the system works. So as Miriam mentioned, for the Foreign Service officers, they rotate in and out of positions domestically and overseas. A deputy of mine, my deputy when I was ambassador in Djibouti, had a stellar record.

8:08He happened to be in the wrong job at the wrong time, and so he was shown the door. Twice I chaired our promotion boards at State Department. And what I learned there is we have a low-ranked system. So the State Department system has a list of low performers. You would think that's where they would start, but that list was never referenced at all. It was, oh, we don't like these jobs. Whoever happens to be in that job is now out of a job. So that was just an unprofessional and ineffective way of managing this issue. As far as the numbers, yes, organizations do have creep. You get people hired for an office that was set up to respond to a political constituency.

9:00That political constituency goes away. The office remains. So there are barnacles that attach themselves to the ship of state. And so every now and then you need to scrub the hole. That makes sense. But in a logical way, in a systematic way, in a well-informed way, not in this way. Akbar, you wanted to jump in here. I just wanted to add two quick details that I think really illustrate how sort of haphazard this felt. I just remember that day, multiple people were fired who were then very quickly told, oh, actually, we didn't mean to fire you. We need to rehire you. Right? That kind of mess. And then just looking back to what happened in the buildup to that day and what gave us the sense they just wanted to hit a number.

9:37Many of the people who took that fork in the road chose to leave were some of the most qualified people. I wrote about the State Department's lawyers. Very rare to leave. Very hard to train those people. Those were overwhelmingly represented in who chose to take the package. Ambassador, you would look at the shaving off of barnacles and say it's normal for an administration to do firings, even a lot of firings, if they can preserve the job that USAID or the State Department is doing for America overseas with fewer people or more efficiently. Is that what happened here, or did the firings also fundamentally change the way the State Department, USAID, and other agencies that we're talking about did their job projecting American values?

10:24No, the way it was done was not strategic. It was not organized. It was not rational. And the numbers were arrived at by an unknown process also. It wasn't a systematic searching of the organization for jobs that are no longer relevant to the mission goals. As far as USAID, as you mentioned, I was a USAID contract employee before I started at State. I've worked alongside USAID in all of my postings. I know them very well. an enormous amount of expertise there. So you want to go a different direction. The direction that the administration has chosen actually is not new. You had an enormously successful anti-HIV AIDS program that was set up in 2003 under President George W.

11:19Bush. PEPFAR saved millions and millions of lives. The latest figure I saw was 25 million. That was coordinated by State Department. So that's what the Trump administration is wanting to do for aid right now. And it was implemented by the Centers for Disease Control's international arm by USAID, by Department of Defense, by Peace Corps. So it was multi-agency implemented and coordinated by the State Department. That seems to be the model that they're wanting to do now. And the administration is setting up these country-by-country agreements for global health. That is the one part of aid that the administration seems most interested in continuing.

12:08And they've been doing this, negotiating compacts one by one with different countries. Well, let's pause here. Coming up, we sit down with a former State Department worker whose office was eliminated to hear how she's continuing her work in the private sector. That's just ahead.

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13:15Welcome back to the 1A podcast. For today's installment of If You Can Keep It, we're talking about the U.S.'s global reach in diplomacy a year after the dramatic reshaping of the State Department and elimination of USAID. We're talking through it with Ambassador Larry Andre, who served as U.S. Ambassador to Somalia, Djibouti, and Mauritania. Akbar Shahid Ahmed, diplomatic correspondent at NOTICE, frequent guest here on the show. And Mariam Saifi, Foreign Service Officer, for 17 years. And now let's turn to Verena Winder. She's former chief of staff and senior advisor at the Women's Rights Office at the State Department.

13:51She's now the co-founder of Arch Collaborative. That's a nonprofit that works towards gender equality. Verena, welcome to the program. Hi, thank you so much for having me. So you worked for an office that no longer exists. Tell us about the work Women's Rights Office was doing. So my last posting was, as you mentioned, as the chief of staff to the ambassador, and that was a political appointment. I worked for the Biden administration. But I want to be clear that this office was not just set up during a Democratic administration. This is a long-term, long-standing office. Started in the mid-90s and then really elevated in 2009.

14:27And so the Women's Rights Office, we worked in three different ways. And actually, I served in it as a civil servant as well. We worked on diplomacy. So that was how we talked to other countries, specifically about women's rights and about integrating gender equality. That's our multilateral efforts, so how we present and show up at the UN. And that was also our public diplomacy, so who we choose to elevate. We also did policy for the U.S. government. We led and developed all of the policies relating to gender-based violence or violence against women, on women's economic security, on something called women's peace and security.

15:03And this we did because there's a huge body of evidence showing, as the show's theme talks about that women, empowered women, gender equal societies are far more likely to have peaceful, stable, prosperous, democratically leaning societies. And lastly, we ran programs for the department. We had about a$10 million budget. That sounds really big, but in fact, that's about what the Pentagon spends in about three to four minutes. And we'd use that money to invest in small, really potentially impactful programs around the world, one of the things that we were getting ready to do just as the office was shut down was we were setting up a first-of-its-kind rapid response fund to help women, women candidates, women politicians who are dealing with this horrific backlash and online abuse, everything from doxing to stalking to nudification.

15:56And they were telling us all around the world, hey, I can't do this. I can't stay in this. I can't represent my constituencies. And so we were going to pilot this program where we were going to provide them with just a little bit of money so they could safely leave houses or get their kids out of school for a short period of time, contact lawyers, get information off the dark web, just as a stalwart and as a bulwark against the sort of encroachment against democracy. So Verena, the work that you're describing, has it been lost now or is some other office doing it in a bureaucratic reshuffle that shouldn't make too much of a difference to an outsider?

16:34Or is the quality, the actual work that you're describing, is it gone? Thank you for that question. I think something that your first panelist said is really important to underscore. Akbar said that this administration just didn't want folks at the State Department doing human rights. And so I would posit that actually a lot of the firings were not necessarily indiscriminate. If you look at the kinds of offices that could have picked up some of this work, the Trafficking in Persons Office, the Criminal Justice Office, the Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor Office, all of those either saw an entire and complete firing and elimination, or they are so small compared as to what they were before that they're not able to do their work.

17:18Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, actually regularly gets asked when he goes on the Hill by some of our congressional champions, hey, what's happening to this work? Is the State Department doing women's rights anywhere? And he'll say yes, and he'll say, you know, the regional bureaus are doing it. Well, in 2023, so this was obviously before the Trump administration, we, as in the Women's Rights Office, conducted a survey of the entire State Department just to see how far along we were in sort of the integration of women's rights. Eight percent of bureaus and offices had somebody in their office working on women's rights or working on gender equality, and on average, of those people in that 8 % that said yes, that person who held that portfolio had on average nine other portfolios, and they were also the most junior members of the staff.

18:07So I think it's really safe to say no, despite what Marco Rubio says, this work is not being done. Verena, I just want you to connect some dots for us because I can imagine someone listening to this conversation and saying, listen, if a country wants to have gender equality, that's the work of that country. Why is the U.S. involved in this? Why does it matter for everyday Americans? How would you answer that question? I think that what all Americans want is a more peaceful society, is a more prosperous society, and we can't do all of that work alone. I also think that folks in general agree that violence against women is a global scourge, that women should be able to control and to have economic independence.

18:52And that's actually a net good, a public good for everybody. Countries that have more gender equal societies are much less likely to have civil wars within their own country, but they're also much less likely to start wars with other countries. And so this is really an investment in not just other countries, but in our own safety and prosperity as well. Much like it makes sense for us to invest in other countries' public health systems because because their public health reflects on our public health. Verena, Jen mentioned Arch Collaborative, the work that you're still doing. I wonder about its reach every day without the heft, the weight, and the stamp of the United States government overseas.

19:37How much harder it is for this work to penetrate in the societies where you're working? Yeah, it is. It's much harder, obviously. I come from the U.S. government. I was trained in the U.S. government. It was my first job out of graduate school. And so I very much, you know, have just an enormous respect for the reach and global networks of government. We started Arch Collaborative in the sort of early months of January 2025 and beyond. And we started it really as our stake in the ground to say, OK, we have been witnessing, we have had front row seats over the past four years to just how hard it is now to get an agreement on women's rights in the UN.

20:17Or we have seen, you know, when we travel to countries like Kenya and activists tell us, you know, the US is importing all of this legislation, go home and get your own house in order. We started this really like knowing that this was going to be an uphill battle, but not being willing to give up that fight. And so Arch Collaborative is really focused on two areas of work. Our first bucket is to resist these global anti-rights forces. And by anti-rights, I really mean those folks who would seek to undermine human rights, who would seek to undermine women's rights, who would seek to do so on behalf of undermining democracy as a whole.

20:56And then our second bucket of work focuses on rebuilding, which is, you know, when and if we survive this moment, what's the kind of scaffolding that we're going to need to get to a place where gender equality truly is no longer negotiable? It is just a given. Verena, I want you to project out about, let's say, 10, even 20 years, especially after your experience with the U.S. government. Do you see the possibility for this work to be more secure if it's not connected to a government agency and the whims of any given president? No, I think that I remain stubbornly optimistic and stubbornly hopeful, but the role of the government cannot be overstated.

21:45And in fact, our office, our Women's Rights Office, having that global ambassador position, that was actually, Mary Ann Safey talked about technology being one of our superpowers, actually our investment also in human rights and being sort of a shining beacon of a hill is also a superpower. Many, many countries have followed suit and in our footsteps have created these positions. And so between governments, between the multilateral system, between private philanthropy and civil society, you need to have a healthy ecosystem in order for this to move forward. because otherwise you're going to get what we have now, which is even those women that the State Department ourselves honored as international women of courage.

22:32We used to honor 10 women every year who had done incredible, amazing work on behalf of human rights around the world. One of the women that we honored, I believe in 2023, was a Ugandan human rights lawyer. And we honored her on our stage. And she was recently captured, tortured, and left for dead. And that's what the power of government is when it wants to be, you know, doing things that are anti-human rights. They're trying to send chilling messages all around the world. And that's Verena Winder. She's a former chief of staff and senior advisor at the Women's Rights Office at the State Department, which no longer exists.

23:10She's now the co-founder of Arch Collaborative. That's a nonprofit that works towards gender equality. Verena, thank you for speaking with us. Thank you so much for having me and for allowing me to talk about the important work that we did and that we will continue to do. Well, let's turn back now to Ambassador Larry Andre, who served as U.S. Ambassador to Somalia, Djibouti, and Mauritania. Akbar Shahid Ahmed, he's a diplomatic correspondent at NOTICE. And Miriam Saifi, a Foreign Service officer for 17 years. We've been hearing from lots and lots of you. One text club member says, caring for those in need is the lowest priority of this administration, whether the needy in this country or whether they are outside.

23:50Only if there's money to be made in the process of giving care and a deal can be made for profit, then there's interest. Dave says this. Don't forget to talk about how cuts to U.S. aid eliminated the people who could have prevented the screwworm outbreak. Screwworm, of course, parasite infecting American cattle across the Midwest and the West right now. And one member of our text club writes this, diplomacy and foreign aid project soft power that costs less than military power. A machismo foreign policy doesn't make the United States stronger. It creates more resistance and problems than it solves.

24:28This is an old one, Ambassador Larry Andre. Soft power versus hard power, military might versus ideals. can you speak to that person who sent us that note and what's being lost realistically here with these firings we're talking about? Certainly. And if I can start with a quick clarification, Verena is absolutely correct when she says that the offices were closed on a selective basis in line with the administration's policy framework. The arbitrariness was firing people who happened to be in the eliminated positions, given that the Foreign Service rotates from position to position, rather than firing people on the basis of performance.

25:12And that was possible. That was able for them. Back to your question. The way diplomacy works is you seek to identify a shared goal, a shared interest with another country and you work on it together to accomplish something for both countries. And you build up credit, you build up chips that you then spend on advancing your goals. So if you, one role of soft power, I don't like the term, but there it is, is in building up those chips, building up that credit that you can then spend. I could give so many examples from my career where that happened. Something very specific that we in the U.S. needed, and we could draw down on all the credit we had built up through different use of soft power, different programs and different assistance that we'd rendered, and cooperation that we had extended.