‘Abolished': US State Department lays off 1,353 staff in reorganisation
President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio hailed the move as a long-overdue streamlining of a bloated bureaucracy.'This will make the department leaner, more nimble, and more efficient,' Trump said during a press availability. 'It's about time we focused on core priorities, not waste.'However, current and former diplomats expressed alarm at the cuts, warning they could weaken US diplomatic power at a time of intensifying global challenges from geopolitical threats to climate instability.'You don't promote American leadership abroad by gutting the agency tasked with diplomacy,' said one former ambassador.The move is part of a broader Trump-era effort to shrink the federal workforce and reorient the State Department toward what officials call 'mission-critical functions.'Rubio defended the plan, saying, 'These are smart reductions that will allow us to focus on emerging threats more strategically.' Critics say the changes will hurt US standing abroadThe American Foreign Service Association, the union that represents U.S. diplomats, said Friday that it opposed the Trump administration's cuts during 'a moment of great global instability.''In less than six months, the US has shed at least 20 percent of its diplomatic workforce through shuttering of institutions and forced resignations,' the organisation said in a statement. 'Losing more diplomatic expertise at this critical global moment is a catastrophic blow to our national interests.'If the administration had issues with excess staffing, 'clear, institutional mechanisms' could have resolved it, the group said.'Instead, these layoffs are untethered from merit or mission. They target diplomats not for how they've served or the skills they have, but for where they happen to be assigned. That is not reform,' AFSA said.In a notice Thursday, Michael Rigas, deputy secretary for management and resources, said that 'once notifications have taken place, the Department will enter the final stage of its reorganisation and focus its attention on delivering results-driven diplomacy.'The State Department noted that the reorganisation will affect more than 300 bureaus and offices, saying it is eliminating divisions it describes as doing unclear or overlapping work. It says Rubio believes 'effective modern diplomacy requires streamlining this bloated bureaucracy.'- Ends
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Indian Express
3 minutes ago
- Indian Express
What might a Russia-Ukraine ‘land swap' entail?
The American and Russian Presidents will meet in Anchorage, Alaska on Friday (early hours of Saturday in India) to discuss, possibly decide, the future of the war in Ukraine. Ahead of the meeting, US President Donald Trump has repeatedly spoken about a 'land swap' which, he says, will help end the fighting. 'There'll be some land swapping going on,' Trump told reporters earlier this week. Russia currently occupies around a fifth of Ukrainian territory. Ukraine holds next to no Russian land. So what might a potential land swap entail? Status of war Three and a half years into the war, Ukraine is well and truly on the defensive. According to Reuters, Russia currently controls 114,500 square km (more than 19%) of Ukraine, including Crimea and a major chunk of territory in eastern and southeastern Ukraine. Some estimates peg this number to be even higher. Ukraine, on the other hand, controls next to no Russian territory. After making significant gains in Kursk last August-September, Ukrainian forces were pushed out of Russian soil by March this year. As things stand, Russia holds all of the initiative in the war: with Ukraine running out of men to send to the frontlines, Russian forces continue to make steady progress. If the fighting were to continue in its current tempo, experts suggest Russia would occupy all of the four eastern and southeastern Ukrainian provinces of Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson. At the moment, Russia holds almost all of Luhansk, and about three-quarters of Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, Reuters reported. Putin officially incorporated all four provinces as Russian territory in 2022, shortly after the war began. Russia also controls small pockets of land in the northern Kharkiv, Sumy, Mykolaiv and Dnipropetrovsk regions of Ukraine. Russia has said it is carving out a buffer zone in Sumy to protect Kursk from a future Ukrainian attack. Russia has held Crimea since 2014. While Kyiv publicly maintains that the peninsula is Ukrainian territory, in private, officials have long admitted that getting Crimea back by force would be next to impossible at this point of time. Swap or surrender? Earlier this week, Trump had said that Russia had occupied some 'very prime territory', and he would 'try to get some of that territory back'. But since Ukraine currently holds no Russian land that can be leveraged in a negotiation, many have wondered what Trump's land swap would entail. Moscow wants Ukraine to unilaterally withdraw from all of the strategically and economically vital Donbas region, comprising provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk, multiple media reports from this week have suggested. If Kyiv were to agree — and that is unlikely — this would entail pulling Ukrainian troops back and ceding some 6,600 sq km it still holds onto in this region. In return, Moscow would be willing to freeze the frontier in Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, return the small pockets of land it holds in northern Ukraine, and possibly concede the even smaller pockets of land Ukraine still holds in Kursk. Ukraine Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrsky in June had said that despite Russian claims to the contrary, Ukrainian forces still held some 90 sq km of Russian territory in Kursk. Even if this were to be true, whatever Russian land Ukraine holds is incomparable in size and strategic importance to the Ukrainian land held by Russia. This is why the talk of swapping land has been perceived more as a surrender in Ukraine. 'We will not leave Donbas. We cannot,' Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine told local media this week. No good options Given it has no leverage on the battlefield, Kyiv will be hoping that Western sanctions are hurting Moscow enough to force Putin to make some concessions. Such hope is not altogether unjustified: the latest secondary sanctions will potentially leave a massive hole in Moscow's budget, and Trump has promised to further squeeze Putin if Russia does not agree to make peace. That said, the Russian economy has thus far been remarkably resilient against Western pressure. Even if the economy were to be in terrible shape, that alone is no guarantee of a Russian capitulation in what Moscow views as a fight against an existential threat. In this context, experts suggest that the best-case scenario for Ukraine at the moment would be for the conflict and battlelines to be frozen. In theory, this would buy Ukraine some much needed time to rebuild its manpower base and economy, both of which lie in tatters at the moment. At the same time it would also give Russia time to recoup, and potentially prepare for another future invasion — something that Kyiv believes is an inevitability. As Al Jazeera defence editor Alex Gatapoulos puts it: 'This is a really dangerous time for Ukraine.'
NDTV
3 minutes ago
- NDTV
Trump-Putin Alaska Meet Live Updates: US President Warns Of 'Severe Consequences', Talks May Last 6-7 Hours
Trump-Putin Alaska Meet Live Updates: US President Donald Trump is set to meet his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin in Alaska on Friday for a "high-stakes" summit that could not only shape the future of Moscow's three-year war with Ukraine, but also have consequences for European security. Both Trump and Putin are seeking wins from the meeting, which marks the first time Putin will set foot on foreign soil since the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Trump, who casts the war as a risky "bloodbath", is pressing for a ceasefire in the war that would cement his image as a global peacemaker. For Putin, the summit is already a big win as it allows him to say that Western efforts to isolate Russia over the years have failed. Trump said that while there are 25 per cent chances of the talks failing, their success could allow him to call Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, for a second three-way meeting. Zelensky's exclusion from the summit is a setback for the West's policy of "nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine" and raises the possibility that Trump could agree to a deal that is unfavourable to Ukraine. While enroute to Alaska's Anchorage, Trump fired barbs mid-air from the Air Force One, warning of more severe sanctions if the talks aren't fruitful. "I noticed he's bringing a lot of business people from Russia, and that's good. I like that because they want to do business, but they're not doing business until we get to war settled," he said.
The Hindu
3 minutes ago
- The Hindu
Contacts with the U.S. did not cease even during Biden's presidency: Senior Russian interlocutor on Russia-U.S. talks
Russia's back channel links intensified under President Donald Trump, but Russian representatives had maintained contacts even with the previous administration under President Joe Biden, said a senior interlocutor who has been part of the back channel negotiations that helped in maintaining dialogue tracks between Russia and the United States in the last three and half years since the Ukraine crisis began. Trump-Putin Alaska Summit LIVE In a written interview to The Hindu, Nikolai Plotnikov, Head of the Center for Scientific and Analytical Information of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, said the summit in Alaska is not just about Ukraine and that there is a sense of panic in Europe as Russia and the U.S. have made a fresh beginning. 'Contacts with the U.S. did not cease even during Biden's presidency. With the start of Trump's second term, the situation began to change dramatically. Contacts resumed through the foreign policy departments, special services, and the military. Special representatives have been actively at work: Kirill Dmitriev on the Russian side and Steve Witkoff on the American side. One should also mention contacts at the expert and academic levels,' said Mr. Plotnikov. The summit in Alaska is the first in recent years when the top leaderships of Russia and the United States are meeting seven months after the return of President Donald Trump as the U.S. President. Formal communication between the two sides had broken down after the Biden administration imposed a slew of sanctions on Russia after President Putin ordered a 'special military campaign' against neighbouring Ukraine on 24 February 2022. The Alaska summit has been opposed by the President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy who has demanded that a discussion on the future of Ukraine must include Ukraine's leadership. That however did not prevent a number of countries, India included from welcoming the summit. Mr. Plotnikov said that Ukraine was not included in the summit as Mr. Zelenskyy has 'no legal rights'. 'They voluntarily gave up their independence in favor of Washington, London, Paris, Brussels, Berlin, and other Western capitals,' said Mr. Plotnikov marking 2014 as the year when Ukraine according to him ceased to be independent after the removal of President Viktor Yanukovych in the so called 'Revolution of Dignity'. He further said that European Union's strategy on Russia has failed and that the European states had miscalculated their strategy of using a 'blitzkrieg' of sanctions against Russia. 'Judging by the plentiful statements coming out of various European capitals (except perhaps for Hungary and Slovakia), Europe is panicking. With his decision to meet President Putin, Donald Trump revealed who is really in charge,' said Mr. Plotnikov. He further said that discussion between President Trump and President Putin would also make a difference in enduring conflict zones of the world including in Armenia-Azerbaijan and India-Pakistan. 'If the two world powers and leading members of the nuclear club find common ground in resolving existing issues, everyone will benefit,' said Mr. Plotnikov.
