18-07-2025
The State Department Upheaval Makes China Great Again
She had not seen the axe coming for her specifically, one Foreign Service Officer told me. (She wishes to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals.) Thinking she would be safe from cuts that largely targeted other teams, she worked late into the night on a Thursday this month, helping colleagues around the world as usual. But the following morning she found a termination email in her inbox, signed by Lew Olowski, a MAGA firebrand who runs personnel at the State Department.
And so she became one of roughly 1,350 people at the department, including about 250 FSOs, who got 'RIFed,' as they call it (after the euphemism 'reduction in force'). Having served in the Middle East and Asia for many years, she had stellar performance reviews throughout and had been picked by several top diplomats for specific assignments. If she had stayed overseas, she would have been safe from this round of RIFs, which hit only US-based staff. But she happened to be transitioning from a posting in Asia to one in Europe and was technically classified as 'domestic.'
