A senior State Department official told members of Congress on July 15 that recent layoffs at the department were necessary because the complex bureaucracy was unsustainable.
Appearing before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Deputy Secretary of State for Management and Resources Michael Rigas said the cuts were needed because the department “must move at the speed of relevance.”
Under Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the department began firing more than 1,350 personnel on July 11. Most of them were civil service employees, while a small fraction worked in the foreign service. The mass firing came on the heels of the Supreme Court’s ruling that the Trump administration could more easily fire federal civil service employees….