The State Department is set to begin firing more than 1,300 people on Friday, according to multiple sources including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and CNN, who has seen an internal memo on the matter.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio reportedly has been planning to downsize the department, but the plan was on hold until the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in a decision that now paves the way for mass federal agency layoffs.
The notice said the firings will affect approximately 1,107 civil service and 246 foreign service officers, with hundreds of offices and bureaus eliminated, for a total of “nearly 3,000 members of the workforce [to] depart as part of the reorganization,” CNN reported. That number includes staff who would be leaving voluntarily.
Secretary of State Rubio first unveiled the plan back in April, at which time he called the department in charge of American diplomacy “bloated.” He also hinted the downsizing was not merely fiscal, but also political, when he said the cuts would aim to root out and align those “beholden to radical political ideology” with the Trump administration’s current political agenda.
The State Department reportedly notified some employees of layoffs as early as Thursday, according to diplomats who told The New York Times the notices could arrive as soon as Friday.
The mass firings are just the latest in a long list of federal agencies to see their staff and resources slashed as the Trump administration continues to broadly dismantle the United States’ current federal government. Some critics say the cuts are an attempt to move resources from the agencies over to fund his massive tax cut bill, now passed and signed into law, which will add $2.4 trillion to primary deficits over the coming decade, adding $3 trillion to the national debt including interest, per the Committee for a Responsible Budget.
