Even critics must concede that the State Department has some clever wordsmithing diplomats. The week before Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the recent personnel cuts, a re-imagined poem circulated on email throughout the offices inside Foggy Bottom. ’Twas the Night before Christmas was re-penned as ’Twas the Night before RIFs. A “RIF” is bureaucrat talk, and it is an acronym for “reduction in force.” RIFs are the tool that the executive uses to lay off personnel in federal agencies.
The bureaucrat’s poem captured the Washington-establishment angst that the cold-blooded Trump administration has no idea of the great diplomatic work of State Department careerists. Yet, in a case of reverse-irony, the poetic rewrite unintentionally puts a finger right on the heart of the matter. Referring to an imagined Rubio contemplating the layoffs, the Deep State bard wrote:
And far above it, in paneled repose,
The Secretary cackled, indifferent, composed.
No tear for the loss, no nod to the past —
Only the thrill of a system collapsed.“Too slow, too global, too nuanced, too woke —
This place needs a purge, not another soft poke.”
They watched as the ranks were stripped down to the bone,
And turned out the lights on careers overthrown.
The imaginary Rubio was exactly right, even if the disgruntled diplomat-turned-poet certainly did not mean it that way. As an institution, the State Department is too slow, too global, too nuanced, and too woke. The cuts the real Rubio and his leadership team imposed hardly stripped the department “down to the bone” or “collapsed” the system. Rubio’s RIFs were far from a “purge,” and in fact the “mass layoffs” eliminated only about 1,350 positions, or around 15 percent, of State’s Washington-based employees—some 246 Foreign Service and 1,107 civil service.
True, none of that is consolation for those individual employees who lost their positions, but U.S. foreign policy is not, or should not be, a jobs program. Rubio is trying to reverse years of counterproductive increases in State’s bureaucracy, which has been on a steady growth pattern for decades. The organization is bloated with unnecessary staff grouped in offices with agendas that have no place in the Trump administration’s foreign affairs objectives.
As a point of comparison, the United States managed the Cold War years with fewer diplomats and staff abroad than we deploy today. It was the disaster of 9/11 that set the stage for massive growth in both State’s foreign and civil service. State hired more and more diplomats as Washington’s war on terrorism turned Iraq and Afghanistan into vast nation-building projects. What had been a simple, but catastrophic, failure of U.S. border security—i.e., letting suicidal terrorists into the country—was the proximate cause of two decades of massive expansion in the foreign affairs and national security agencies. State was very much part of that.
During these same years, Washington’s war on terrorism was also accompanied with an ambitious new globalist agenda, which transformed issues like climate change, international health issues, and migrant empowerment into new priorities, all of which helped to drive up costs and grow employee numbers. This dubious expansion of government points to another hard-learned principle not only in the State Department but across the federal government: Unsupervised bureaucracy constantly expands; the number of positions increase and budgets grow while constantly defaulting to the pursuit of the political left’s agenda.
Besides creating afflatus for Deep State poetry, Rubio’s layoffs are spawning many new myths. One myth is that, under Rubio’s leadership, State’s Foreign Service and civil service are “hemorrhaging” career officials with irreplaceable diplomatic skills and professional expertise. The career hierarchy is deep, and there are also many fine diplomats, with experience and senior rank, who are staying to help Rubio move his initiatives forward. It is part of the New York Times and Washington Post’s sky-is-falling narrative that there is only one point of view in the career bureaucracy, which is monolithically against all the initiatives of the Trump administration to reform government or change policies.
If career officials cannot support administration policies, the honorable course is to leave government and not stay to sabotage a duly elected president. It is presidential appointees, not senior bureaucrats, who as much as possible should make and speak for U.S. policy. The Trump administration rightly seeks to streamline the federal government so that, as the Constitution makes clear—Article 2, Section 1—the president himself or at least his appointees literally run the executive branch. The career bureaucracy has no legitimate policy interest outside of what the president wants.
Thus, most conservatives would cheer if Rubio’s cuts have pushed into retirement the next Victoria Nuland, the classic example of an overactive former career diplomat. Some might say, good riddance to Nuland, but what about the next George Kennan? The answer is that any George Kennan today inside Foggy Bottom or abroad is smothered by State’s suffocating bureaucratic practices. In State’s modern bureaucracy, Mr. X’s “long telegram” would never be allowed to emerge and land on the president’s desk. The State Department’s group-think “clearance” process makes the emergence of any original thinking virtually impossible. Breaking the blob inside Foggy Bottom is another reform task for Rubio and his leadership team.
Finally, there is the much-circulated Washington talking-point that the senior career bureaucracy is composed of “professionals” who, like dispassionate attorneys, can take up the case of each new president without being encumbered by their own ideological baggage or worldview. Like all folk tales, there is some truth in the story. There are certainly many career diplomats who faithfully serve presidents for whom they did not vote. In such situations, many career officials find technical and narrow issues that they can work on during the time of an administration they oppose.
But we are in the age of Trump Derangement Syndrome. Observers have noted countless government officials, many of whom served at State, retiring and then signing open letters proclaiming that the president and his administration represent a fundamental “assault” upon democracy. Quietly opposing or voting against a president are citizen activities at a considerable intellectual distance from publicly proclaiming that the chief executive is a fundamental threat to the country. When Rubio’s RIFs were announced last week, many “professional” employees left the main building after plastering signs of “resist fascism” in abandoned offices and bathrooms. One office team, having been sacked, bitterly posted:
Here sat America’s experts on democracy, human rights (yes, which include women’s, LGBTQ+, & minorities’ rights), election security, freedom of expression, privacy, on countering corruption, violent extremism, and disinformation, and more. You’ve just released them and hundreds of their colleagues into the wild … and into the United States of America.
The message is presumably a warning to the administration from State’s mighty human rights ex-bureaucrats. Maybe Rubio should call 911?
As for me, I think the Deep State poet left the most creative departure message. Here it is in full:
’Twas the night before RIFs at the old State Department,
The silence was heavy, a grave, still compartment.
No chatter, no clatter, no last hallway jest —
Just emptied-out inboxes and HR requests.The FSOs waited, too tired to grieve,
Unsure who would stay and who would be asked to leave.
Their badges still dangled from cords round their necks,
As the future collapsed in unread .docx.Bidding was futile. The panels were bare.
No onward assignments, just cold budget air.
They’d served through the floods, the coups, the disease —
Now felled by a pivot in PowerPointese.The CDOs knew, but they wouldn’t explain.
“Realignment,” “efficiency” — corporate refrain.
No answers, no warnings, no chance to amend —
Just calendar holds that spelled out the end.The Ben Franklin Fellows, on six-month power highs,
Cut with clean hands and pre-cleared alibis.
No posts in their past, no risk, no regret —
Just MAGA-fed fervor and Fox News vignette.They walked through the bureaus like fate in a suit,
With checklists and smirks and no time to comput
What years in the field, what languages spoken,
What fragile alliances would now be broken.And far above it, in paneled repose,
The Secretary cackled, indifferent, composed.
No tear for the loss, no nod to the past —
Only the thrill of a system collapsed.“Too slow, too global, too nuanced, too woke —
This place needs a purge, not another soft poke.”
They watched as the ranks were stripped down to the bone,
And turned out the lights on careers overthrown.The service stood silent. No protests, no fight.
Just weary compliance in pale hallway light.
They left with their boxes, their clearance revoked,
Their memories folded in khakis and coats.No sendoff, no honors, no final bow —
Just a clock punching out on a lifetime of vow.
The posts overseas would go quiet in turn,
As policy smoldered in folders to burn.’Twas the night before RIFs, and the mission went still,
Another great silence imposed on the Hill.
The desks lay abandoned, the channels unmanned —
The end not with fire, but by someone’s hand.And what once gave this country its voice and its face
Was reduced to a number, then struck from the base.
No reckoning came, no justice, no trace —
Just the long, quiet death of a vanished grace.
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