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Cuts at DoS

by coldwarrior ( 90 Comments › )
Filed under Economy, Open thread at April 28th, 2017 - 7:39 am

It’s a great start!

The State Department plans to cut 2,300 U.S. diplomats and civil servants — about 9 percent of the Americans in its workforce worldwide — as Secretary of State Rex Tillerson presses ahead with his task of slashing the agency’s budget, according to people familiar with the matter.

The majority of the job cuts, about 1,700, will come through attrition, while the remaining 600 will be done via buyouts, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because the decision hasn’t been publicly announced. William Inglee, a former Lockheed Martin Corp. official and policy adviser in Congress, was hired to help oversee the budget cuts and briefed senior managers on the plan Wednesday, the people said.

The personnel cuts, which may be phased in over two years, represent the most concrete step taken by Tillerson as he seeks to reverse the expansion the department saw under former President Barack Obama’s administration and meet President Donald Trump’s demand — outlined in an executive order signed last month — to cut spending across federal agencies. A draft budget outline released in March for the year that begins Oct. 1 seeks a 28.5 percent reduction in State Department spending from fiscal 2016…

Policy is being determined by a relatively small group that includes Tillerson, policy planning chief Brian Hook, chief of staff Margaret Peterlin and a few acting assistant secretaries of state at regional bureaus.

But the lack of clarity has damaged morale among the department’s rank and file, according to the people. Departments are supposed to be in the thick of planning for the 2018 and even the 2019 budgets, and many of those conversations have been frozen by a lack of clarity.

“They’re behind the curve, but they’re not totally off base,” said Richard Boucher, a former assistant secretary of state under secretaries from both parties. “Generally I’d say people don’t have a sense of direction, and the rumors of what the reorganization is going to look like are just rampant and nobody knows if jobs are going to be there and what’s going to happen.”

WAHHHH!!!! There is no clarity! Cry me a river, cupcakes. Welcome to the reality that non-govt employees face every day.

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