Deep State Department cuts reveal problem much bigger than anyone realized

Trimming up the State Department turned out to be a much bigger hassle than anyone could have anticipated.

“It took us three months to get a list of the people that actually work in the building,” said one senior official, defending the slashing of 3,000 employees. “They couldn’t tell you how many people worked here. It’s sort of scary as a taxpayer and as a public servant to think that we don’t even know how many employees we have. This is a national security agency, you know. Who are these people?”

About half of the employees took advantage of the voluntary buyout, while the rest were reportedly given “reduction in force” notices, according to Fox News.

“A handful of Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s closest advisors evaluated over 700 domestic offices within the State Department, submitting RIF (reduction in force) notices to employees in those they found to be ‘duplicative’ or ‘inefficient,’” the outlet reported.

Ultimately, the idea of making these kinds of deep cuts in the department is to get a “maximum of 12 clearances on any piece of paper,” as opposed to the “40, 50 clearances” that are required for the current approval process.

It was also discovered that there were “dozens of different offices handling human resources,” and when some employees were hired, “they were accepting faxed records on their past work with other agencies.” Three offices were reportedly handling sanctions, and it took another two to manage arms control issues.

“It’s crazy that a department that’s tasked with so many critical diplomatic, national security functions, with a $50 billion-plus budget, is running its affairs that way,” said an official.

“Some of these regional offices within this sort of functional civil liberties, civil society, bureaus of democracy, human rights and labor, population, refugees and migration, each had their own regional offices in addition to the country desk, regional bureau, construct,” they continued. “Every independent bureau and office had its own executive director, its own HR department, its own payments. We were making payments out of like 60-plus different offices.”

“State Department employees are getting paid to go hang out at Georgetown, and sort of recruit for the Foreign Service, without any sort of metrics or accountability,” revealed yet another official.

“We touched the people that are doing these sorts of like wasteful, sort of mindboggling functions or places where we found natural efficiencies in combining two offices.”