The Friday Night Massacre at State Department

The U.S. Department of State employs approximately 80,000 people. That’s an increase of about 11,000 since the Obama administration, which, as far as I know, still managed to find a way to screw up the world badly by meddling where it didn’t belong. 

That’s a 15% increase in headcount, with, as far as anybody can tell, no increase in actual productivity. Sure, the Biden administration was able to put more resources into exporting alphabet ideology, and there certainly was an enormous, government-created influx of unwelcome illegal immigrants, but during Biden’s administration, the world went from bad to worse. Basic tasks such as delivering passports got, if anything, worse. 

So what we got was more wars, inefficient domestic services, and drag queens in Ecuador and transgender flags at the Vatican. 

…government employees are being treated like the private sector and they don’t know what to do.

Federal employees have long been paid much more than they would earn in the private sector to perform the same duties.

State has been run inefficiently for years. Wonder…

— David Chavous (@DACDAC4DAC) July 12, 2025

The Trump administration is trimming back some of the overgrowth in State Department employees–not to Obama-era levels of employment, which, as we all know, would amount to a Genghis Khan level of brutality–to about 2019 levels in headcount. 

The media and government employees are treating this like a Stalinesque purge. 

The level of cruelty is, we are told, beyond measure. Fellow State Department employees are expressing their disappointment by greeting each laid-off employee on the way out and applauding them for their great work and empathizing with their unimaginable suffering.

Most of the reduction in force came from voluntary separations–the Trump administration gave generous packages to those who would voluntarily leave. So the layoffs amount to about 1,300 employees–less than 2% of the workforce. Each of these people was offered a generous buyout and refused, despite being warned that reductions in force were coming. They chose to fight the RIF through a sitzkrieg. 

A State Department employee shared with PBS News an image from inside the department. The image includes a piece of paper taped to a mirror with the words, “Colleagues, if you remain: RESIST FASCISM. Remember the oath you vowed to uphold.”

The State Department is firing around… pic.twitter.com/iq8Geg9p3s

— PBS News (@NewsHour) July 11, 2025

Under Biden, twice as many members of the military were dismissed because they sought exemptions from the COVID mandates and were refused. An unknown number of federal workers were dismissed for similar reasons, but we are told that “less than 1%” were, although that is probably due to the fact that eventually the courts stopped the practice. 

I don’t recall videos of federal employees getting applause from their peers, or officers patting their soldiers on the back, congratulating them for their courage. 

One thing I never realized until I moved to the DC area is the absolutely insane amount of people who think they are entitled to a job in government – forever.

It is part of the rot in DC and they need a reality check about how the actual world works. https://t.co/ZPDOpW91oJ

— Meghan McCain (@MeghanMcCain) July 12, 2025

The same people are outraged that 1,600, mostly new hires, have been laid off when they refused a generous separation package, were applauding the summary firing of people who refused an experimental and, for some, dangerous and untested vaccine. Biden fires you? You deserve it. Trump does? An outrage!

Yeah, that’s why you were fired. You were openly implementing Psychological Terrorism and Communism with Tax Dollars. pic.twitter.com/vdD3k7pw3o

— Liz Churchill (@liz_churchill10) July 12, 2025

Now, those of us who have worked in the private sector, or just about anywhere other than government, have always been at risk of losing our jobs. Layoffs, restructurings, and downsizing are a fact of life because organizations outside of government have to deliver goods and services in a competitive environment. 

Government doesn’t, and the result is a belief that once one gets a government job, it is for life. Good pay, great benefits, and total security for the nomenklatura. 

Any thoughts @Reuters on the massive @Microsoft layoffs? I heard it was almost 10,000, any pictures of brokenhearted and crying former employees of Microsoft?

— jaminphx (@jaminphx) July 12, 2025

You may think that this sort of theater wouldn’t work as PR, but it actually does with a slice of our population. There is a slice of the Democratic voters who are outraged beyond belief, seeing terrible cruelty in 2% cuts to the State Department. For the most part, these people have never faced layoffs and cannot imagine a world where anybody of their class ever would. 

It must be nice. 

I don’t feel glee that these particular people are being let go. I have no beef with them because I have no idea whether they were good, bad, or indifferent in their jobs. But I understand that the federal government has become a monster eating our economy, and the salaries of each of these employees were extracted from others working hard for their own families, and those people deserve to have their tax dollars spent well. 

It shouldn’t take 2 months to get a passport, and it shouldn’t take tens of thousands of employees to do basic tasks. In many cases, government services are arranged to maximize employment and minimize productivity to ensure that headcounts always grow. Failure in government is rewarded–the worse you do, the higher your budget tends to go. 

“We need more money!” How about modernizing IT? Streamlining processes? 

Only in government would services like processing retirements be done by hand in an abandoned mine. That sort of inefficiency is the preferred way of doing things as often as not. The IRS still uses computer code from the 1960s, for God’s sake. 

We live in a world where the privileged get outraged when members of their class lose permanent sinecures, but shrug when members of the hoi polloi do. After all, they can be replaced with hoards of illegal immigrants.