The Trump administration’s dramatic reorganization of the State Department, including this month’s firing of more than 1,300 workers, was engineered primarily by a handful of political appointees lacking extensive diplomatic experience and chosen for their “fidelity” to the president and willingness to “break stuff” on his behalf, according to people with knowledge of the process.
State Dept. layoffs led by team of outsiders willing to ‘break stuff’
Interviews with more than 60 people detail a frenetic, arbitrary process underpinning the Trump administration’s far-reaching overhaul.
July 19, 2025 The Washington Post
Proponents of the initiative have declared its execution a historic success, overcoming years of resistance from a career workforce averse to major change. Critics say it was done arbitrarily, in furtherance of Trump’s polarizing brand of conservatism and will damage the United States’ standing in the world by shedding invaluable expertise across the department.
Central to the effort was Jeremy Lewin, a 28-year-old former agent of Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service who earlier this year oversaw its rapid, messy dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) — one of the administration’s first and most drastic acts to impose President Donald Trump’s “America’s First” agenda on the government’s foreign policy institutions.
In a statement, Rep. Gregory W. Meeks (New York), the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s top Democrat, accused the Trump administration of acting outside the law and called the plan’s architects “a small cabal of unqualified MAGA extremists.”
“This wasn’t a serious review of national security needs,” Meeks said, “it was a political stunt. … The result? The most damaging brain drain in the State Department’s modern history.”
This account of the Trump administration’s overhaul of the State Department is based on interviews with more than 60 current and former employees, some with direct knowledge of the months-long coordination preceding last week’s mass-layoff announcement. They described a haphazard process that broke administration officials’ repeated promises to leave certain offices and positions untouched and left an unspecified number of fired Foreign Service officers stranded overseas. Many spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing a fear of reprisal.
The State Department employs more than 70,000 people worldwide, though there are only about 100 political appointees who lead the agency. Last week’s layoffs targeted the 18,000 or so employees who work domestically, cutting U.S.-based positions that worked in areas including women’s issues, nuclear diplomacy, China policy and processing passport applications, as part of a broader plan to downsize U.S.-based positions by 15 percent including attrition and voluntary departures.
Lewin, now serving in the newly created position of acting under secretary for foreign assistance, humanitarian affairs and religious freedom, expressed sympathy for those affected by the layoffs, telling The Washington Post in a recent interview that his team worked diligently to avoid more significant chaos. He called the RIFs — government speak for reductions in force — “blunt instruments” but emphatically defended his team’s efforts “to make this as humane, dignified and organized as lawfully as possible.”
“Unfortunately, mistakes happen when you’re doing anything in large numbers,” Lewin said, acknowledging missteps the department has been forced to address.
A senior State Department official, speaking on the condition of anonymity under ground rules set by the Trump administration, also disputed the current and former State Department employees’ characterization of the process, saying that while the planning for the reorganization began with a small team, the final blueprint for eliminating so many jobs ultimately was prepared with considerable input from “experienced career staff” and in consultation with the White House.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has maintained the agency was “bloated” and infected, in some corners, by “radical political ideology,” necessitating the shake-up. Other administrations — Democratic and Republican — have made similar diagnoses. But past efforts at reform, including a plan to “modernize” the agency under President Joe Biden, faced pushback from its entrenched bureaucracy and complicated rules that offered Foreign Service officers considerable job protections.
Yet even among supporters of reform, there are widespread concerns that little real calculus went into deciding where and how to cut — and that it will have a lasting negative impact on morale among the more than 15,000 U.S.-based employees who remain, working as the backbone to America’s diplomatic corps around the world. The White House also has sought to slash the State Department budget by roughly half, raising fears both internally and among the department’s defenders on Capitol Hill that Trump will attempt to make further staffing cuts in the future.
“The reorganization was desperately needed, and when you do a reorganization of a bloated bureaucracy, you have to reduce the numbers,” said Tibor Nagy, a veteran diplomat and two-time ambassador who served as undersecretary for management until early April. “But are they doing it the right way? I highly question that.”
Rubio’s brain trust
Before this year, Lewin was virtually unknown in Washington.
After graduating from Harvard Law School in 2022, he worked for constitutional legal scholar Laurence Tribe, a prominent critic of Trump, and with the elite law firm Munger, Tolles & Olson LLP. The firm, known for its progressive office culture, also has represented Musk and his businesses. According to his State Department biography, Lewin previously worked as an investment banker, too.
He joined the Trump administration as a member of Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, which moved aggressively to root out perceived inefficiencies in the government by slashing jobs and ending services contracts across virtually all agencies. DOGE surprised many by targeting USAID, with Musk describing Washington’s principal foreign assistance arm as a “criminal organization.”
Musk has since left the administration and now is at odds with Trump, leaving DOGE with waning influence. Lewin, too, has moved on. He became the chief operating officer of USAID in late March, helping to oversee its collapse. And after a more high-profile political appointee, Pete Marocco, was forced from his position following clashes with Rubio’s inner circle, Lewin was promoted to acting director of the State Department’s Office of Foreign Assistance.
Lewin was again promoted July 11, the day of the layoffs, to become under secretary, the agency’s third-highest rank. He appears to be among the youngest people to hold that rank in the State Department’s history, if not the youngest.
Critics of Rubio’s management of the State Department, including Democrats and former diplomats, say the rapid ascension of Lewin and others lacking much government experience shows how the agency’s leadership has downgraded institutional expertise to instead promote political appointees who often are young, White and male.
Lewin’s growing profile in the Trump administration led multiple media outlets to dig into his past, reporting that surfaced unflattering allegations by former classmates at Dartmouth and a private high school in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Those reports further hurt his reputation among career staff at the State Department, current and former officials said.
At one meeting this spring, Lewin was asked why it made sense to fire so many in the Foreign Service when the department is slated to welcome a new class of diplomats in September, said one official briefed on the deliberations. Lewin responded by saying he wanted to bring in new blood, the official said.
The exchange, this person said, left the impression that Lewin believed the next cadre of Foreign Service Officers, essentially blank slates, could be molded into Trump and MAGA loyalists.
The senior State Department official disputed this, stating that there would be no “loyalty tests.” The agency has, however, added new language to its hiring documents indicating that “fidelity” to the executive branch will be a key metric for tenure and promotion decisions.
Lewin was a key part of a reorganization team put together by Mike Needham, a former aide to Rubio in the Senate who now serves as the secretary’s counselor. Needham, who spent years coaxing Republican lawmakers to the right as the head of Heritage Action for America before joining Rubio’s office, is also a newcomer to the State Department. He spent six years as chief of staff for Rubio while the Florida lawmaker sat on panels overseeing the department and intelligence community.
Some of other members of the reorganization team did have diplomatic experience, though generally it was limited.
Lew Olowski, had been an entry-level Foreign Service officer before receiving special dispensation by the Trump administration to vault through the ranks at the Bureau of Global Talent Management, or GTM, to effectively become head of State’s human resources department, said four current and former officials. The most senior ranking leader at GTM resigned in response because he was unwilling to serve under someone he deemed so inexperienced and unqualified, three officials said.
Despite his brief diplomatic résumé, Olowski had been a part of the Ben Franklin Fellowship, a nonpartisan assembly of former and current State Department employees. The group, which primarily serves conservatives who don’t feel represented among the other groups for State staffers, now acts as a MAGA incubator, according to more than a dozen current and former officials.
Among the fellowship’s prominent members is Chris Landau, Rubio’s deputy secretary, an ambassador to Mexico in Trump’s first term who has strong ties to the conservative legal world.
Upon his swearing into office, Olowski drew skepticism from career staff with a speech that relied heavily on Christian rhetoric and made several references to rap lyrics. When the RIF notices went out last week, Olowski was the only signatory and received much of the ire from career officials when mistakes were uncovered.
Foreign Service officer Andrew Veprek also worked on the layoffs, according to several people with knowledge of the process. Veprek is an acquaintance of Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff known for his hard-line views on immigration, and is the administration’s nominee to become assistant secretary of state at the Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration (PRM), an office that traditionally deals with issues like refugee resettlement.
Veprek told congressional staff in April that the group of people working on the layoffs was intentionally kept below 10 so the process could move quickly. One person who attended that meeting said they left with the impression the group was chosen for its “willingness to break stuff on behalf of the Trump administration.”
The senior State Department official said that Veprek was referring to an initial working group that launched early preparations for the reorganization and that later plans were developed by under secretaries with teams of career staff.
The official defended the work of the political appointees who focused on the reorganization, noting that many had put in grueling hours while devising the plan. “We are proud of our staff members and our leadership,” the official said.
How the layoffs unfolded
A draft of prospective cuts totaled more than 2,000 Civil Service officers and 700 Foreign Service officers, according to four current and former State officials familiar with the matter.
Preliminary layoff plans were delayed when a federal judge in California blocked them, prompting State Department leadership to wait for a Supreme Court decision that would eventually allow federal layoffs. The Supreme Court sided with the administration July 8.
Concurrently, staff at the Bureau of Global Talent Management urged officials to trim the list of layoffs and pushed for Foreign Service officers working in offices targeted for closure or reduction to receive their next posting assignments, in theory shielding them from the RIFs, officials said. Dozens secured new jobs via this strategy.
Eventually, political leaders instructed staff to stop approving onward assignments for domestic staff, according to two State officials and documents reviewed by The Post. Foreign Service officers who managed to secure new jobs but hadn’t started them yet suddenly found themselves in the crosshairs.
In the weeks before the mass firing — in a move led by Lewin, several officials said — the State Department rewrote its layoffs procedures for Civil Service and Foreign Service employees. The changes left far more people vulnerable.
The morning of July 11, fired employees across the globe began receiving emails signed by Olowski. Those dismissed included experienced, multilingual staffers with decades of service, those in postings overseas and military veterans.
Ultimately, the State Department chose to target employees for dismissal based on one key criteria: where they worked on May 29. If they were listed as staffing an office targeted for closure or cutbacks, they were gone. GTM staffers had tried to convince the political leadership to push the date forward but were told no, according to a State official briefed on the deliberations. That meant that some people who had been offered new jobs and in some cases accepted them were fired based on their previous position.
One woman was fired while on maternity leave, she said. Another staffer was dumped after taking a job in Washington to recover from post-traumatic stress incurred by surviving a terrorist bombing in his last posting in the Middle East, he said. One man lost his job weeks after his wife, a federal contractor at the Department of Veterans Affairs, was fired due to cuts there. Another woman who was dismissed, having served for two decades overseas, is a single mother of two children under the age of 4.
The messages came in batches over the course of the morning because the government’s email system prevented officials from sending one mass delivery, staffers said.
“No one was afforded the respect of a face-to-face notification,” said one employee. “No goodbye party or retirement party. No handover of information to continue work integral to our national security. No message from department leadership that the notifications had all been submitted, so we were all left in a tortured limbo for hours.”
Rubio, who was returning from travel to Asia that day, did not directly address those losing their jobs. The day before, he said that he was proud that his State Department conducted its reorganization in “the most deliberate way of anyone that’s done one.”
Lewin told The Post he strongly disagreed with criticisms of the layoffs, calling the mass firing “the most complicated and orderly RIF in history.”
Days later, though, errors were still being identified. On Tuesday, for instance, some State employees checked their emails to find messages informing them a mistake had been made. “Please disregard that notification,” it said.
The un-firing emails were sent to staff at the Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs and the Bureau of African Affairs, according to three State officials familiar with the matter. The State Department later acknowledged there were two such “administrative errors” and that there had been other “discrepancies” in up to 3 percent of all RIF notices.
The message sent Tuesday was signed by Olowski. It closed by apologizing for “the inconvenience” and thanking rehired employees for “your service and dedication.”
One State official said the fallout was inevitable given the composition of the team that planned the firings.
“That’s what happens,” the official said, “when you put the equivalent of a lieutenant in a job normally held by a three- or four-star general.”
By John Hudson