To the rage of the establishment left, the Trump State Department has been trimming the fat. Large numbers of people go who weren’t doing much of anything more than collecting taxpayer-funded paychecks are being let go. The leftist establishment, as predictable as usual, is howling, but the cuts are going ahead and so far have survived court challenges. When you lift up a rock, however, you get to see all the strange and often revolting things that were underneath it, and the State Department is no different.
Fox News reported Wednesday that Trump administration found every step of the streamlining and reorganization process to be difficult. Even something as simple as getting a list of the people who actually worked for the State Department turned out to require major effort. “It took us three months,” recounted one Trump State Department official, “to get a list of the people that actually work in the building.”
That’s your taxpayer dollars at work. “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?” Yeah, good point. Not only were unknown amounts of money being wasted, but the State Department could have been the place of employ of any number of people whose loyalties lay elsewhere, or who were even at place in Foggy Bottom in order to gather information for hostile entities.
Inconceivable? If only it were. With the establishment left being so deeply anti-American today, we can have no certainty that every last State Department employee was properly vetted. After all, back in 2023, even the far-left, thoroughly compromised Biden regime suspended the security clearance of longtime foreign policy analyst Robert Malley, who was serving at the time as the U.S. special envoy to Iran, over concerns about his handling of classified information. Ariane Tabatabai had a top State Department job despite serious concerns over her ties to Iran’s Islamic regime; she is still an adviser to the Defense Department. And so we are to believe that everyone else at State is a true-blue patriot?
Beyond the lack of clarity about who exactly worked there, the State Department was stunningly inefficient. One official observed: “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.” How crazy? How about several separate offices all tasked with dealing with the same thing? State had two offices devoted to sanctions, and two for issues related to arms control.
The official explained: “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. 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.” 60 different offices, that is, to do the work of 30, or fewer.
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Some of these people had hardly anything at all in the way of actual work responsibilities. “State Department employees are getting paid to go hang out at Georgetown, and sort of recruit for the Foreign Service,” an official noted, “without any sort of metrics or accountability.” In making cuts, Trump officials “touched the people that are doing these sort of like wasteful, sort of mindboggling functions or places where we found natural efficiencies in combining two offices.”
The fired bureaucrats were ready to assume the left’s coveted victimhood status. Some put up signs around the department: “resist fascism” — courageous! — and “you made an impact.” Well, no. No, you didn’t. And that “fascism” business is stupid, in that fascists would want a bigger government, not a smaller one. It’s also a Democrat Party talking point regarding Trump; not only does it have no basis in reality, but it has no place in what is supposed to be a diplomatic agency. The State Department’s role is not to play domestic politics, but to help the president conduct his foreign policy. Rabid partisans have no justifiable place there. It’s good that at least some of them have been given their walking papers.
When useless leftist bureaucrats lose their jobs, it’s a good day indeed. But all you’ll find about it from the establishment media is about how indispensable these people are. That’s why you need to become a PJ Media VIP today with the promo code FIGHT for 60% off.
