50 SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2025 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL Losing More Than a Role I’m a career FSO with more than a decade of service across seven countries and multiple bureaus. I’ve served as a public diplomacy officer, helped lead the Critical Language Scholarship program to strengthen U.S. national security through language learning, and run an investment visa portfolio facilitating cross-border business that brought capital and jobs to the United States. In recent years, I focused on climate diplomacy, first in South and Central Asia and later in the Office of Global Change (OES/EGC), where I managed more than $60 million in federal climate adaptation funding and led U.S. diplomatic engagement with some of the world’s most climate-vulnerable countries. I speak Greek, Turkish, and Spanish—languages I’ve used throughout my career to strengthen alliances, de-escalate tensions, and communicate U.S. priorities. When the State Department eliminated the Office of Global Change earlier this year, I didn’t walk away. I requested leave without pay to pursue a master’s degree at the Harvard Kennedy School’s midcareer master’s in public administration focused on climate adaptation—fully self-funded—so I could return better equipped to serve in an increasingly unstable world. Instead, I was RIFed. Not for performance. Not for lack of mission need. But because I happened to be in a domestic assignment when the cuts hit. This wasn’t reform. It was arbitrary. And it sent a clear message that skill, commitment, and achievement are no longer a safeguard. What was lost wasn’t just my role—it was deep expertise in climate policy, crisis response, and public diplomacy at a moment when the U.S. can least afford to lose it. —State FSO Coordination Is Not a Curse Word I retired from the State Department in March 2025, ending a 30-year career in the Civil Service working on nuclear nonproliferation. Throughout my career, I learned from my predecessors, built my own expertise, and passed on what I had learned to my successors. Public service is not just a career or a calling; it depends on transmission of knowledge and a cultural ethos from one generation to the next. At my retirement ceremony, I assured those in the next generation that they would figure out what needed to be done, but after July’s RIFs, that next generation is in tatters. My own office dealt with multilateral nonproliferation diplomacy and was not directly in the path of destruction, but key counterpart offices that do multilateral disarmament diplomacy, that lead or coordinate responses to nuclear challenges from Iran and North Korea and with allies in Europe and the Pacific, were wiped out. Not only did this cut short promising careers, but it leaves the U.S. government without anyone who knows how to do this essential work. There is no one left who knows how to deal with the nonproliferation, security, arms control, and disarmament issues that come up every year at the United Nations and all year round in Geneva, leaving us unequipped to advance or even defend our national security interests in multilateral settings. “Coordination” was a particular target of this massacre. Foreign affairs involves the complex interplay of policy, political, administrative, and legal imperatives. This can be a source of frustration for officials at all levels, but it is intrinsic to the work. Those responsible for the RIF bloodbath seem to think that coordination is not an essential skill but an extra layer of bureaucratic red tape. But, in fact, bureaucratic dysfunction occurs because people lack the skills and habits of working together across those organizational lines. Eliminating those offices will make that dysfunction worse. —State FSO $176 Billion in Exports—Gone I am an FS-2 political officer with nearly 17 years of State Department service, and I was RIFed on July 11 along with my entire office in the Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs, Office of Agricultural Policy. Before we were fired, my team drove $176 billion in annual U.S. agricultural exports that directly translate into income and higher standards of living for millions of American farmers and ranchers. We negotiated highly technical trade agreements to ensure that U.S. agriculture remains globally competitive. My particular role helped guarantee U.S. primacy in cutting-edge biotechnology and facilitated delivery of life-saving humanitarian food assistance. —State FSO
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