THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2025 51 Losing Health Security I’m both a civil servant and a diplomatic spouse (in the parlance of the State Department, an EFM, eligible family member). Both my FSO spouse and I received RIF notices July 11. With my layoff, the foreign affairs apparatus is losing a technical expert on global health, who helped ensure Americans were safe by bolstering health security and monitoring infectious disease outbreaks. As a health policy analyst, I helped ensure that the taxpayer dollars Congress appropriated to address humanitarian need in complex emergencies were spent on the highest quality assistance programs that could be staged in places like South Sudan and Bangladesh. I helped ensure the assistance didn’t go to sanctioned groups or terrorist organizations and wasn’t diverted by armed groups. I ensured the programs were not wasteful, fraudulent, or an abuse of taxpayer and congressional intentions. The State Department’s ability to do that important work is lost because the reorganization effort has eliminated my office and my team of nonpartisan sectoral experts. My family and I willingly made sacrifices in service to the United States and in service to the idea that diplomacy makes the world safer and more stable for Americans who never met us, and we secured markets for U.S. businesses whose owners may never have considered what paved the way for their success overseas. —State Civil Service officer Consider the Person, Not the Office I was an FSO in the U.S. Department of State’s Office of Recruitment. The entire office (senior Civil and Foreign Service, recruiters, student program leads, etc.) was gutted on one day in July. Every single person in our office received a reduction in force (RIF) email. There was no consideration of merit, no regard for awards or promotions. Cutting the entire Office of Recruitment pushes away top talent, weakens U.S. global influence, and gives a free pass to China, which is increasing its diplomatic corps and its global influence as we destroy our own. And the decision to cut the entire office contradicts the White House’s stated priority of putting “America First” and countering China’s rise. Additionally, the hasty decision to cut entire offices (ours wasn’t the only one closed that day) without examining both merit and prior investment in staff is not only sloppy and lazy work but is reckless, dangerous, and a colossal waste of taxpayer money. If the idea were to truly save the American taxpayer money (as the administration frequently touts), layoffs would have been made by merit, not by issuing blanket RIF notices to entire offices. The department has invested heavily in its diplomatic corps, and Foreign Service officers have undergone long-term training in foreign languages to represent the United States overseas. If national security priorities such as combating China’s rise were truly taken into account, they would have looked at who was being fired, what skills they had, and what training the department had already invested in them. Before I spent five years representing the U.S. in Asia, the department invested in a two-year, full-time Mandarin Chinese language program for me. Yet they RIFed me without considering this investment, simply because I happened to be working in the Office of Recruitment. Instead of developing a coherent strategy, they hastily removed top talent in whom the department has already heavily invested, slashing the U.S. taxpayer’s return on investment while weakening American interests around the world. —State FSO Disappearing Data … and People As a Foreign Service Limited employee based in Washington, D.C., I supported USAID missions and overseas staff. I was rarely at my desk—I traveled often, leaving my family and young children to visit every mission in my portfolio across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. It mattered that both local staff (FSNs) and FSOs at missions had a friend in D.C. like me. I worked with in-country mission teams to support local partners and act as an interlocutor between the needs of the field and the demands back home. I delivered year-round capacity building to staff in the countries where we provided food security funding to help strengthen their strategies, programming, and data metrics to report results to the public. I traveled to the nine countries and regions I supported to deliver in-person workshops, leading to more robust data collection and greater accountability for U.S. taxpayer dollars. Why does this matter? Every year from October to March, we conducted an extensive review process of all the data collected
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