Before you get the idea that I think that all the State Department employees laid off by Marco Rubio were lazy, good-for-nothing layabouts, I stipulate that many are not.
When layoffs happen--or in government parlance, "Reductions in Force"--the axe doing the cutting is always blunt. This is necessarily true in the government because it is almost impossible to fire anybody for cause, so the only way to reduce headcount is through RIFs that don't resemble performance-related firings.
But c'mon, man. We all know that 80% of the work is done by 20% of the people, and a whole lotta useless people need to go. The national debt is growing by trillions of dollars a year, and we can't have the economy collapse to subsidize the lifestyles of gender-studies majors.
A beautiful example of this phenomenon is encapsulated by the posts from a State Department employee, who spends some significant time on Reddit.
Yesterday: "Trump fired me from the state department"
— Reddit Lies (@reddit_lies) July 15, 2025
4 years ago: "Last week I did literally nothing of value" pic.twitter.com/rICIB7HFI8
Four years ago, she posted to Reddit about how ridiculous her job was at the State Department. As a foreign service officer (FSO) s/he accomplished nothing of value all week.
No doubt that any meeting gets better with coffee and pastries, but I am pretty sure that it doesn't require a person with a very nice salary, benefits, and a pension to ensure that the larder is stocked for upcoming meetings.
Of course, when you and I think of "Foreign Service Officer," we have something a bit more glamorous in mind than booking conference rooms and ensuring that visitors can enter the building, but apparently, we are wrong about that. Personally, I would at least have hoped that the Biden administration would have shifted more than a few of these people into the Passport office to cut down the ridiculous wait times, but that would mean they would have to work.
Well, Showajidai no longer works at the State Department, and I am supposed to feel really bad about this, I suppose.
It is a dark day indeed. US foreign policy will never be the same without the coffee and pastries.
A rough estimate of the cost to taxpayers for a foreign service officer's salaries and benefits in a 25-year career would be $2.5-$3 million--on the low end. This is hardly a princely sum, even though it sounds large when you add it all up. But it is hardly negligible.
After all the layoffs and early retirements, about which we are supposed to feel devastated, the headcount at State will return to...2019 levels. That is still 8000 more than the headcount in 2010, or about 10 larger than in the Obama administration.
Hillary Clinton still managed to destroy North Africa and the Middle East with that level of employment and start a few color revolutions around the world, so I think that number is sufficient.
Even if there are fewer pastries at the meetings, the US will survive.
The storm and strife we are being forced to endure at the modest reductions of federal employment is indicative of what is wrong with how the Pravda Media and the elite see the government. When Biden destroyed 10,000 jobs on Day 1 by stopping the Keystone Pipeline, Democrats literally told them to "learn to code." There was no drama on their part because the working class is an undifferentiated mass of workers who can be replaced with imported serfs by opening the border.
But a government worker loses his job? It's a crisis.
Millions of liberals eat this all up. The video and breathless newscasts move them to tears of rage, because they are told that this is an outrage. The same people would smugly explain to you why it is absolutely necessary to destroy tens of thousands of jobs for the good of Mother Earth.
I don't know that you can even call them hypocrites. They are likely blind to the contradiction. They are told by The Atlantic and The New York Times that they should care about something, so they do. I'm not even sure that the brain is involved. It's all pulling at heartstrings.
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