Tillerson out to shrink the State Department

Share Blue - Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is purging his department of high-level diplomats. Unsurprisingly in the Trump era, many of those pushed out are minority voices.

Before even taking the helm, Tillerson was determined to slash the State Department’s budget by almost one third. And once confirmed, Tillerson set about “reorganizing” the department, although “many in the department have always seen the reorganization as a smoke screen for drastic cuts,” according to a report from The New York Times:

[Tillerson’s] small cadre of aides have fired some diplomats and gotten others to resign by refusing them the assignments they wanted or taking away their duties altogether. Among those fired or sidelined were most of the top African-American and Latino diplomats, as well as many women, difficult losses in a department that has long struggled with diversity.

Experts have been aware of Tillerson’s plot to destroy State Department from the inside for months. According to an August 2017 article in the Los Angeles Times, “Current and former State Department officials say it appears that one goal in the current reorganization is to reduce staff by attrition, what one critic called ‘death by a thousand cuts.'”