Judge halts Rubio’s plan to lay off almost 2,000 State Dept. employees
A federal judge in California has halted a State Department plan to lay off almost 2,000 employees, marking a setback to Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s push to rapidly downsize the agency.
Speaking in court Friday, U.S. District Judge Susan Illston in San Francisco said an earlier ruling that prohibited federal agencies from laying off people also applied to the State Department’s downsizing efforts, despite arguments by government lawyers.
In response, Alex Resar, a Justice Department lawyer, said that the government would halt plans to send out layoff notices Saturday, according to an account from Reuters. A Justice Department spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and attempts to reach Resar were unsuccessful.
The judge’s intervention provides a reprieve, if only temporarily, for U.S.-based employees of the State Department expected to be targeted by the plan to cut positions in what the department’s leadership says is a bid to streamline the agency to focus on “core U.S. foreign policy objectives.”
The State Department told Congress last month that it planned to cut more than 15% of its U.S. workforce through layoffs and voluntary departures. According to a memo sent to Congress, the State Department employed roughly 18,730 people in the United States at the start of May.
In an internal memo released in April that previewed the changes, Rubio said the country’s oldest executive agency had suffered from “decades of bloat and bureaucracy” and that his reorganization was designed to push out a “radical political ideology.”
The American Foreign Service Association, a workforce union, wrote to members this week to say that the planned layoffs were unnecessary, arguing that “our workforce is already stretched thin and under-resourced for the effective conduct of American diplomacy.”
Illston, the judge, had ruled in May that President Donald Trump’s administration needed congressional approval to make significant reductions to the federal workforce, halting tens of thousands of layoffs implemented by Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service and other cuts.
The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to pause Illston’s court order to allow it to continue with planned layoffs. The court is yet to rule on the matter.
The State Department has argued that Rubio’s downsizing plan was independent of broader cuts ordered by the Trump administration. In a letter submitted by the State Department to the court Friday, Rubio’s Deputy chief of staff Dan Holler wrote that the reorganization was “directed by Secretary Rubio and intended to address foreign policy needs.”
Illston rejected that reasoning, noting that some reorganization plans cited the White House executive order that prompted her decision.
At the State Department, the layoffs had been expected this week, though some thought they could be delayed due to a military parade to be held in D.C. on Saturday. In the memo to Congress, the State Department set a deadline of July 1 for the changes.
In its letter to members this week, the American Foreign Service Association expressed concern that the department leadership was trying to rewrite employment rules in a way that would “clearly violate core principles of our merit-based system.”
Efforts to change how layoffs were conducted at the State Department would “harm workforce morale, weaken our institutional effectiveness, and damage our country’s foreign policy interests,” the association wrote.