State Department plans to offer buyouts

Tillerson wants to cut almost 2,000 from the ranks.

Gardiner Harris WASHINGTON — The State Department will soon offer $25,000 buyouts to diplomats and staff members who quit or take early retirements by April, officials confirmed Friday.

The decision is part of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s continuing effort to cut the ranks of diplomats and civil service officers despite bipartisan resistance in Congress. Tillerson’s goal is to reduce a department of nearly 25,000 full-time U.S. employees by 8 percent, which amounts to 1,982 people.

To reach that number, he has already frozen hiring, reduced promotions, asked some senior employees to perform clerical duties that are normally relegated to lower-level staff members, refused to fill many ambassadorships and senior leadership jobs, and fired top diplomats from coveted posts while offering lowlevel assignments in their place.

Those efforts have crippled morale worldwide.

Still, State Department accountants have told Tillerson that only about 1,341 people are expected to retire or quit by the end of September 2018, the date by which Tillerson has promised to complete the first round of cuts.

Indeed, rumors of a buyout have reduced the number of departures expected this year. So $25,000 will be given to the first 641 employees who agree to leave by April, a representative from the State Department confirmed Friday.

For top diplomats, a $25,000 buyout — which taxes would probably reduce to about $16,000 — is not enough to change career plans, so many have already left.

The number of those carrying the department’s top two ranks — equivalent to four- and three-star generals — has dropped almost in half, from 39 to 21.

And nearly 20 percent of those with two-star-equivalent ranks have signaled their intention to leave in what is an unprecedented exodus, according to an accounting provided by the American Foreign Service Association.

“Where is the mandate to pull the foreign service team from the field and forfeit the game to our adversaries?” Barbara Stephenson, the union’s president, asked in a letter to membership this week.

Tillerson is in the middle of a departmentwide reorganization, an effort he has called his most important priority.

But the staff reductions have nothing to do with that overhaul, according to those briefed on the plans.