The State Department, which carried out widespread layoffs just a year ago, is now actively recruiting for numerous positions it previously eliminated. This about-face has left many former employees struggling to find work, casting doubt on the effectiveness and coherence of the department’s hiring strategy.
A year after sending out Reduction in Force (RIF) notices, the State Department finds itself in the unusual position of trying to rehire for the same roles it spent months eliminating. According to former officials, the department has not reached out to the nearly 1,350 employees who received RIF notices. Many of those laid-off professionals report that their applications for new positions have gone unanswered, creating a sense of frustration and disillusionment.
This situation is particularly concerning because federal RIF procedures are designed to prioritize recently laid-off employees for new competitive positions. The standard protocol is to rehire those who lost their jobs due to restructuring before looking outside the organization. The current hiring surge, therefore, not only seems to ignore this guideline but also wastes the institutional knowledge the department recently discarded.
“It’s shooting ourselves in the foot over and over again,” warned Maryum Saifee, a 17-year Foreign Service officer who received a RIF notice last year. She noted that the department is struggling to replace the specialized expertise required for modern diplomacy, particularly in technology. “We seem to be shooting ourselves in the foot over and over again,” she added.
Much of the lost expertise was concentrated in the Bureau of Cyberspace and Digital Policy. Saifee, who worked in that bureau, was involved in a project to create “StateChat,” a secure large-language model designed to help diplomats write cables using decades of historical data. This initiative, which had the backing of former Secretary of State Colin Powell and former Secretary Antony Blinken, was shelved just before its launch when the team was laid off.
“The whole thing turned to dust overnight,” she said. The project was part of a broader effort to modernize the State Department’s technological capabilities, an effort that now appears to have been abandoned.
Another layer of dysfunction emerged from the execution of the layoffs themselves. According to Larry André, a former ambassador and State Department official, the process was deeply flawed. Instead of following the performance-based rankings used in annual evaluations—which identify top performers for promotion and poor performers for removal—the department issued RIFs to individuals based on temporary duty locations.
“That shows you how the process was so flawed, and taken in like an emergency situation. There was no emergency,” André said. He claimed that some of the agency’s top performers were eliminated while poor-performing staff retained their jobs, describing the process as a “game of musical chairs.”
Adding to the controversy, the State Department recently awarded a nearly $1 million contract to Military Hire, a subsidiary of RedBalloon, to conduct recruitment. The company describes itself as “America’s non-woke job board.” The goal is to find 600 to 1,000 candidates to take the Foreign Service Officer Test.
The focus is reportedly on recruiting military veterans and highly patriotic individuals who align with a “merit-based” ethos. “I think this has been a consistent theme with the administration right now — how do we find people who are patriotic, are not afraid of America first, and are going to get the job based on merit and hard work,” said Military Hire CEO Andrew Crapuchettes.
Despite the scale of the layoffs, Crapuchettes reported that the new candidates are not deterred by the instability. He framed the turnover as a necessary reset to ensure employees are dedicated to public service rather than personal comfort.
However, many former employees feel alienated by this approach. Michael Duffin, a former senior policy advisor at the State Department, is running for Congress as a Democrat. He wrote that despite the trauma of layoffs, many officials still wish to return to federal service. However, he noted a significant barrier: most job postings are restricted to internal applicants, effectively excluding those who were fired.
“I want to go back, as much as that would, let’s say, require some bit of humility. But I want to serve,” Duffin said.
The State Department currently claims that there are no restrictions on RIF-eligible employees applying for new roles and that they are subject to the same process as any other candidate. Yet the perception remains that the department is looking to “replace” rather than “rehire” talent, bringing in less experienced contractors to perform jobs previously held by seasoned professionals.
Saifee argued that the knowledge lost in the RIF cannot be easily replaced by new hires or contractors. “Our skills are not something you can just bring A-100s in, and they can immediately start. You have to train in a very specialized way,” she said, noting the difficulty of learning how to work overseas, handle sensitive languages, and safeguard privacy.
As the department attempts to refill its ranks, it faces the paradox of having to train new hires in the very specialized skills that were just eliminated, all while mid-career and senior officials continue to resign due to the vacuum created by the layoffs.
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*Original article: “State Department, fresh off widespread layoffs, back to hiring for jobs it eliminated” by Jacob Heckman, Federal News Network, May 2026.*
