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As President Donald Trump takes a beating from his own MAGA crowd for his handling of the case of Jeffrey Epstein, the deceased pedophile and sex trafficker, his State Department pulled a surprising move: It decimated its office combating human trafficking.
As part of a downsizing, the Trump administration on Friday cut 1,353 positions at State, about 15 percent of its Washington-based staff, and the largest reduction in decades. This Reduction in Force (RIF) targeted foreign policy goals that don’t align with MAGA values. This included closing or eviscerating entire offices that promote democracy, combat genocide and violent extremism, help resolve armed conflicts, and supported women’s rights. Among them was the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, known as the TIP Office.
Politically, the timing of these cuts is ironic.
For 25 years, the TIP Office has worked to combat human sex and labor trafficking around the world. Its remit includes producing an annual report, as required by Congress, that grades every country on the issue. Those that fail can face economic repercussions from the US, putting teeth into the government’s efforts to end trafficking. This year’s report was due on June 30, but has not been released.
The TIP Office also works with local partners around the world to strengthen civil society groups, train prosecutors, and help other countries combat trafficking. The office’s mission, including managing tens of millions of dollars for these programs, has always had bipartisan support.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio submitted his reorganization plan for the State Department to Congress in April, but stopped its implementation after a federal judge in California halted such plans across 22 agencies. Last Tuesday, the Supreme Court lifted that injunction, and State rushed ahead with its reduction in force (RIF) on Friday.
According to reorganization plans shared ahead of time with State employees, workers in the TIP Office expected few job cuts, but believed their office would be demoted from a stand-alone entity into a component of the Office for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor.
Perhaps the fact that the plans indicated they were being lumped into the category of democracy and human rights—ideas the Trump administration has sought to remove from the federal government’s foreign policy and had targeted in the departmental reorganization—should have been a sign that things would not go well. Still, workers there were blindsided when about half of the office’s full-time civil and foreign service employees received RIF notices Friday. When combined with Elon Musk’s deferred resignation program, the office now has about a third of the full-time staff it had in January.
“The sheer number of cuts has really decimated the office.”
“Everyone was caught off guard,” according to someone familiar with the cuts. Many of the approximately 35 workers who didn’t get laid off received notices late Friday that they would be reassigned and given a pay cut. The RIFs appeared to target employees with the shortest tenures, which meant there was no attempt to strategically preserve experience or expertise across the office’s projects. After Friday, for example, it appeared that just six of the 24 people responsible for researching and producing the congressionally required report remained.
“The sheer number of cuts has really decimated the office,” says the source. “With that goes all of the expertise and connections and understanding” of each foreign country the office worked with. “That takes years to build up. It’s not like you can just reassign a few people in the office and somehow it’s going to work.”
A State Department spokesperson defended the cuts: “The world has changed. As we looked comprehensively across the Department, we saw that many of these offices had served an outdated purpose, had strayed from their original purpose, or were simply duplicative.”
Politically, the timing of the cuts is ironic. The Trump administration is battling perhaps its biggest intra-MAGA struggle over its handling of the Jeffrey Epstein investigation. President Donald Trump came into office promising to reveal the truth about the billionaire pedophile who killed himself in federal prison in 2019 while under federal charges for sex trafficking minors. Through a series of missteps, the Trump administration over-promised on its ability to release a rumored Epstein’s client list, then received blowback from the MAGA crowd when the Department of Justice tried to close the books on the case earlier this month without delivering any list or juicy new information. Moreover, thanks to the QAnon conspiracy that many of Trump’s supporters have embraced, the president’s base has been primed to believe that sex trafficking is rampant among America’s elite and that Trump alone can stop it.
But neither Trump’s reputation among QAnon followers for fighting sex trafficking, nor the fact that the Epstein debacle risks compromising that reputation, not to mention that trafficking prevention is a bipartisan priority, were enough to spare the TIP Office from crippling cuts.
Perhaps, the person familiar with the cuts wonders, the office had gained a reputation for being an aggressive “human rights gadfly,” producing an annual report that got in the way of other diplomacy efforts around the world.
“It was pushing back against other voices in the State Department,” they said. “That maybe made some enemies.”
On Tuesday, Michael Rigas, deputy secretary of state for management and resources, seemed to confirm the sentiment when he appeared before Congress and defended cuts to programs like the TIP Office: “For too long, single-issue offices have mushroomed in number and influence, often distorting our foreign policy objectives to serve their parochial interests and slowing down our ability to function.”
Correction, July 17: This story’s headline has been updated to reflect that the State Department has significantly reduced the workforce of, instead of closed, its office combating human trafficking.