The D Brief: State’s cuts; Trans ban, in effect; Concerns about Army plan; B-52s join B-2s; And a bit more.
Bradley Peniston and Ben Watson | May 9, 2025
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The State Department aims to cut substantially more employees than generally expected: some 3,400 instead of roughly 2,000, report GovExec’s Eric Katz and Nextgov’s David Dimolfetta. That's because the 700 jobs that will be eliminated in a departmental reorganization will not count toward the planned 15-percent reduction in the department's roughly 17,000-person domestic workforce, and because foreign service officers whose jobs are eliminated are not expected to be permitted to apply for other roles.
These details could be altered before layoff notices go out starting in early June. They were spelled out in State officials’ notes of a briefing to lawmakers, which were obtained by Government Executive and corroborated by employees familiar with the meeting and the department’s plan. Read on, here.
Welcome to this Friday edition of The D Brief, a newsletter dedicated to developments affecting the future of U.S. national security, brought to you by Ben Watson and Bradley Peniston. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1941, the British Royal Navy obtained a Nazi Enigma machine for encrypted communications when they captured German submarine U-110.
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