On July 11, John Dinkelman, a veteran diplomat, was informed in a terse email that he was being laid off after 37 years in the US foreign service. He was given six hours to pack up and clear out.
Dinkelman was one of 246 foreign service officers and 1,107 civil service employees who were terminated this month in a bloodletting that has few precedents in the state department’s 236-year history.
The purge will harm the US’s claim to global leadership, he says. “Gutting this workforce is like firing your soldiers in the middle of a war — shortsighted, destabilising and hard to recover from,” Dinkelman, who is head of AFSA, the labour union for foreign service personnel, tells the FT.