After 14 years as a US diplomat, one officer talks about being laid off as part of sweeping State Department cuts, losing both his career and his professional identity.
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The State Department union says the Foreign Service is in crisis. Morale has fallen to record lows and the Trump administration has cut thousands of jobs by dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development and reorganizing the State Department. Foreign Service officers fired in July were given temporary reprieves by a U.S. judge. They have been on administrative leave for several months. NPR's Michelle Kelemen tells us about one of them.
MICHELLE KELEMEN, BYLINE: Ren Elhai was scheduled to head to West Africa for his next assignment. Instead, he was fired in July along with more than 240 other foreign service officers and more than a thousand government employees. Elhai knows that layoffs are a constant in the U.S. economy, but he says the State Department is different from a tech company. It's more like an army.
REN ELHAI: When you're a programmer and you get fired from a tech company, you're still a programmer. You will have a career. You leave to look for another job. When you're a diplomat and you get fired from the State Department, you're no longer a diplomat. Like, because of this dismissal, we lost our professional identity and career.
KELEMEN: Elhai is a Russian and Chinese speaker who was sworn in as a foreign service officer on Sept. 11, 2011 – 10 years after the terrorist attacks that changed America.
ELHAI: The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan shaped my early life in many ways. And being part of a dedicated team of professionals who work hard to ensure that things like this don't happen again in the future was also something I cared about and worked towards for 14 years.
KELEMEN: Externally, he would like to give Americans a chance to see the work of an American diplomat. So we're talking about his first tour in Moscow, where he and his colleagues helped complete adoptions while Russian President Vladimir Putin banned Americans from adopting Russian children.
ELHAY: And there are families in the United States that have been made whole by these efforts. There are children who grew up in loving homes who would not have had it any other way because of the work we have done.
(Sings in Kazakh).
KELEMEN: Elhai is a bluegrass musician who learned Kazakh traditional songs as part of his public diplomacy in Kazakhstan. He says he was trying to change the perception of Americans in the former Soviet country, which is awash in Russian disinformation.
ELHAI: I hope I've made it a little easier for Americans to do business in this country, to travel to this country, and for us to be able to pursue policies with the government of this country that are in the best interest of the United States.
KELEMEN: Back in the U.S., he worked on technology and science diplomacy and then the environment, in an office that was downsized when Secretary of State Marco Rubio reorganized the State Department to streamline what Rubio called a bloated bureaucracy. Elhai had already left that office and thought he was safe while undergoing French language training for his next assignment.
ELHAY: Many of us expected up to this point that the fact that we were already working in different jobs and doing different things meant that we would not be affected by the reorganization. But this was a mistake.
KELEMEN: He watched as the State Department welcomed a new class of foreign service officers while his own career was cut short.
Michelle Kelemen, NPR News, State Department.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
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