Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently fired 1,350 employees. The “reductions in force” brought tears, outrage, proclamations of resistance to “fascism,” and disbelief that federal workers could lose their “lifetime” jobs. [emphasis, links added]
Losing one’s job and income is hard, disruptive, and demoralizing – which helps explain why the RIFs received extensive coverage across the United States and overseas, and why most stories emphasized the anger and grievances of fired workers, their colleagues, and unions.
However, equally important perspectives and realities must also be recognized.
State Department employment rolls had grown by 22,874 over 17 years: from 57,340 US and international employees in 2007 to 80,214 in 2024. The July layoffs were 5.9% of this growth; 1.7% of the total 2024 employees.
The downsizing was part of a Trump-Rubio reorganization to streamline a bloated State Department and align it more closely with the administration’s policies and priorities, partly by eliminating or merging bureaus and offices, including those focused on DEI, transgender, and “climate crisis” issues.
It recognizes the Trump, Vance, and American voters’ belief in (and commitment to) reducing the size of government and the scope of its control over our lives, livelihoods, energy, and personal choices.
Private-sector companies often have to trim payrolls or shut down entirely, mostly with little more than local coverage. Journalist Amy Curtis noted that she lost her first nursing job when her medical facility closed, partly because of Medicare’s “abysmal reimbursement rates.
“There were no tearful parades for us essential workers,” she observed. No politicians or journalists railed about how “unfair and dangerous it was to fire nurses, respiratory therapists and doctors” – and send them, support staff, spouses and children into food centers, poverty, debt, and search for new employment.
Job losses triggered by government policies and edicts receive even less attention, especially from Democrats and the legacy media.
On Day One of his presidency, Joe Biden shut the Keystone Pipeline project down, terminating up to 11,000 manufacturing and construction jobs.
Between 2008 and 2016, the coal industry lost over 80,000 jobs – casualties of cheaper, less polluting natural gas electricity generation and, even more so, the Obama Administration’s “war on coal.”
Billionaire Michael Bloomberg gave $174 million to the Sierra Club and other radical greens to finance their Beyond Coal campaign and buttress the Obama efforts.
The 2019 presidential candidate Joe Biden said that the jobless miners should just “learn to code. Anybody who can go down 3,000 feet in a mine can sure as hell learn to program!” Combined federal programs promised a paltry $7 million in job retraining aid.
The Obama EPA went after coal-fired generating plants with equal zeal, using questionable-to-bogus claims about climate change, mercury, and fine particulates to justify its actions. One victim was the Navajo Nation’s coal-fired power plant and Kayenta mine, mainstays of the tribal economy.
The Navajos lost 700 jobs and $40 million in annual revenue. There were no viable replacements. So much for “environmental justice” for indigenous people.
Not Just Jobs And Revenues
These government actions also brought reduced living standards and healthcare … and increased risks of depression, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, alcohol and drug use, spousal and child abuse, and premature death within involuntarily unemployed families and communities.
Once the Obama and Biden Administrations demolished coal, they went after natural gas and those jobs.
Federal, state, and local government restrictions on public gatherings during Covid ruined thousands of bars, gyms, restaurants, and other small businesses, costing millions of jobs and incomes.
NY Governor Andrew Cuomo forced nursing homes to accept elderly Covid patients, likely killing thousands – and then buried data about the actual disease and death tolls. Some lockdowns lasted almost two years.
Thousands of military personnel were booted for refusing to get vaccines that evidence increasingly showed posed myocarditis and other risks for young men who had little to fear from COVID-19.
On a far larger scale, the grand scheme for a legislated, mandated “transition” to “cheaper” wind and solar power would mean rising electricity costs, widespread environmental impacts, and millions of lost jobs.
The final votes on the Big, Beautiful Budget Bill restored many federal wind and solar subsidies. A slim majority of senators and representatives bought into claims that lost federal funding would jeopardize investments and projects in their districts and states, put hundreds of thousands of “green energy” jobs at risk, and cause electricity prices to surge, threatening still more jobs.
In the real world, wind and solar power are far more expensive than coal, gas, hydro, or nuclear electricity.
The higher costs are paid directly through higher utility bills or indirectly via higher taxes to finance subsidies. Both are often cleverly disguised or hidden. But the result worldwide is that electricity costs rise in tandem with a country or state’s reliance on wind and solar power.
Germany and Britain have among the most “nameplate” megawatts of wind and solar globally – and the highest electricity prices: 3x higher than average US prices; up to 4x higher than in 30 US states.
That’s why so many European automotive, glass, and steel companies are slashing payrolls or closing shop.
Every megawatt of wind and solar must be backed up with expensive, duplicative, reliable power generation for the hours, days, and weeks when wind and sunshine fail to do their job.
And wind and solar installations are typically far from data and urban centers that need their electricity, requiring long transmission lines ($1-8 million per mile) and numerous transformers that adjust voltage up for transmission and down for consumption (up to $4 million per unit).
Backup power can come from coal or natural gas generators – or from vastly more expensive (and fire-prone) grid-scale batteries that would cost American taxpayers and ratepayers trillions of dollars.
All those costs get added to utility and tax bills, making it especially hard for energy-intensive hospitals, factories, and other businesses to afford electricity without raising prices, reducing services, issuing pink slips, closing their doors, or all of the above.
And those “hundreds of thousands of American green-energy jobs” are mostly in constructing, maintaining, removing, and landfilling these installations.
The mining, processing, and manufacturing jobs (for the incomprehensible amounts of raw materials needed to make all this “renewable” energy equipment) are mostly overseas, primarily in China, mostly burn coal for fuel, and have few or no pollution controls, workplace safety, or child labor regulations.
None of this includes the costs of croplands, wildlife habitats and scenic vistas destroyed for “clean” energy installations, birds and bats killed by turbine blades, or reduced living standards resulting from recurrent blackouts, higher utility costs that make proper heating and air conditioning out of reach for many, and having electricity when it’s available instead of when we need it.
Americans are right to be more concerned about all of this than about State Department layoffs.
We clearly need fewer federal offices and employees promoting “climate crisis” and “renewable energy” reports, GIGO computer models, DEI, junk science, and fearmongering.
Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of books and articles on energy, environment, climate change, and human rights issues.
Top image via ABC News/YouTube screencap
