'That Wasn't True, Was It?': Chris Van Hollen Grills State Department Official About His Testimony

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At a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Wednesday, Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) asked Deputy Secretary of State for Management and Resources Michael Rigas about statements he made in a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on Tuesday.

Transcript

00:00Senator Van Hollen. Thank you Senator Daines. Welcome Mr. Deputy Secretary. Thank you Senator.

00:07Secretary Rubio claimed that these big layoffs were quote a deliberate step to reorganize the

00:14State Department while a senior official promised to carry them out in a manner that preserves the

00:20dignity of federal employees. In practice the process has been badly botched, wasteful, and

00:27deeply disrespectful of the department's workforce. I heard the figures thrown

00:34around earlier about about 76,000 State Department employees. You know very well

00:39Mr. Deputy Secretary over 50,000 of them are Foreign Service Nationals who helped

00:44do everything from maintain embassies and consulates to a lot of essential work. So

00:49that's a very misleading number. We have 14,000 plus Foreign Service officers, 12,000

00:55civil servants and of those civil servants about a thousand have been fired. These

01:01are employees with expertise in critical minerals, artificial intelligence, human

01:05rights, and consular affairs were let go along with those that were fluent, are

01:11fluent in languages like Chinese, Arabic, Russian, and Farsi. Many of whom have

01:16received their training at taxpayer expense. Staff on parental leave were dismissed

01:22including one person who had given birth just 12 hours earlier. The department

01:28used cheap procedural tricks to fire career officers with no regard for veteran

01:36status, performance, or tenure directly contradicting Congress's intent. And at the

01:42same time senior leadership failed to show up to thank these patriotic employees. One

01:48Trump appointed Deputy Assistant Secretary took the day off as her team working on

01:52Afghan resettlement picked up pink slips. And while Secretary Rubio met with ASEAN

01:58counterparts in Malaysia, the team that had prepared his briefing materials in the

02:03Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs was being fired. Mr. Secretary, I hope you'll

02:10agree that you have a duty to tell the truth to Congress. Do you?

02:14Oh, certainly. Okay. Well, you testified in the House yesterday and you testified and I'm

02:18quoting, my understanding is we did not make any cuts in the Consular Affairs

02:23Bureau, unquote. But you did make cuts in the Consular Affairs Bureau, did you not?

02:27So right after I said that statement, the second part of that, the sentence

02:30immediately after that, I clarified and I said we did not cut anyone who was doing

02:36passport adjudications or customer service. The cuts in the Consular Affairs Bureau

02:43were to administrative functions, not to any of the customer service. Well, my

02:47understanding, the Secretary will just, there's gonna be a lot of, you know, review

02:50of all this, is that you fired about a hundred staffers, including teams that

02:55investigate passport and visa fraud. You also said in your House testimony that

03:01with respect to the office that prepared the Secretary for his trip overseas, none of

03:05the people who prepped him were terminated. That wasn't true, was it? So the people in,

03:09what I said was the people in the country bureaus were not let go. They said the

03:14people who prepared him. So he was prepared by all the people who were in

03:19those country bureaus and to the extent that the ASEAN Bureau, all of the

03:23regional, all these kind of regional offices were absorbed or the functions

03:27were absorbed by the country specific and regional offices. With respect, I think

03:33that the message suggested that folks had been preparing the Secretary for that

03:38important trip, that none of them had been fired, but clearly, clearly does. But let me, I gotta go on the Secretary.

03:45You know, that's possible. There's a lot of people who can contribute to, and when the

03:49Secretary travels, it's, you know, the entire organization steps in to support his

03:54travel. So is it possible that someone who contributed in some way to his trip was

03:58part of a reduction in force? Certainly that's possible. Let me, you, you also said

04:02that the quote, reorganization affected only the domestic footprint of the State

04:07Department. But in fact, some employees were fired after arriving at their

04:14overseas assignments. Isn't that true? So to the extent people were, were rift based

04:20on the assignment that they held as of May 29th, we were not able to, people, some

04:28had onward assignments, but the nature of the rift was that we had to pick a date for

04:33where people were as of May 29th. And within, so the State Department Secretary said, nevertheless,

04:40we're going to send you and your families overseas, and their families had moved overseas,

04:45and they were rift. Let me just turn to one last issue, because I've heard repeatedly

04:48the suggestion that, you know, all of these decisions were based on performance and that

04:54the best people were selected. Um, isn't it the case that in some offices you had a competition

05:03of one? Like one person competing against themselves?

05:08Sir, I, I'd be happy to, you know, go over the, the, the rift registers with you.

05:13I'm just, I just would like an answer to my question. Isn't it the case-

05:16There's no way for me to, to know, when we're looking at 1500 offices, if there was, is it likely

05:21that there was probably one office that had one, one or two people, and another one that

05:25had 50 or 150 people? You know, it's a big organization. Some offices-

05:29Yeah, it's a big organization. And so, you know, when you fire 13,000, 1300 people, um,

05:35you know, it's, it's understandable that we didn't go through a deliberate process. I don't,

05:39I don't buy that, Mr. Deputy Secretary. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

05:44Thank you, Senator.

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