Senior State Department officials have drawn up plans to close a dozen consulates overseas by this summer and are considering shutting down many more missions, in what could be a blow to the U.S. government’s efforts to build partnerships and gather intelligence, American officials say.
The department also plans to lay off many local citizens who work for its hundreds of missions. Those workers make up two-thirds of the agency’s work force, and in many countries they form the foundation of U.S. diplomats’ knowledge of their environments.
The shrinking is part of both President Trump’s larger slashing of the federal government and his “America First” foreign policy, in which the United States ends or curtails once-important ways of exercising global influence, including through democracy, human rights and aid work.
The moves come at a time when China, the main rival of America, has overtaken the United States in number of global diplomatic posts. China has forged strong ties across nations, especially in Asia and Africa, and exerts greater power in international organizations.
Any broad shutdowns of missions, especially entire embassies, would hinder the work of large parts of the federal government and potentially compromise U.S. national security.
Embassies house officers from the military, intelligence, law enforcement, health, commerce, trade, treasury and other agencies, all of whom monitor developments in the host nation and work with local officials to counter everything from terrorism to infectious disease to collapsing currencies.
The prospect of wide cuts has already generated some anxiety within the Central Intelligence Agency. The vast majority of undercover American intelligence officers work out of embassies and consulates, posing as diplomats, and the closure of diplomatic posts would reduce the C.I.A.’s options for where to position its spies.
The cuts come as the State Department is hemorrhaging senior staff members via voluntary resignations, and a hiring freeze means the work force is shrinking through attrition. A current five-week course mainly for senior career diplomats, including ambassadors, choosing to retire has about 160 people in it, one of the largest cohorts of retiring officers in recent memory, one American official said.
About 700 employees — 450 of them career diplomats — have handed in resignation papers in the first two months of this year, the official said. That is an astonishing rate: Before 2025, about 800 people had resigned over an entire year.
The efforts to cut diplomatic posts and overseas staffing are part of an internal campaign to reduce the State Department’s operations budget, perhaps by as much as 20 percent, according to two U.S. officials with knowledge of the evolving discussions. Like others who spoke for this article, they discussed the sensitive plans on the condition of anonymity.
The possible cuts and related proposals could evolve as internal debate continues.
The process has been accelerated by a team led by Elon Musk, which has embedded itself in government agencies in the hunt for what it calls government waste. One member of the team, Edward Coristine, a 19-year-old engineer who publicly goes by “Big Balls,” is in the State Department helping to direct the budget cuts at the agency. Its budget and employee numbers are tiny compared with those of the Pentagon.
A memo circulating within the department proposes closing a dozen consulates, mainly in Western Europe, according to three U.S. officials who have seen or been briefed on the memo. That action is occurring as Mr. Trump distances the United States from its democratic allies in Europe in favor of strengthening relations with Russia.
The United States’ 271 global diplomatic posts lag behind China’s 274, but the United States currently has an edge in Europe, according to a study by the Lowy Institute.
The State Department notified two congressional committees last month of the closures. And on Monday, department officials told the committees that they also planned to close a consulate in Gaziantep, Turkey, which has been a hub for U.S. officials to work with refugees from neighboring Syria and humanitarian aid groups there.
Those consulates are small operations, usually with one or two American diplomats and a staff of local citizens. But they help collect and disseminate information in places away from capitals, and issue visas.
In mid-February, Secretary of State Marco Rubio sent a memo to chiefs of mission, who are usually ambassadors, telling them to ensure that staffing at overseas posts was “kept to the minimum necessary to implement the president’s foreign policy priorities.” He also said any positions left vacant for two years should be abolished, said a U.S. official who has seen the memo.
A cable sent from Washington on Wednesday to global missions tells all employees to look for “waste, fraud and abuse,” the phrase that Mr. Musk uses to justify his deep cuts across the government. Officials are told to help with Mr. Musk’s mission by reviewing all contracts that cost $10,000 to $250,000, said a U.S. official who has seen the cable.
That could contribute to a proposed slashing of up to 20 percent of the State Department’s operating budget. The U.S. official said the phrase “across the board” cuts has been used, but it is unclear what that means. Under one proposal, the work of shuttered embassies could be absorbed by another embassy in the same region, or by a regional mission hub.
The plan to close a dozen consulates mainly in Western Europe is more concrete. State Department officials have shared a list with Congress, though it could still change. The list includes consulates in Florence, Italy; Strasbourg, France; Hamburg, Germany; and Ponta Delgada, Portugal. It also includes a consulate in Brazil, according to a U.S. official who has seen the list. Some details of the planned closures were reported earlier by Politico.
“The State Department continues to assess our global posture to ensure we are best positioned to address modern challenges on behalf of the American people,” the agency said in a statement on Thursday when asked about the various proposed changes.
In his remarks to employees on his first day at the department, Mr. Rubio said that he valued the diplomatic corps, but that “there will be changes.”
“The changes are not meant to be destructive; they’re not meant to be punitive,” he said. “The changes will be because we need to be a 21st-century agency that can move, by a cliché that’s used by many, at the speed of relevance.”
Since then, Mr. Rubio has overseen drastic foreign aid cuts and allowed Mr. Musk and Pete Marocco, a divisive political appointee, to fire or place on leave thousands of employees at the United States Agency for International Development, a sister agency to the State Department. That has raised doubts among diplomats over Mr. Rubio’s commitment.
The unease among diplomats is further fueled by the fact that they have seen no sign that Mr. Rubio has tried to push back against Mr. Trump’s efforts to weaken democratic Ukraine and embrace Russia, which could signal a broader acquiescence to White House directives. Diplomats have noted a viral photo of Mr. Rubio slouched stone-faced on a couch in the Oval Office last Friday as Mr. Trump shouted at Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine.
Employees in the State Department’s Foreign and Civil Services are bracing for rounds of layoffs. The department has about 76,000 employees, with 50,000 of those local citizens abroad. Of the rest, about 14,000 are trained diplomats who rotate overseas, called Foreign Service officers, and 10,000 are members of the Civil Service and work mostly out of Washington.
The chiefs of mission were asked by senior department officials to submit a list by mid-February of the bare minimum number of local citizens they would need to maintain mission operations, a U.S. official said.
Diplomats and civil servants could be pushed out through reduction-in-force orders, a mechanism that government agencies can use to lay off workers. Another U.S. official said those kinds of orders are supposed to take into account seniority and job performance.
In recent weeks, a list of 700 Civil Service workers who potentially could be fired circulated within the department, but so far only 18 who were on probationary status have been let go, a U.S. official said.
One attempt to cut workers has been rolled back for now. In early February, the department issued orders to contracting companies to end the work of 60 contractors in the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor. The companies put the workers, who include tech and area specialists, on unpaid leave. But after internal discussions, the bureau asked most or all of them to return this week.
Top officials are discussing consolidating parts of the department. One proposal would downgrade, through a merger, the democracy and human rights bureau as well as bureaus working on counternarcotics and refugee and migration issues. The department’s office of foreign aid and the tiny remnants of U.S.A.I.D. would be put under the same umbrella.
Officials have also proposed merging some of the department’s regional bureaus. Those are run by assistant secretaries in Washington and oversee policy and operations across large swaths of the globe. The bureaus are central to American diplomacy.
