Free Republic

The State Department informed U.S.-based employees on Thursday that it would soon begin laying off nearly 2,000 workers after the recent Supreme Court decision allowing the Trump administration to move forward with mass job cuts as part of its efforts to downsize the federal workforce. The agency's reorganization plan was first unveiled in April by Secretary of State Marco Rubio to eliminate functions and offices the department considered to be redundant. In February, President Donald Trump issued an executive order directing Rubio to revamp the foreign service to ensure that the president's foreign policy is "faithfully" implemented. Employees affected by...

A federal judge in California has halted the Trump administration’s effort to dismantle the State Department’s Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (R-FIMI) Hub, formerly known as the Global Engagement Center (GEC). In a June 13 order, US District Judge Susan Illston declared that the planned elimination of the unit, part of a broader push by the administration to downsize the federal government, violates an earlier injunction. Secretary of State Marco Rubio may have prematurely celebrated the end of R-FIMI back in April when he said the censorship unit was “dead.” Despite his announcement, legal barriers remain in place, preserving...

Vote Coming to Confirm Anti-gun Radical -- "Guns Kill Civil Society," says State Department Nominee Tuesday, June 23, 2009 Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has scheduled a Wednesday vote on a State Department nominee who supports gun control on a global scale. While advocates of the Second Amendment have come to expect that appointees of President Barack Obama would be hostile to the rights of gun owners, the president's nominee for legal advisor to the State Department reaches a whole new level of anti-gun extremism. Harold Hongju Koh, who served at the State Department under the Clinton administration, is a...

A former State Department budget analyst has pleaded guilty to embezzling more than $650,000 from the agency over a two-year span, according to the US Attorney’s Office in Washington, DC. Levita Almuete Ferrer, 64, of Maryland, admitted to abusing her signature authority over a State Department checking account between March 2022 and April 2024 in her capacity as a senior budget analyst in the department’s Office of the Chief of Protocol. She wrote 60 checks to herself and three checks to someone else she had a personal relationship with, prosecutors said. She printed and signed each check before depositing all...

Former National Security Advisor Mike Waltz was photographed checking his Signal chat the day before President Donald Trump announced he was stepping down from the role. Reuters published photos of Waltz during a Wednesday cabinet meeting checking his Signal account. Chats with newly-appointed National Security Advisor Marco Rubio and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard could be seen on his phone. U.S. National Security Advisor Mike Waltz is seen checking his mobile phone while attending a cabinet meeting held by U.S. President Donald Trump at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., April 30, 2025. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein pic.twitter.com/gQAvgypVFf — Idrees...

WASHINGTON -- Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah's historic trip to Crawford, Texas, this week ought to provoke Americans to plumb some of the deeper reasons behind the yawning U.S./Saudi estrangement. The "Arab street," according to every analyst here from the region, is increasingly anti-American. Their stories relate the skewed pictures most countries are getting about America -- from satellite-carried Israeli attacks on Palestinians to the often vulgar and sexually explicit American commercial TV programs sent around the world. But when one searches for the failure of American influence in the Middle East, one does not have to look far. We are...

JUST IN - U.S. State Department terminates U.S. support of Ukraine energy grid restoration — NBC

What’s so wonderful, however, is that this is the actual guy! He may be the only celebrity I truly want to meet…

An LGBTQ group in Ecuador tapped into a $25,000 grant from the Biden State Department to produce a two-day drag workshop intended to promote diversity and inclusion abroad. Footage obtained by The Post showed drag queens donning makeup, strutting around topless wearing nothing but pasties and crowing about how the displays could be used as a “political tool.” Fundacion Dialogo Diverso, a nongovernmental organization that aims to promote democracy and the “LGBTIQ+ population” of the South American country, organized the drag show and published footage of it last July. The State Department footed some of the bill for the show...

“The DOGE team is working on canceling those payments now.”

According to USA Spending, a site that tracks how and where taxpayer dollars being spent, at least $2,315 worth of grants from the Biden State Department have gone to the Nepal Federation of Sexual and Gender Minorities between April 16, 2023 and this week. Never mind, apparently, that the United States is nearly $32,000,000,000,000 in debt and we're potentially days away from Biden bumbling his way into the first default in U.S. history. Nope, the Biden administration is still throwing taxpayer dollars at woke causes around the globe. The description of how the State Department grant funds — read: taxpayer...

House Republicans who have led a nearly two-year investigation into a $500,000 State Department grant to an organization that promotes humanism and secularism are pressing the agency to conduct more diligent oversight after it admitted that the organization may have misused taxpayer funds.Rep. Mike McCaul, a Texas Republican who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and Chris Smith, a New Jersey Republican who heads the panel’s human rights subcommittee, have accused the State Department of trying to promote atheism overseas under the guise of advancing religious pluralism, a longtime U.S. foreign policy priority. Rep. Brian Mast, a Florida Republican who...

This comes as an email was sent to USAID staffers saying that "At the direction of Agency leadership" the headquarters facilities "will be closed to Agency personnel on Monday, Feb. 3." The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is reportedly being merged with the State Department, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio will serve as USAID’s acting administrator. According to CBS News senior White House reporter Jennifer Jacobs, sources said that USAID will be moved under the purview of the State Department, which will bring cuts to the workforce. It will remain a humanitarian aid entity. IMAGE According to...

A former senior policy adviser to President Barack Obama has been arrested and accused of child sex crimes in Great Britain. According to court documents, Rahamim 'Rami' Shy, a 46-year-old resident of New Jersey, stands accused of arranging a child sex offense, in addition to charges of possessing indecent images of children, according to a report from The Daily Mail. Shy, a US citizen, who lives in New Jersey, worked for the White House under president Barack Obama and secretary of state Hillary Clinton, was arrested in late February by Bedfordshire Police. He was charged the following day and appeared...

…It’s a transformational moment. The United States, I think, is now, as President Trump pointed out last night and I believe deeply, we are headed into a new era that I think will make the world a safer place. We have a President who yesterday – President Trump made clear in his inaugural speech that one of the primary goals of American foreign policies is the promotion of peace – of course peace through strength, peace and always without abandoning our values. But I think it’s extraordinary that it’s something that needs to be said and hasn’t been said enough...

Rubio’s move here shows the federal workforce there’s new management across the federal government and that business as usual has come to an end. It also could upset some career bureaucrats in a Department where it’s commonplace to travel and deal with other countries. But the effort signals a broader push by the new administration to ensure that any and all federal government activities align with Trump’s agenda and vision–especially on the international stage.

The State Department grossly mishandled its suspension of scandal-plagued Iran envoy Robert Malley, allowing him to continue accessing classified information and sensitive data after he was disciplined, according to an inspector general report reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon. The department's assistant inspector general gathered congressional staffers Wednesday afternoon for a closed-door briefing on the agency’s missteps after Malley had his security clearance pulled in 2023 for mishandling classified information. The briefing revealed that Malley was permitted to engage in classified activities even after his clearance was pulled, representing a breach of federal protocol, according to attendees. Malley was also...

Ryan Routh, the suspected Donald Trump assassin, was interviewed by U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials when he returned from Ukraine last year and flagged for further investigation based on spontaneous comments he made to agents, but the Homeland Security Department declined to act, Just the News has confirmed. The June 2023 encounter with Routh at the Honolulu airport is confirmed in U.S. border entry records reviewed by Just the News and is latest tale of missed law enforcement opportunities dating 2019 to stop or further investigation the alleged would-be assassin. [snip] The memo stated that the Ukraine advocate was...

You may ask yourself, is it worth one of the best American non-fiction writers producing a book of just under 600 pages on an arrogant and abrasive egotist whose highest sustained rank in the State Department was that of a lowly assistant secretary? The answer is unabashedly yes. This is a remarkable work about a remarkable, if deeply flawed, statesman whose career was intimately intertwined with the 50 years of American decline from Vietnam to Afghanistan. Nearly all biographies have long, boring stretches you want to skip. This one has none. The access to Richard Holbrooke’s papers and to the...

Hunter refers to “my guys upcoming travels” in his email to business partner Devon Archer dated April 13, 2014, one week before Joe visited Ukraine as vice president. It was an uncharacteristically sophisticated email, listing 22 points about Ukraine’s political situation, with detailed analysis of the upcoming election and anticipating an escalation of Russia’s “destabilization campaign.” Unlike anything else written by Hunter in thousands of documents during the nine years covered in the laptop, the email has the distinct flavor of an official briefing, or perhaps even a classified one. An artificial-intelligence analysis of the email shows a stark difference...