President Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio listen during an Oval Office meeting at the White House on July 16. Alex Brandon/AP hide caption
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Alex Brandon/AP
The State Department fired its top experts on the South China Sea and shuttered the office with a key focus on Indo-Pacific security amid a sweeping reorganization earlier this month, leaving gaps in knowledge and experience that are critical to U.S. interests in the region.
The cut comes as members of President Trump’s administration, as well as both Democratic and Republican lawmakers, continue to say security and free navigation of the South China Sea — a busy shipping passage for global trade — remain a priority.
For years, China has been aggressively asserting its territorial claims, from building artificial islands and military installations in the South China Sea, while also harassing fishing and oil exploration ships from the Philippines, Vietnam and other Pacific nations. And for years, the U.S. has worked with other countries in the region to push back.
“China’s actions undermine peace and stability in the region. The evidence for this is their growing willingness to use force to achieve their objectives — as seen in the South China Sea and around Taiwan while also undertaking a massive and unprecedented military buildup,” Elbridge Colby, the Pentagon’s top policy official, said in June. He has made countering China his top priority, arguing that the U.S. should refocus its military in the Western Pacific.
The Office of Multilateral Affairs within the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs managed U.S. engagement with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), coordinated diplomatic response to China’s aggression in the South China Sea and oversaw the Mekong River region, according to current and former officers. The office was cut along with dozens of others in the recent reduction in force that left more than 1,300 government workers without a job.
It was also the office that helped prepare Secretary of State Marco Rubio for his trip to Malaysia earlier this month for ASEAN-related meetings. The layoffs were announced while Rubio was traveling home from that trip.
“After he used us, he fired us,” one fired foreign affairs officer who focused on the South China Sea said. “It’s mind-boggling.”
NPR spoke to several members of the office who had been fired, who voiced concerns that their elimination would harm U.S. interests, and instead give China the upper hand. Many thought that even if the office was eliminated, they would be moved to other offices to continue their work. There was no indication in any of the termination letters employees received that performance was a factor; in fact, NPR verified that many of them recently received outstanding performance reviews. All spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid reprisal.
All of those fired from the office were civil service employees with years of expertise in the region. Civil servants tend to stay in positions for longer periods and over many administrations, while foreign service officers change position every two or three years.
One of the officers who was fired put it this way: “We are the consistency. We keep the train running while everyone rotates.”
In a statement to NPR, the State Department maintained that there are still teams covering needed issues, but in different offices, saying that mission-critical functions from any office eliminated will be integrated elsewhere.
But particularly as it relates to the South China Sea, it’s unclear who will perform some of these functions with the top experts now gone.
“You have people that are going to be making decisions that are poorly informed. They’re not going to know the potential risks of some of the options that they have,” said one fired officer.
Another fired State Department officer said that, despite a congressional notification in May that the office was planning to be cut, nothing was done to transfer information or expertise to another team: “What’s baffling to me is that no one was preparing for this. There was no planning, there was no coordination, and there was no preparation to hand over any of our office duties.”
The Trump administration has long said that containing Chinese aggression and maintaining free navigation of the South China Sea is a priority — a stance generally shared by both hawkish Republicans and Democrats alike. Just this week, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. traveled to Washington to meet with Trump and Rubio, underscoring the importance of the alliance between the two countries, particularly as it relates to the South China Sea.
Meanwhile, China has maintained an increasingly aggressive stance in the region. As recently as this week, Chinese aircraft carriers pushed farther into waters that had long been dominated by the U.S. military, in a series of drills reported by the Japanese military’s joint staff. And China has continued to increase its illegal claim to more and more waters, something the U.S. firmly rejected during the first Trump administration under then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
A narrative of American withdrawal
All of this has security and diplomacy experts who closely watch the region confused as to why the State Department would fire its experts on the topic, even if the office was slated for reorganization.
Gregory Poling, director of the Asian Maritime Transparency Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, calls the move “really harmful” for U.S. efforts in the region.
“You’re not going to pluck somebody else out of an unrelated bureau who knows the ins and outs of one of the most complicated issues in the world,” he says.
Poling says he also worries about the signal it sends to our allies in the region.
“It reinforces a narrative in the region of U.S. strategic withdrawal. Sure, we might still be sending the Navy out, but we’re not really interested in the diplomatic or the economic leadership that the region wants to see,” he says.
Piper Campbell, former diplomat and now chair of the Department of Foreign Policy and Global Security at American University, says she was “really disappointed” to hear about the decision to close the Office of Multilateral Affairs and particularly to fire the experts. She worries it puts the U.S. at a disadvantage, especially since that office specialized in working across several countries.
“It reduces our influence. It reduces our understanding of what’s happening in this important region, and it reduces both our security and our economic heft in the region,” Campbell says.
Others expressed concern that the move, especially in the context of recent tariffs imposed on many countries in the region along with the gutting of aid programs, might leave U.S. allies turning to China for help instead.
“If our chief goal is pushing back against Chinese expansionism — how does this help? I would argue it hurts,” says James Caruso, a former diplomat with many years focused in Southeast Asia.
Henrietta Levin, former deputy China coordinator for global affairs at the State Department in the Biden administration, echoes those worries, saying she was “surprised and somewhat concerned” by these specific cuts.
“I think these cuts eliminate tools that have been powerful in the United States,” she says. “At a time when China is doubling down on its own commitment to this competition and trying to win over countries in the Indo-Pacific, I would hope the United States would use every tool available.”
