The State Department announced plans to lay off some U.S.-based diplomats and other employees, after the Supreme Court ruled that the Trump administration can go ahead with plans to slash the size of the federal workforce.

The decision, detailed in a memo by Deputy Secretary of State Michael Rigas, didn’t specify the number of State Department staff who would be laid off. But the department had earlier told Congress it planned to cut about 2,700, or 15%, of its 18,000 U.S.-based workforce through a combination of resignations and layoffs.

“The objective from the start was clear: focus resources on policy priorities and eliminate redundant functions,” Rigas said in the memo.

Senior State Department officials, briefing reporters on condition of anonymity, said the reorganization is meant to unwind a proliferation of Cold War-era offices they said are ill-suited to President Donald Trump’s “America First” foreign policy. They said it will consolidate redundant human resources, finance and accounting jobs.

They declined to provide details on the teams or number of people affected. But earlier reorganization plans called for downgrading the office that oversees democracy and human rights and shutting offices responsible for women’s issues, global health security, and diversity and inclusion.

The move comes with Secretary of State Marco Rubio in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, meeting with counterparts from Asia on issues including trade and security. He spoke Thursday with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov about the administration’s efforts to broker peace between Russia and Ukraine.

The department’s plans had been on hold pending the resolution of legal challenges to the Trump administration’s authority to conduct mass firings of federal workers. But the Supreme Court ruled that Trump can move ahead with those plans, lifting a court order that had blocked more than a dozen federal departments and agencies — including State — from slashing their workforces.

The American Foreign Service Association, both a union and a professional organization for foreign service officers, “unequivocally opposes the State Department’s unilateral changes to the Foreign Service workforce reduction procedures,” according to a statement before the announcement.

The group said the changes “seriously weaken America’s ability to conduct foreign policy at one of the most critical geopolitical moments in recent memory.”

State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce told reporters Thursday that the reorganization, which Rubio announced in April, “will ensure that the department moves at the speed of relevancy and restores the department to its roots of results-driven democracy.”

President Donald Trump took office aiming to reshape the federal government, targeting what he and allies refer to as “deep state” bureaucrats hostile to his agenda. The Department of Government Efficiency effort previously led by billionaire Elon Musk has worked to slash federal jobs, including through a deferred resignation plan that provides payments to workers who depart their agencies voluntarily.

The State Department has already weathered the dissolution of the U.S. Agency for International Development, which Musk derided as corrupt and irrevocably broken. Rubio, who Trump tapped as the acting administrator of USAID, in March directed the cancellation of 83% of the agency’s projects and the absorption of the rest into the State Department. The agency was formally closed earlier this month.

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(With assistance from Eric Martin.)

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