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The State Department's union says the Foreign Service is in crisis. Morale has hit record lows, and the Trump administration has cut thousands of jobs by dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development and reorganizing the State Department. The Foreign Service officers who were let go in July got a temporary reprieve from a U.S. judge. They've been on administrative leave for months. NPR's Michele Kelemen tells us about one of them.
MICHELE KELEMEN, BYLINE: Wren Elhai was supposed to be heading to West Africa for his next assignment. Instead, he was laid off in July, along with more than 240 other Foreign Service officers and more than a thousand civil servants. Elhai knows there are layoffs all the time in the U.S. economy, but he says the State Department is different from a tech company. It's more like the military.
WREN ELHAI: When you're a computer programmer and you get laid off from one tech company, you're still a computer programmer. You get to have a career. You go off to find another job. When you're a diplomat and you get laid off from the State Department, you're no longer a diplomat. Like, we lost our professional identities and our careers with that layoff.
KELEMEN: Elhai is a Russian and Chinese speaker who was sworn in to be a Foreign Service officer on September 11, 2011 - 10 years after the terrorist attacks that changed America.
ELHAI: The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan shaped a lot of my young adulthood. And being part of a dedicated cadre of professionals who are working hard to make sure that things like that don't happen in the future was also certainly something I cared about and worked on for 14 years.
KELEMEN: Now on the outside, he'd like to give Americans a window into the work of a U.S. diplomat. So we talk about his first tour, in Moscow, where he and his colleagues helped finalize adoptions just as Russian President Vladimir Putin banned Americans from adopting Russian children.
ELHAI: And there's families across the U.S. that are whole because of those efforts. There are kids that grew up in a loving family who wouldn't have otherwise because of the work that we did.
(Singing in Kazakh).
KELEMEN: Elhai is a bluegrass musician who learned Kazakh traditional songs as part of his public diplomacy in Kazakhstan. He says he was trying to shift perceptions about Americans in a former Soviet country that is awash with Russian disinformation.
ELHAI: I hope I made it a little easier for Americans to do business in that country, to travel to that country, for us to pursue policies with the government of that country that are in the interests of the United States.
KELEMEN: Back in the U.S., he worked on technology and science diplomacy and then on the environment, in an office that was cut when Secretary of State Marco Rubio reorganized the State Department to streamline what Rubio called a bloated bureaucracy. Elhai had left that office already and thought he was safe, getting French language training for his next assignment.
ELHAI: Many of us had the expectation right up until that date that the fact that we already were in different jobs, doing different things meant that the reorganization would not affect us. But that was mistaken.
KELEMEN: He's watched as the State Department has welcomed in a new class of Foreign Service officers, while his own career was cut short.
Michele Kelemen, NPR News, the State Department.
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