Trump administration weighs closure of nearly a dozen diplomatic missions abroad

By Humeyra Pamuk

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The U.S. State Department is preparing to shut down almost a dozen consulates that are mainly in Western Europe in the coming months and is looking to reduce its workforce globally, multiple U.S. officials said on Thursday.

The State Department is also looking into potentially merging a number of its expert bureaus at its headquarters in Washington that are working in areas such as human rights, refugees, global criminal justice, women's issues and efforts to counter human trafficking, the officials said.

Reuters reported last month that U.S. missions around the world had been asked to look into reducing both American and locally employed staff by at least 10% as Trump and billionaire Elon Musk unleash an unprecedented cost-cutting effort across the U.S. federal workforce.

The Republican president wants to ensure his bureaucracy is fully aligned with his "America First" agenda. Last month he issued an executive order to revamp the U.S. foreign service to ensure "faithful and effective" implementation of his foreign policy agenda.

During his electoral campaign, he had repeatedly pledged to "clean out the deep state" by firing bureaucrats that he deems disloyal.

Critics say the potential cuts in the U.S. diplomatic footprint coupled with the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development that provided billions of dollars worth of aid globally risk undermining American leadership and leave a dangerous vacuum for adversaries like China and Russia to fill.

Trump and Musk say the U.S. government is too big and American taxpayer-funded aid has been spent in a wasteful and fraudulent way.

Leipzig, Hamburg and Dusseldorf in Germany, Bordeaux, Rennes, Lyon and Strasbourg in France, and Florence in Italy were among a list of smaller consulates that the State Department is considering shutting down, three officials said, adding that could still change as some staff were making a case for them to stay open.

U.S. consulates in Belo Horizonte in Brazil and Ponta Delgada in Portugal were also on the list, the officials said.

"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," a State Department spokesperson said.

"ARBITRARY CUTS"

Officials said the department had notified Congress on Monday that it plans to shutter its branch in Turkey's southeastern city of Gaziantep, a location from which Washington has supported humanitarian work in northern Syria.

"Some of these are so small the savings from cutting is quite insignificant," one U.S. official said. "It just fits with the theme of the administration's performative and arbitrary cuts without any method or strategy."

In Washington, dozens of contractors at the department's bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor have been terminated in recent weeks. The office at the department overseeing the resettlement of Afghans in the United States has been told to develop plans to close by April, Reuters has reported.

Several dozen contractors in that bureau were being terminated.

Diplomats working on Asia affairs were asked to submit a brief assessment to justify the continuation of U.S. missions in the region. An early February internal State Department email asked officials to make a short summary addressing the mission's diplomatic importance and relevance to the "America First agenda", according to the email, seen by Reuters.

The department operates in more than 270 diplomatic missions worldwide with a total workforce of nearly 70,000, according to its website. About 45,000 are locally employed staff, 13,000 are members of the foreign service and 11,000 are civil service employees.

Following Trump's sweeping freeze on almost all U.S. foreign aid, thousands of USAID staff and contractors were terminated or put on leave, and billions of dollars worth of life-saving humanitarian aid has been cut.

(Reporting by Humeyra Pamuk, Editing by Rosalba O'Brien and Edwina Gibbs)