State department plans mass layoffs with cuts to nearly 1,800 staff
Andrew Roth
The US state department has announced that it plans to move forward with mass layoffs as part of the most significant restructuring of the country’s diplomatic corps in decades. Officials say the cuts will align their mission with Donald Trump’s vision of America first.
The layoffs, which are commonly called reductions in force (or RIFs), along with voluntary redundancies, will affect nearly 15% of the state department’s domestic staff. A senior state department official said that was close to 1,800 people. The restructuring will also see several hundred bureaus merged or eliminated entirely. The department advises the president and leads the US in foreign policy issues.
The state department went forward with the layoffs, which were long expected, after the supreme court sided this week with the Trump administration against a federal judge’s hold on plans for mass government firings that could affect hundreds of thousands of federal employees.
“In the coming days, the department will be communicating to individuals affected by the reduction in force. First and foremost, we want to thank them for their dedication and service to the United States,” read a memo attributed to Michael Rigas, the deputy secretary for management and resources, announcing the layoffs.
Key events
Trump imposes new 35% tariff on goods from Canada
In the latest of a flurry of diktats sent to world leaders announcing new import tariffs, Donald Trump posted a letter on social media on Thursday addressed to Mark Carney, the prime minister of Canada, informing him that the US “will charge Canada a tariffs of 35%” starting on 1 August, “separate from all Sectoral Tariffs”.
In March, Trump imposed a 25% tariff on cars and auto parts imported from Canada. In June, he announced a 50% tariff on Canadian steel and aluminum imports. The new rates apply to all other goods.
Trump’s letter repeats his mistaken but frequently reiterated belief that tariffs are paid by foreign countries or businesses. In fact, tariffs are an import tax, paid by US importers, and often passed on to US consumers.
The new tariff rates set by Trump this week could all be reduced to zero if the administration loses its appeal later this month of an adverse ruling by the US Court of International Trade, which found in May that the president had acted beyond his legal authority by using emergency powers to impose tariffs in the absence of an actual emergency.
That hearing at the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington is scheduled for 10 am on 31 July.
Trump threatens to oppose any Republican who votes against defunding NPR and PBS
In a post on his social media platform, Donald Trump threatened to withhold his support from any Republican in Congress who does not vote to strip away previously appropriated funds to support non-partisan public broadcasting.
Clearly laying out his vision that it is the role of the legislative branch to obey his orders, Trump wrote that it is very important for Republicans to “adhere to my Recissions Bill and, in particular, DEFUND THE CORPORATION FOR PUBLIC BROADCASTING (PBS and NPR)”.
“Any Republican that votes to allow this monstrosity to continue broadcasting will not have my support or Endorsement,” the president of the United States instructed members of the co-equal branch he regards as subordinates.
The legislation is the first request by the Trump administration for Congress to claw back money it already has approved through annual spending bills. The bill reflects a list of cuts totaling $9.4bn that were requested by the office of management and budget. The bulk of the cuts – $8.3bn billion – are to foreign aid programs addressing global public health, international disaster assistance and hunger relief. The package also strips away all the funds for fiscal years 2026 and 2027 for public broadcasting, totaling $1.1bn.
The Senate is expected to vote on the rescission legislation, which passed the House by two votes, by next week.
Republican senators Lisa Murkowski, of Alaska, and Mike Rounds, of South Dakota, have both expressed qualms about eliminating public broadcasting from rural communities in their states.
Rounds, who is up for re-election in 2026, told CNN on Tuesday yesterday that he wants to protect “the radio stations in some of the rural areas that provide emergency services”.
Murkowski told reporters on Wednesday: “I don’t like the rescissions package as it is currently drafted. I’m a strong supporter of Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and I think our global health programs are important.” At an appropriations committee hearing on Thursday, in which she voted with Democrats to stop the White House from using money budgeted for a new FBI headquarters in Maryland to move the agency somewhere else, Murkowski said she was opposed to rescissions in general.
In May, Trump issued an executive order claiming that PBS and NPR “spread radical, woke propaganda disguised as ‘news’”.
Together the two broadcasters reach tens of millions of Americans, providing them with fact-based news and educational information at a time when the administration favors partisan outlets and produces deeply political, and often misleading or false, social media content.
Although NPR’s political reporting is rigorously non-partisan, its adherence to factual accuracy apparently alienated the Trump campaign last year to such an extent that its correspondent, Franco Ordoñez, was denied credentials to at least one Trump news conference.
Federal officers use force on protesters during immigration raids at California farms
Federal immigration officers, supported by national guard troops, used force against protesters, firing chemical munitions, during raids on two cannabis farms in California’s central coast area on Thursday, according to local news outlets and video posted on Instagram by immigrant-rights activists.
At a farm in Carpinteria, Salud Carbajal, a Democratic representative, was denied entry to the area by federal agents, a scene captured on video by the Santa Barbara Independent.
Congressman Salud Carbajal was denied access during a Homeland Security operation in Carpinteria. A very large crowd gathered at Foothill and Casitas Pass Road for about two hours. 10 people were reportedly taken away from a nearby cannabis farm. pic.twitter.com/wOFiQT7ZIc
— John Palminteri (@JohnPalminteri) July 10, 2025
“ICE was conducting a raid using disproportionate displays of force against local farm workers and our agricultural community,” Carbajal said in a statement after the incident. “As a member of Congress and representative of the Central Coast, I have the right to conduct oversight and see first-hand what ICE was doing here. As soon as I walked up, I was denied entry and was not allowed to pass. This was completely unacceptable.”
“And let me be clear,” Carbajal added, “these militarized ICE raids are not how you keep our communities safe. This kind of chaos only traumatizes families and tears communities apart. They are also a gross misuse of limited resources and a betrayal of the values that define us as Americans.”
Two members of the Carpinteria city council, Julia Mayer and Mónica Solórzano, were also present, they told the Santa Barbara Independent. As the officers pushed the crowd back, they threw a smoke grenade, causing Solórzano to fall and injure her right arm, she said.
“They were pushing toward each of us and we were standing,” Solórzano said. “They pushed us as a group into the ground.”
“It was loud,” Mayer said. “We were just trying to be out here to support our communities.”
Activists with 805 Immigrant Coalition sent out text alerts calling on community members to protect the workers and confronted the officers.
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The face-off with the federal officers was documented on Instagram by another group, VC Defensa, which describes itself as “a coalition of local organizations dedicated to protecting the immigrant and refugee population of Ventura County”.
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Carpinteria’s city council scheduled an emergency meeting to discuss the city’s response to the raids at 6pm local time on Thursday.
Arizona Democrat moves to codify ‘click-to-cancel’ rule into law
The senator Ruben Gallego, an Arizona Democrat, just introduced a one-page bill to codify into law the Federal Trade Commission’s “click to cancel” rule, to force companies to make it easy for consumers to cancel subscriptions, one day after a federal appeals court blocked the rule from going into effect.
During his successful 2024 campaign for the senate, Gallego hosted Lina Khan, the Biden administration’s FTC chair who devised the rule.
On Thursday morning, the Arizona senator shared a social media post by Khan, in which she explained how the rule had been blocked by industry pressure.
“Firms have been making people jump through endless hoops just to cancel a subscription, trapping Americans in needless bureaucracy and wasting their time & money,” she wrote.
The FTC, Khan explained, “began writing a ‘click-to-cancel’ rule promoting efficient cancellation, a rulemaking process that took 3+ years and required reviewing 16k comments & giving industry a chance to present their views at an FTC hearing”.
“Big business interests sued to block the ‘click-to-cancel’ rule – and Republican-appointed judges tossed it out, concluding that industry needed MORE time and process to explain why they opposed the rule,” Khan added.
“Too many companies are relying on shady fine print and confusing cancellation processes to lock customers into charges they never agreed to. They’re counting on customers to forget, give up, or get stuck in the fine print so they can keep charging their card every month,” Gallego said in a statement on his proposed legislation.
“This bill puts an end to that scam by giving the FTC’s Click-to-Cancel rule the full force of law so that people can cancel subscriptions just as easily as they sign up for them. It’s a commonsense fix that will save families money and stop businesses from trapping customers in subscriptions they don’t want, can’t use, or never meant to keep,” the senator added.
State department plans mass layoffs with cuts to nearly 1,800 staff
Andrew Roth
The US state department has announced that it plans to move forward with mass layoffs as part of the most significant restructuring of the country’s diplomatic corps in decades. Officials say the cuts will align their mission with Donald Trump’s vision of America first.
The layoffs, which are commonly called reductions in force (or RIFs), along with voluntary redundancies, will affect nearly 15% of the state department’s domestic staff. A senior state department official said that was close to 1,800 people. The restructuring will also see several hundred bureaus merged or eliminated entirely. The department advises the president and leads the US in foreign policy issues.
The state department went forward with the layoffs, which were long expected, after the supreme court sided this week with the Trump administration against a federal judge’s hold on plans for mass government firings that could affect hundreds of thousands of federal employees.
“In the coming days, the department will be communicating to individuals affected by the reduction in force. First and foremost, we want to thank them for their dedication and service to the United States,” read a memo attributed to Michael Rigas, the deputy secretary for management and resources, announcing the layoffs.
Murkowski sides with Democrats to block Trump from changing site of new FBI headquarters
The Senate appropriations committee narrowly voted to adopt an amendment on Thursday that blocks the Trump administration from changing the site of a new FBI headquarters building.
Lisa Murkowski, an Alaska Republican, cast the deciding vote on the amendment introduced by Chris Van Hollen, a Maryland Democrat, which bars the Trump administration from spending any of the previously appropriated $1.4bn in funds to move the FBI anywhere but the site in Greenbelt, Maryland, which was chosen in a competitive process.
Last week, the administration notified Congress that it intended to permanently relocate the FBI to the Ronald Reagan building in Washington DC instead of proceeding with the planned building in suburban Maryland.
Such an “unauthorized use of funds”, Van Hollen said in a statement, would have been “directly at odds with what has been passed by the Congress on a bipartisan basis” and would have set “a dangerous precedent for executive overreach into Congress’s power of the purse”.
The measure passed 15-14.
In her comments before the vote, Murkowski said that she had no information on how the administration had determined that the Reagan building was a secure enough location.
“I, for one, would like to know,” Murkowski said, “this is the right place and it’s the right place, not for a Trump administration, not for a Biden administration, not for a Jon Ossoff administration, but this is the right place for the FBI.”
Murkowski paused after her reference to the possibility that the Democratic senator from Georgia could be the next president.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to start any rumors,” she added to laughter from her colleagues.
Scotland braces for protests against Trump before rumored visit
Keir Starmer, the UK’s prime minister, has reportedly accepted an invitation to visit Donald Trump during the US president’s expected trip to Scotland this month, a source familiar with the plans told Reuters on Thursday.
There is, as yet, no word on the details of the rumored visit to the homeland of Trump’s mother, but Severin Carrell, the Guardian’s Scotland editor, reports that police in Scotland are gearing up for a possible visit to his golf resort in Aberdeenshire:
“It is thought Trump will officially open a new 18-hole golf course at his resort on the North Sea coast at Menie, north of Aberdeen, being named in honour of his mother, Mary Anne MacLeod Trump,” Severin reported on Wednesday.
“Planning is under way for a potential visit to Scotland later this month by the president of the United States,” assistant chief constable Emma Bond said. Police are bracing for likely large-scale protests, given Trump’s deep unpopularity in his mother’s homeland. There were demonstrations in Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen during Trump’s last official visit as president in 2018.
That year, Trump was greeted at his Turnberry golf resort in Scotland by a Greenpeace activist who paraglided directly over his head trailing a banner that read: “Trump: Well Below Par.” The scene was captured on video by the activist group and journalists.
Donald Trump’s arrival with the First Lady at his Turnberry golf course in Scotland has been met with a protest from the air. A Greenpeace paraglider propelled past him with a banner saying ‘Trump well below par’ – it was in protest at his stance on green issues. Watch video here pic.twitter.com/xvhLByfnYo
— Zora Suleman (@ZoraSuleman) July 14, 2018
Trump’s first visit to Scotland as a politician came the morning after the UK voted to leave the European Union. He hailed the result that morning, despite the fact that Brexit was opposed by nearly two-thirds of Scottish voters.
Trump, whose mother was from a remote part of Scotland (the Western Isles, where 55% of voters opposed leaving the EU), seemed oblivious to nationalist sentiment there that day, telling reporters the vote meant: “Basically, they took back their country.”
During his first official state visit to the UK as president in 2018, Trump started to claim, falsely, that his 2016 visit had been “the day before” the Brexit referendum, not the day after it, and took credit for having “predicted” the outcome. Trump’s obviously false claim about the date of a foreign visit baffled reporters who accompanied him on the trip.
In an Oval Office meeting with Ireland’s leader in 2019, as Brexit negotiations stalled, in part over the issue of the Irish border with the North of Ireland, Trump again repeated his fictional account of having visited Scotland before the Brexit vote, claiming that he had “predicted it” at a news conference at one of his golf courses in Scotland, which actually took place the day after the vote.
Oregon’s junior senator, Jeff Merkley, announced on Thursday that he is running for re-election next year, citing the threat posed by “Donald Trump and his Maga cronies”.
Merkley, a liberal Democrat, will turn 70 before election day in 2026, and his decision to run for a fourth term will not please party activists who are concerned that there are too many older Democrats in Congress. He was first elected to the senate in 2008.
Oregon’s senior senator, Democrat Ron Wyden, who is 76, was elected to a fifth term in 2022.
In an interview with the Washington Post in 2023, Merkley said that while he did not support calls for a mandatory retirement age for senators: “I do say to my team, when I am at that point, that pivot in my life, where you start to see the changes in my abilities, don’t let me run for re-election.”
Summary
The Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil filed a claim against the Trump administration seeking $20m in damages, alleging he was falsely imprisoned. The suit comes as Khalil, a lawful permanent resident who has not been charged with a crime, is out on bail and the administration continues to actively seek his removal from the US. The Thursday filing is a precusor to a lawsuit under the Federal Tort Claims Act. “They are abusing their power because they think they are untouchable. Unless they feel there is some sort of accountability, it will continue to go unchecked,” Khalil said in a statement.
Here’s what’s also happened so far today:
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A US district judge issued an injunction blocking Donald Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship, certifying a nationwide class of plaintiffs
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Pam Bondi, the US attorney general, pushed back against new evidence from a whistleblower suggesting Department of Justice lawyers were instructed to ignore court orders.
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US senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, said Kristi Noem was responsible for deaths related to flooding in Texas.
Texas attorney general Ken Paxton and his wife, state senator Angela Paxton, announced on Thursday they were getting divorced.
The Texas radio station KUT obtained the petition for divorce filed in Collin county. The petition accuses the attorney general of adultery and says the couple hasn’t lived together since June 2024.
Ken Paxton, who is running for US Senate, said on X:
After facing the pressures of countless political attacks and public scrutiny, Angela and I have decided to start a new chapter in our lives. I could not be any more proud or grateful for the incredible family that God has blessed us with, and I remain committed to supporting our amazing children and grandchildren. I ask for your prayers and privacy at this time.
Angela Paxton said on X:
Today, after 38 years of marriage, I filed for divorce on biblical grounds. I believe marriage is a sacred covenant and I have earnestly pursued reconciliation. But in light of recent discoveries, I do not believe that it honors God or is loving to myself, my children, or Ken to remain in the marriage. I move forward with complete confidence that God is always working everything together for the good of those who love Him and who are called according to His purpose.
Dharna Noor
The fossil fuel industry poured more than $19m into Donald Trump’s inaugural fund, accounting for nearly 8% of all donations it raised, a new analysis shows, raising concerns about White House’s relationship with big oil.
The president raised a stunning $239m for his inauguration – more than the previous three inaugural committees took in combined and more than double the previous record – according to data published by the US Federal Election Commission (FEC). The oil and gas sector made a significant contribution to that overall number, found the international environmental and human rights organization Global Witness.
The group pulled itemized inaugural fund contribution data released by the FEC in April, and researched each contributor with the help of an in-house artificial intelligence tool. It located 47 contributions to the fund made by companies and individuals linked to the fossil fuel sector, to which Trump has voiced his fealty.
