State Department Cuts Key Office Amidst Raging Epstein Files Outcry

While Donald Trump tries to completely dismiss Jeffrey Epstein’s child sex ring scandal as a Democratic “scam,” his administration has quietly axed a key office related to investigating human trafficking.

The White House hacked 1,353 positions from the State Department on Friday, gutting parts of the agency that don’t align with MAGA values, reported Mother Jones. Those include offices focused on promoting democracy, ending genocide, quelling political extremism, and combating human trafficking.

Employees at the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, known as the TIP Office, believed that they would be spared from State Secretary Marco Rubio’s cuts, which were permitted by the Supreme Court last week after months-long delays. They were under the impression that their office would be folded into the Office for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. They were wrong: half of the office’s full-time civil and foreign service employees were effectively terminated by reduction-in-force notices Friday.

The cuts reduced the office to about 35 people—a third of its staffing levels from seven months ago, thanks to Rubio’s plan and Elon Musk’s deferred resignation program. Those who were not laid off were informed that they would be reassigned and given a pay cut, according to Mother Jones.

“Everyone was caught off guard,” one source familiar with the cuts told the magazine.

“The sheer number of cuts has really decimated the office,” they continued, underscoring the enormous brain drain and loss of expertise and international connections that the cuts will induce. “That takes years to build up. It’s not like you can just reassign a few people in the office and somehow it’s going to work.”

But the Trump administration has defended the cuts. A State Department representative justified dismissing federal employees en masse on the basis that “the world has changed.”

“As we looked comprehensively across the Department, we saw that many of these offices had served an outdated purpose, had strayed from their original purpose, or were simply duplicative,” the spokesperson told Mother Jones.

Trump and his associates have ideated paring down the federal workforce since he was on the campaign trail, with details of diminishing the executive branch explicitly laid out in Project 2025. Trump appealed to fiscal conservatives to advance the cuts, claiming that his administration was focused on driving down the federal budget in order to reduce the deficit.

But that has not been the case. Instead, Trump pushed several exorbitantly expensive policies in his “big, beautiful bill,” including a whopping tax cut for the wealthiest individuals in America at cost to the middle and lower classes that is estimated to add trillions to the budget.