WASHINGTON, Nov. 17 (Xinhua) -- The U.S. State Department hit back on Friday at growing bipartisan criticism of its worrying cuts of staff and a reorganization plan which has been seen as going nowhere.
Every federal agency and department was required to cut staff under the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), said Heather Nauert, the spokeswoman of the U.S. State Department, at a press briefing. "That is something that didn't come out of the State Department."
To achieve its goal of reducing 8-percent of workforce required by the OMB, the State Department will ask for 641 employee departures above its normal attrition levels by the end of 2018.
Meanwhile, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has embraced the White House's proposal to cut the State Department budget by about 30 percent.
The former Exxon Mobil CEO also imposed a hiring freeze while analyzing the agency's operations and deciding how to reorganize them.
At the briefing, Nauert called the redesign "a work in progress."
She also insisted that the number of senior foreign service officers, which were slight below 1,000, was only a little lower than the number at this time last year.
The staff cuts and the redesign have drawn harsh criticism from Congress, which believes it may lead to the brain drain of the U.S. foreign service corps.
"I don't think they are anywhere close to having a plan to present relative to the reforms that they want to make," said Senator Bob Corker, the Republican chairman of Senate Foreign Relations Committee in a business meeting on Tuesday.
Senator Ben Cardin, the top Democrat on the same committee, called the staff reductions a risk to national security and a "high-level decapitation of leadership."
"This situation is alarming. We put our country in danger," said Cardin.
So far, numerous top-level posts remained unfilled in the State Department, including the assistant secretary for Asian and Pacific affairs.
"My impression is that the morale is at all time low at the State Department," noted Cardin.
At Friday's briefing, Nauert also acknowledged a low morale among agency employees.
"There is a morale issue in this building," she said. "We have a lot of work to be done. Please don't give up."
