State Department seeks mid-career hires to join its ranks after widespread layoffs

The State Department is looking for mid-career hires to join the Foreign Service, after carrying out widespread layoffs last year. 

State announced online that it will soon accept applications for its Lateral Entry Pilot Program. The congressionally mandated pilot program allows applicants to join the mid-career ranks of the Foreign Service without prior experience. 

The program is a departure from the Foreign Service’s “up or out” model for advancement through its ranks. 

The department is specifically looking for individuals with expertise in a few key areas – including artificial intelligence and IT, commercial diplomacy, strategic competition and foreign assistance. 

State has previously used the pilot program to only make a few hires in specific fields. But the hiring announcement comes after the Trump administration shuttered the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and carried out a major reduction in force in 2025. Those layoffs impacted about 2,000 USAID employees and nearly 1,350 State Department employees. 

The American Foreign Service Association said this latest hiring push “exposes the absurdity and waste of USAID firings.” 

“Dismantling USAID and then recruiting for foreign assistance expertise is like firing the fire department and posting a help-wanted ad for people who know how to hold a hose. The government had experienced professionals doing this work but chose to get rid of them,” AFSA wrote. 

AFSA said in a statement that it has “long opposed lateral entry programs because they undercut a career system in which officers develop expertise through successive assignments and compete for advancement,” but that bringing back USAID officers “who already earned their place in that system is another matter.”

A State Department official said in February 2024 that the agency planned to make about 35 hires the first year of the pilot, adding 30 hires each following year. 

Department officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment on how many hires it plans to make through the pilot program this year. Congress required the department to conduct the pilot under the FY 2017 Department of State Authorities Act.

Candidates applying to join the Foreign Service through the pilot program go through much of the same screening process as entry-level candidates. 

In the first year of the pilot, lateral-entry candidates did not need to complete the Foreign Service Officer Test (FSOT). But the State Department’s latest announcement states candidates will need to pass the FSOT and follow-up Foreign Service Officer Assessment (FSOA). 

In April, the department rolled out a recruitment campaign urging people to join the Foreign Service. Before that, a senior official told House lawmakers that the State had no plans to reinstate laid-off employees or staff who remain on paid administrative leave.

Because agencies conduct a RIF to eliminate positions, not people, they are supposed to give priority consideration to recently laid-off employees for competitive service jobs when they begin to hire again post-RIF.

A former Foreign Service officer who received a RIF notice in July 2025 told Government Executive that her former colleagues have been “waiting on the sidelines to be reinstated,” but that the State Department would “rather get people from the outside.”  

About 250 Foreign Service employees received RIF notices last year. The other layoffs targeted civil service employees.  

“There's 250 of us who are very competent people, seasoned officers – and yet they're trying to hire people to fill positions in everything from diplomatic technology to Middle Eastern affairs LEPP program,” she said. 

The former Foreign Service officer shared documents with Government Executive showing that she recently interviewed for a vacant position but was not selected for the job. 

Having worked with the first tranche of LEPP hires brought in during the Biden administration, the former Foreign Service officer said “they just did not have the gravitas that we do.” 

“They just didn't have the je ne sais quoi that Foreign Service officers, especially at our level, have,” she said. “They just don't have the maturity, the seasoning. And I've met a lot of them.” 

The State Department awarded a nearly $1 million contract in April to the company Military Hire, a subsidiary of the employment firm RedBalloon, which calls itself “America’s non-woke job board.”

Military Hire CEO Andrew Crapuchettes said in an interview that the goal is to recruit 600 to 1,000 candidates to take the Foreign Service Officer Test. Crapuchettes said he’s focused on completing a “nine-month sprint this year on how do we get the right people in the door.”

“Our focus is we’re going to start by looking for military veterans, but we’re also going to look for people who are just high IQ, that love our country. I think this has been a consistent theme with the administration right now — how do we find people who are patriotic, are not afraid of America first, and are going to get the job based on merit and hard work, not based on knowing the right people, or going to the right university, or having the right DEI program,” Crapuchettes said.

Congressional Democrats have introduced legislation that would make it easier for recently fired State Department and USAID employees to reenter the federal workforce. 

The PATH to the Foreign Service Act, introduced in April by Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, and Rep. Dina Titus, D-Nev., would create opportunities for terminated USAID employees to find jobs within the State Department’s Foreign Service 

The Foreign Service Test-Free Reentry Act, introduced by Titus, House Foreign Affairs Committee Ranking Member Gregory Meeks, D-N.Y., and Reps. James Walkinshaw D-Va., and Don Beyer, D-Va., would authorize the secretary of state to waive entry examinations when rehiring eligible career Foreign Service Officers who were involuntarily separated through RIFs between Jan. 20, 2025, and Jan. 31, 2030.