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The South China Sea team is no longer at the U.S. State Department

MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:

We're working to make sense of the cuts that were part of the sweeping reorganization at the State Department this month - cuts that included top experts on the South China Sea - and which come as voices within President Trump's own administration and across the political aisle agree that China and its ambitions in the South China Sea are a top national security concern. For more, we're joined by NPR's Kat Lonsdorf. Hey there.

KAT LONSDORF, BYLINE: Hi there.

KELLY: The team that was cut - who are they? What did they do?

LONSDORF: So this was an entire office called the Office of Multilateral Affairs. It managed U.S. engagement with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, oversaw the Mekong River region and also coordinated diplomatic response across several countries to China's aggression in the South China Sea. For years, China has been aggressively asserting its territorial claims on the South China Sea, which is a busy shipping passage for global trade but also a potential flashpoint for conflict. And basically, the people in this office were working to help get the big picture of all of that and working with a bunch of different countries to push back.

KELLY: OK. And working to share that big picture, right? This was...

LONSDORF: Exactly.

KELLY: ...The office that would, like, prep the secretary of state before a trip to the area.

LONSDORF: Yeah, exactly. This cut was made while Secretary Rubio was on the plane back from a trip to Malaysia. Several of the people who helped prep for that trip were fired.

KELLY: So you talked to several of the officers who were fired. What did they tell you?

LONSDORF: Yeah, our colleague Tom Bowman and I did. All of these people agreed to speak with us anonymously, out of fear the administration could retaliate. And they were pretty shocked. You know, sure, this was a relatively small office, but these people worry that their elimination could have a real impact on some of how the U.S. interacts with China. These were all civil service employees, who tend to stay in positions for longer than foreign service officers, and they had years of experience doing this kind of work. And I'll just say, too, there was no indication that any of these people were fired for performance. NPR verified that many of them had recently received outstanding performance reviews.

KELLY: So why were they let go? What reason does the State Department give?

LONSDORF: Well, the State Department maintains that there will still be teams covering needed issues like the South China Sea but in other offices. They basically said this was a redundancy. In a statement to NPR, it said that mission-critical functions from any office eliminated will be integrated elsewhere. But, you know, particularly as it relates to the South China Sea, it's unclear who will perform some of these functions with these top experts gone now.

KELLY: So step back. I said we're working to make sense of this, and I wonder if you would just take a swing at what the broader stakes are of losing this kind of expertise, and now.

LONSDORF: Yeah. So I talked to quite a few security and diplomacy experts who closely watch this region about this particular cut, and quite frankly, all of them were really baffled by it. Many of them worried about the ability to backfill these kinds of positions, since they require so much in-depth knowledge and understanding. They also worried about the signal that a cut like this sends to our allies in the region. It's something that Gregory Poling with the Center for Strategic and International Studies called, quote, "really harmful."

GREGORY POLING: It reinforces a narrative in the region of U.S. strategic withdrawal that, sure, we might still be, you know, sending the Navy out, but we're not really interested in the diplomatic or the economic leadership that the region wants to see.

LONSDORF: Others expressed concern that the move, you know, especially in the context of recent tariffs imposed on many of these countries, along with the gutting of aid programs, might leave traditional U.S. allies turning to China for help instead. And that's exactly the opposite of the U.S. goal to reduce China's influence in the region.

KELLY: Fascinating. Thanks for your reporting, Kat.

LONSDORF: Thank you.

KELLY: NPR's Kat Lonsdorf. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

Mary Louise Kelly is a co-host of All Things Considered, NPR's award-winning afternoon newsmagazine.