Feb. 7 (Bloomberg) -- The US State Department is seeking ways to reduce the staffing at the US embassy in Iraq, State Department spokesman Victoria Nuland said today.
The Baghdad embassy, the largest overseas US diplomatic post, has a staff of around 16,000 people, most of them contractors.
The State Department has established a group to determine how to “right size” the embassy, Nuland said, without specifying how deep the cuts would be.
She said the cutbacks will involve replacing foreign contractors with Iraqi staff and buying more supplies locally in order to save “taxpayers’ money.”
