By Jorge Casuso

Editor's note: A previous version of this article stated that one third of RAND Corporation's local workforce has been laid off. Of the 800 local employees, 73 have were laid off.

October 24, 2025 -- The RAND Corporation will permanently lay off 73 employees at its Santa Monica headquarters effective November 2, according to a filing with the State on Tuesday.

There are currently some 800 local employees, with only about one quarter of them working on any given day from the cutting-edge building RAND plans to lease or sell under a proposal approved by the City Council in August.

The employees affected cover 43 job titles that include seven policy analysts, five policy researchers, five behavioral/social scientists and three engineers, according to RAND's letter informing the State's Employment Development Department of the layoffs.

The layoffs are part of a total of 192 layoffs at the non-profit's global locations, RAND spokesman Jeremy Rawitch told the Southern California News Group.

According to Rawitch's statement, RAND made the “difficult but necessary decision” to reduce its workforce by “returning to staffing levels of a few years ago,” the Los Angeles Daily News reported.

"RAND remains firmly committed to the quality and objectivity that define our research, and our work for clients and sponsors continues uninterrupted,” Rawitch said.

“We are providing support to affected colleagues and are grateful for their many contributions to our mission.”

The move comes nearly three months after the Santa Monica City Council voted to amend RAND's 25-year-old development agreement with the City that was intended to run for another 30 years.

RAND's use of the building, staff wrote in its report, "has fundamentally changed, in large part due to 'work-from-home' mandates resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic."

Meant to accommodate 1,150 employees, the building is currently occupied by an average of 225 employees a day, according to a City staff report for the August 5 Council meeting.

"With so few employees in a relatively large facility, the work environment no longer meets RAND’s needs," staff wrote.

One of the beach city's largest employers only a decade ago, RAND built its elliptical 326,170-square-foot structure as a cutting-edge research facility at the turn of the millennium.

Established in 1948 during the dawn of the Cold War as a research firm with strong ties to the country's military establishment, RAND had increasingly turned its focus to domestic issues after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.