Secretary of State Marco Rubio unveiled the massive overhaul of the State Department on Tuesday. The reorganization plan, announced by Rubio on social media and detailed in documents obtained by The Associated Press, is the latest effort by the White House to reimagine U.S. foreign policy and scale back the size of the federal government.
“In its current form, the Department is bloated, bureaucratic, and unable to perform its essential diplomatic mission in this new era of great power competition,” Rubio said in a statement.
“We cannot win the battle for the 21st century with bloated bureaucracy that stifles innovation and misallocates scarce resources,” Rubio said in a department-wide email obtained by The AP. “That is why, under the leadership of President Trump and at my direction, I am announcing a reorganization of the Department so it may meet the immense challenges of the 21st Century and put America First.”
Both Rubio and officials said the bloated structure of the US State Department made it impossible to quickly and efficiently make decisions, and that the new plan would attempt to empower regional bureaus to increase functionality and remove offices and programs not aligned with America’s core national interests
Plans include consolidating 734 bureaus and offices to 602 as well as transitioning 137 offices “to another location within the Department to increase efficiency,” according to a fact sheet obtained by The AP.
There will also be a “reimagined” office focused on foreign and humanitarian affairs to coordinate the remaining foreign assistance programs left at State after the recent dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development.
Some of the bureaus that are expected to be cut include the Office of Global Women’s Issues and the department’s diversity and inclusion efforts, which have been cut government-wide since President Donald Trump took office in January. State is also expected to eliminate some offices previously under the Undersecretary of State for Civilian Security, Democracy, and Human Rights, but the fact sheet says that much of their work will continue in other sections of the department.
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It is unclear if the reorganization would be implemented through an executive order or other means. Draft reorganization proposals shared within the department in recent weeks outlined an even more drastic shift of priorities than the one revealed Tuesday. The official plans came a week after The AP learned that the White House’s Office of Management and Budget proposed gutting the State Department’s budget by almost 50 percent and eliminating funding for the United Nations and NATO headquarters.
The budget proposal was still in a highly preliminary phase and not expected to pass muster with Congress.
Ahead of the changes at the State Department, the Trump administration has been slashing jobs and funding across agencies, from the Education Department to Health and Human Services.
On foreign policy, beyond the destruction of USAID, State has also moved to defund so-called other “soft power” institutions like media outlets delivering objective news, often to authoritarian countries, including the Voice of America, the Middle East Broadcasting Networks, Radio Free Asia and Radio/TV Marti, which broadcasts to Cuba.