The Trump administration’s first step in forging an America-First foreign affairs bureaucracy was to abolish the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Conservatives nursed pipe-dreams about shuttering that agency for a generation, and the Trump team actually achieved it in just a few weeks.
The next step is even more ambitious: transform the Department of State. After the New York Times put out a total disinformation piece about the matter, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the real organizational changes inside Foggy Bottom, most importantly, a plan to eliminate 15 percent of career staff. Rubio’s plan is mainly focused on State activities in Washington and not the department’s global network of embassies and consulates. Rubio’s approach is not radical, but it is a significant step in refocusing department priorities and cutting, as the secretary wrote, State’s “bloated, bureaucratic swamp.”
In a warning to that swamp right before the reorganization rollout, Rubio gave an interview with Mike Benz, executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online, and blasted the disgraceful anti-free speech campaign of the department’s Global Engagement Center. GEC is now disbanded, but under the Biden administration, it had morphed into a State Department censorship project, designed to identify and silence both foreigners and American citizens who presented policy and political points of view, mainly online, deemed unacceptable. In expressing his outrage, earlier this month the secretary wrote:
With its multimillion-dollar budget, paid for by American taxpayers, GEC funneled grants to organizations around the world dedicated to pushing speech restrictions under the guise of fighting “disinformation.”
Rubio’s remarks about GEC, an office that few Americans even inside the Beltway had ever heard of, were a good reminder that State’s career bureaucratic machinery requires close monitoring.
Most activities inside State’s bureaucracy are not as insidious as GEC, but they do frustrate an America-First foreign policy. This is the result of State being a collection of offices imbued with foreign priorities (e.g., “what will the Europeans think?”) and globalist perspectives (e.g., climate change). For too many State careerists, these kinds of concerns and values are their first touchstones. In streamlining State, Rubio has eliminated some 132 offices scattered across Foggy Bottom; many of these had served as little redoubts for these points of view. Eliminating them not only makes the department less bureaucratic, but it reinforces an America-First perspective in Foggy Bottom’s internal deliberations, which by custom deliver bland recommendations (arrived at through State’s arcane memo-writing “clearance process”). Rubio’s changes should help push careerists to get in step with the secretary and his senior staff.
It is useful to understand that the org chart of the State Department is built on bureaus. An assistant secretary commands each bureau, which can have several hundred employees, subdivided into specialized offices. The bureaus are themselves grouped into undersecretariats of which previously State had six. Rubio has now abolished outright the “Civilian Security, Human Rights, and Democracy” undersecretariat (known as “J” inside State). The J undersecretariat was trouble for an America-First mission because it was homebase for State’s globalist policy priorities. While most outsiders might yawn at this bureaucratic shuffle, eliminating J is a major cut on the way to streamlining the department.
In the Obama years, total State Department staffing rose dramatically from 57,000 to 74,000. Much of this growth was local foreign staff hired at embassies abroad, but it was all part of State’s mission creep, as the department increasingly engaged in nation-building from the Middle East to the Hindu Kush. The growth reflected the ambition of the Washington foreign policy establishment, well entrenched in career Foggy Bottom, that believes having a bigger international footprint is a goal in and of itself, with little connection to the real U.S. national interest. The J undersecretariat was the home for this kind of Wilsonian internationalism. As Rubio wrote, J provided a “fertile environment for [State Department] activists to redefine ‘human rights’ and ‘democracy’ and to pursue their projects at the taxpayer expense, even when they were in direct conflict with the goals of the secretary, the president, and the American people.”
Since Congress has mandated some of J’s activities, it is hard for Rubio to make them totally disappear, but they can be minimized and managed as secondary duties by other State officials. Rubio did eliminate outright J’s Bureau for Conflict and Stabilization Operations, designed to put diplomats on the ground to support Iraq-like U.S. military incursions. The secretary has also done away with a number of J’s independent envoys that had specialized portfolios.
Some well-established J issues, like monitoring human rights, will still require careful management. During the Cold War, Congress mandated an entire human rights bureau (known as “DRL”— democracy, human rights, and labor) that has had, for decades, a significant impact on U.S. foreign affairs. For now, DRL continues to exist. The secretary will need to reorient or sack those department careerists pushing the international left’s agenda of transforming “human rights” into a tool for promoting socialist and woke values.
Rubio’s reorg plan also involves overhauling the Bureau for Population, Refugees, and Migration (PRM—the atrocious name is expected to change, but it has not happened yet). The Biden administration radicalized this bureau to pass out billions in U.S. assistance dollars to fuel the global migration crisis of the past four years. Since President Donald Trump moved back into the White House, PRM’s check-writing authority has been drastically curtailed. Instead of encouraging illegal migration, PRM now endeavors not to bring displaced persons to the U.S., but to keep them in their geographic regions.
Under Rubio, the State Department will continue to work with other countries on bread-and-butter issues such as foreign military assistance, law enforcement, and counter-terrorism collaboration. These security activities, as well the nonproliferation mission, will be managed by bureaus reporting to the Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security. Rubio’s changes will need to ensure that this kind of foreign assistance is actually linked to concrete U.S. national security interests. The slippery slopes inside State tend to result in expanding this kind of assistance into back-door nation-building projects.
Most importantly, Rubio, through his plan, intends to re-empower State’s geographic bureaus, which should serve as the secretary’s main operational tools for executing the president’s foreign policy. State has always divided up the globe into regions that are covered by geographic bureaus; currently there are six. Each is headed by an assistant secretary who directs the U.S. embassies located in their region and is a leader for the president’s policy in the respective parts of the globe. Ideally, there is a direct line of command that runs from the White House through the secretary to the geographic assistant secretaries. It is common for the president to care very much whom he nominates to these positions, which are often filled—much like U.S. ambassadorships abroad—by both political appointees and senior career Foreign Service officers.
Over the decades, the influence of geographic assistant secretaries has tended to wane. In part, this is a function of the growth of so many other bureaus inside Foggy Bottom—such as the aforementioned J undersecretariat—as well as so many other U.S. government agencies taking a seat at the foreign policy table, such as the Department of Justice, the Pentagon, and the United States Trade Representative, to name just a few. Happily, USAID is now gone, but that was just the tip of the bureaucracy-bloat iceberg. Many of us can remember when the Department of Homeland Security itself did not even exist; now DHS is a major actor in all U.S. foreign policy. More bureaucracy inevitably means less actual presidential control of foreign affairs.
Rubio’s effort to re-empower the geographic assistant secretaries is part of the constitutional battle to ensure that the president—and not a lumbering “interagency process,” which is what we have now—actually conducts foreign policy. This is another reason why Trump’s dismantling USAID was so positive. Under the Rubio plan, State’s geographic bureaus will now direct what little remains of USAID non-security foreign assistance.
As mentioned, Rubio will cut at least 15 percent of current staff. This reduction in force will not return State to the employee levels that existed before the Obama expansion, but it is a step in the right direction. No department insider can honestly deny that State—particularly the Foreign Service—has too many employees chasing too few jobs. Yes, some field positions in hardship posts always go unfilled, but they are mostly jobs that never should have been created in the first place.
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Just as the J undersecretariat has been cleaved off, it is likely that the footprint of U.S. embassy staffing is also scheduled for a major rework in the coming months, reducing of the number of diplomats posted abroad. Most career Foreign Service officers acknowledge that U.S. diplomacy functions best in small posts, where official Americans mainly deal with foreign counterparts and not with each other in over-staffed large missions that work as extensions of the Washington bureaucracy. Under Trump, perhaps the dubious era of State constructing massive billion-dollar embassy compounds, as in London, is finally coming to an end.
The caterwauling from the Washington establishment about the Rubio plan has been less vociferous than one might have expected. Cynics might say that is because Rubio did not cut enough. Certainly, the 15 percent reduction in staff could have been higher, but it’s undeniably a major move. Yet, so far, the charges of “mindless cutting” that accompanied Elon Musk’s takedown of USAID have been muted. One reason is that carefully selected career staff, including Foreign and Civil Service employees that are aligned with the secretary, crafted Rubio’s plan. It was not the product of outside political appointees or the Musk DOGE team. Conservative career employees know from experience that State is too inefficient and too ideological, and they provided their expertise to the secretary. Rubio was smart to empower these career allies.
Ultimately, if President Trump wants to make an America-First approach outlast his remaining time in office, he has to fundamentally remake the foreign policy bureaucracy. Fortunately for the MAGA movement, that’s exactly what he’s doing.
