Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Tuesday announced a “reorganization” of the State Department, with plans to make staffing cuts and consolidate domestic offices.
The cuts aren’t happening immediately, but a senior State Department official told reporters that Rubio’s announcement sets forth a road map for future cuts, and Congress has been notified to set the process in motion. The senior official said State Department undersecretaries for the various bureaus must in about 30 days present a plan on how they will eliminate positions.
Rubio reposted “X” posts in which Free Press journalists said the move would entail closing 132 offices, moving 137 offices elsewhere, and directing undersecretaries to reduce personnel by anywhere between 15-17%. Another senior State Department official told reporters on Tuesday that the personnel reduction would be 22%.
Among the agency offices to be cut, according to an “X” post Rubio reposted, are those intended to further human rights, advance democracy overseas, counter extremism, and prevent war crimes. Asked during Tuesday’s departmental press briefing about the department’s office of Global Criminal Justice, which plays a role in investigating war crimes and is missing from the proposed “reorganization” chart, Pentagon spokesperson Tammy Bruce said that just “because it’s now folded into another larger bureau, doesn’t mean that it’s gone or we don’t care.”
Rubio called the State Department in its current form “bloated, bureaucratic, and unable to perform its essential diplomatic mission in this new era of great power competition.”
“Over the past 15 years, the department’s footprint has had unprecedented growth and costs have soared,” Rubio said in a statement. “But far from seeing a return on investment, taxpayers have seen less effective and efficient diplomacy. The sprawling bureaucracy created a system more beholden to radical political ideology than advancing America’s core national interests.”
“That is why today I am announcing a comprehensive reorganization plan that will bring the Department into the 21st Century,” Rubio continued. “This approach will empower the Department from the ground up, from the bureaus to the embassies. Region-specific functions will be consolidated to increase functionality, redundant offices will be removed, and non-statutory programs that are misaligned with America’s core national interests will cease to exist.”
The senior State Department official who briefed reporters stressed this is a “purely domestic plan” that “does not have anything to do with any foreign missions.”
“That’s not to say that there won’t be subsequent decisions on foreign missions, but that’s not what this is,” the official said.
According to Rubio’s notification to Congress, the State Department would formally assume responsibility for remaining humanitarian assistance programming, and most remaining USAID functions would be absorbed by the State Department.
The senior State Department official said these changes are an “attempt to go back to the traditional roots of the State Department, which are the primacy of the regional bureaus and of our foreign missions.”
The changes to the State Department come amid the Trump administration’s efforts to shutter most of USAID.
