State Department Budget Cuts Don’t Go Far Enough
State Department Budget Cuts Don’t Go Far Enough
The secretary has made a good start, but more fundamental changes are still necessary.
If you had “State Department” on your DOGE bingo card as the next agency teed up, mark yourself a winner. But are tough times ahead for Foggy Bottom?
Secretary of State Marco Rubio unveiled the beginnings of a reorganization of the State Department on April 22, calling the diplomatic agency “bloated, bureaucratic” and “beholden to radical political ideology.” But to some critics, it looks like a good start that still has much further to go to create lasting progress in line with the Trump administration’s view of the changing U.S. role in the world. Among other things, the reorganization does not address any cuts to embassies and consulates abroad, the meat and potatoes of the State Department. One Foreign Service officer said the plan moved a lot of pieces around, but outside of the sleepy democracy and human rights division being gutted, most of the changes were not significant. “I wouldn’t call these sweeping reforms… yet,” the employee said.
The most drastic (but still ho-hum) change is the elimination of the Office of the Under-Secretary for Civilian Security, Democracy, and Human Rights. Some elements of the office, including the Bureau for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor and one for refugees, would be folded into an office for foreign assistance and humanitarian aid, according to a reorganization chart posted on the State Department website. Rubio wrote that the Bureau for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor became a “platform for left-wing activists to wage vendettas” against conservative leaders, including in Poland, Hungary, and Brazil, and for promoting an arms embargo against Israel. Rubio also accused the Bureau for Population, Refugees, and Migration of sending millions of taxpayer dollars to non-government groups to promote mass migration, including “the invasion on our southern border.”
Rubio’s plan calls for reducing the total number of domestic State Department offices from 734 to 602, a drop of 17 percent, some 700 positions, though a detailed list has not been published. Rubio also instructed senior officials to reduce the number of U.S.-based employees overall by 15 percent in other individual domestic offices by July. Some once high-profile offices, such as the Iraq War–era Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations, which aimed unsuccessfully to anticipate and prevent global conflict, will be closed. A new Bureau of Emerging Threats will be created, focusing on cybersecurity and artificial intelligence.
Rubio said the State Department’s size and costs had “soared” over the past 15 years. So future unspecified plans are to combine overlapping offices and eliminate some programs not mandated by Congress. “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,” said Rubio, though he did not give any specifics. In an email to staff, Deputy Secretary of State Chris Landau said implementation would be led by an internal working group that would come up with “thoughtful plans” aiming to adopt the changes by July 1.
Rubio’s plan is not much more than a good start. An earlier draft memo (called “fake news” by Rubio, likely written as a trial balloon by outgoing Pete Marocco, who left the State Department after having overseen the elimination of USAID) called for the Trump administration to cut some 48 percent of the State Department’s funding next fiscal year, mostly from its external programs. The draft proposed eliminating almost all funding for international organizations like the United Nations and NATO, ending the budget for international peacekeeping operations, and curtailing all of the department’s educational and cultural exchanges, like the Fulbright Program. It would also have cut funding for humanitarian assistance and global health programs by more than 50 percent.
Many of those drastic changes would have been unlikely to survive Congressional scrutiny; going forward, Rubio still needs to show his hand on low bang-for-the-buck international organization funding and post-WWII soft power programs. No more promoting LGBT rights abroad, or trying to right the world’s ills by pouring taxpayer money over them (though to be fair, Rubio did already cut State’s Office of Global Women’s Issues and its Diversity and Inclusion Office.) This reorganization should be a new day for diplomacy, but—so far—it is not.
There has been some deeper progress, and thus cause for optimism. Even before the budget memo described above reached the White House, the State Department placed all full-time staff from its “censorship office” on administrative leave as the agency moves to shut down the group altogether.
Originally founded by Barack Obama and known then as the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference Hub, the office within the State Department’s Office of Public Diplomacy supposedly monitored, flagged, and countered content deemed “foreign disinformation.” R/FIMI was created out of the ruins of the closure of its Obama predecessor in December 2024 following a series of First Amendment lawsuits that discovered the Center was demanding that social media companies censor American conservative voices. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg described instances when government officials would “scream” and “curse” at Meta employees, threatening repercussions if certain content wasn’t removed.
The center was also used as a cut-out to fund the Global Disinformation Index, a British organization with two affiliated U.S. nonprofits, to feed blacklists to online ad companies with the intent of defunding and shutting down websites peddling “disinformation,” the Washington Examiner reported. This same “disinformation” group received $330,000 from two State Department-backed entities tied to the Center.
With its State Department funding (the first State Department-backed group supporting GDI was the National Endowment for Democracy) GDI identified the 10 “riskiest” news outlets for disinformation to include The American Conservative. You be the judge of the validity of that use of taxpayer money, and the direction American diplomacy was headed.
There’s more to come at State (the layoffs planned for July 1 should be transitional) and reason to call all this a good start—if Rubio follows through and if his domestic cuts are met with similar reshaping abroad.
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