Trump administration proposes major shake-up of State Department

WASHINGTON >> The Trump administration is proposing a major overhaul of the State Department that would eliminate more than 100 offices, including some working on war crimes and rights advocacy, to ensure the agency is in line with President Donald Trump’s “America First” priorities.

The plan, which Congress has been notified about, would eliminate 132 of the department’s 734 bureaus and offices, an internal State Department memo seen by Reuters said. Undersecretaries will submit plans to reduce staff by 15%, the document added.

It was not immediately clear how many people would be laid off as a result of the revamp, but a report in the online publication the Free Press, which Secretary of State Marco Rubio posted on X, said an additional 700 positions would be eliminated in the shuttered offices.

An internal working group will lead implementation of the reorganization and develop detailed plans for each part of the department by July 1, Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau wrote to staff in an internal email seen by Reuters.

The shake-up comes as part of an unprecedented push by Trump and his billionaire adviser Elon Musk to shrink the federal government, saying U.S. taxpayer money is misspent. The effort has led to the firing of thousands of government employees.

“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.

Both Rubio and officials said the bloated structure of the 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.

Trump issued a separate executive order in February directing Rubio to revamp the U.S. Foreign Service and how the State Department functions to ensure that the U.S. diplomatic corps faithfully implements his agenda.

The proposed reorganization appears to be less dramatic than many in the department had feared, and a memo that had circulated among State Department employees over the weekend that was proposing to eliminate nearly all of the Department’s African affairs bureau among other drastic changes.

U.S. Rep. Greg Meeks, the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said the reorganization, coming after the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), would cede space to U.S. adversaries.

“These potentially sweeping changes have less to do with streamlining the State Department and more to do with eviscerating American soft power, including our values-driven defense of human rights and democracy globally,” Meeks said in a statement.

(U.S. Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii, the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on State and Foreign Operations and a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said in a statement, “Following the illegal and damaging dismantling of USAID, Secretary Marco Rubio’s proposed changes to the State Department would have drastic and wide-ranging implications for key U.S. national interests. On its face, this new reorganization plan raises grave concerns that the United States will no longer have either the capacity or capability to exert U.S. global leadership, achieve critical national security objectives, stand up to our adversaries, save lives, and promote democratic values. These have always been bipartisan endeavors for good reason. They make America safer, stronger, and more prosperous. Now they are at risk.”)

The administration’s plan is separate from potential budget cuts, which could see the department lose about half of its funding but are yet to be decided by Trump’s White House.

The biggest changes proposed were the elimination of the Undersecretary of Civilian Security, Democracy and Human Rights, a part of the Department that Rubio accused of diverting from U.S. priorities as he took aim at what he called “ideological capture” at the agency.

That branch, he wrote in an article on Substack, “provided a fertile environment for 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.”

He accused officials working on democracy, human rights and labor of waging vendettas against what he called “anti-woke” leaders in Poland, Hungary and Brazil and said the migration bureau had helped spur mass migration.

Numerous USAID programs for years had supported work bolstering independent media and civil society in increasingly autocratic countries. It was not immediately known if that was still a priority.

While some bureaus under the abolished branch were being folded into other parts of the Department, a key office monitoring war crimes and atrocities globally — Office of Global Criminal Justice — had disappeared from the new organizational chart provided.

State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce told reporters the proposal was a road map and things could still change. The closure of a bureau focused on a specific issue does not mean work on that issue would be completely stopped, she said, without detailing how those issues would remain department priorities.

Rubio last week also closed a State Department office set up to counter foreign disinformation, accusing it of censoring conservative views.

U.S. officials in March said the department was also preparing to shut down nearly a dozen consulates.

The plan announced today focused on changes in the department’s Washington headquarters, but changes could still be made to foreign missions, a senior State Department official told reporters.

Officials at the undersecretary of state level have 30 days to assess how many jobs will be eliminated by the proposed reorganization, a senior State Department official said.

Star-Advertiser staff contributed to this report.