The Trump Administration’s plan to reorganize the State Department is the most ambitious effort of its kind since the Foreign Affairs Reform and Restructuring Act of 1998. Announced on April 22, it calls for reducing State Department offices from 734 to 602, a 17% cut. While the plan outlines a 15% cut across all existing bureaus, so-called “functional” bureaus, as opposed to the traditional geographic bureaus that oversee specific parts of the world, would in particular be slimmed down, especially those grouped under “J”—for example, the Under Secretary of Civilian Security, Democracy, and Human Rights.
“J” (which confusingly used to be called “G”) has been around for a few decades. The world of J includes offices such as the Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations (a white elephant created under Hillary Clinton), the Office of Global Criminal Justice, and the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL), mocked internally as “Drool,” that would either be drastically cut back or eliminated altogether.
A considerable amount of the media’s drive-by criticism of the Trump reorganization plan takes at face value the name of an office or what it seems to be doing instead of asking if the work could be done elsewhere, or not at all. The names of these offices, however, have absolutely nothing to do with the work they actually do, much less the tangible value they provide in advancing an America First foreign policy.
The proposed changes come on top of the wholesale elimination of almost all of the $32 billion used to fund USAID and the much smaller Global Engagement Center, another legacy of the Clinton era initially created to fight Jihadist propaganda that then began policing speech in the West—and has even tried to silence right-wing media voices inside the United States.
While the criticism has been endless, there is a very reasonable logic for the cuts. Aside from desperately needed cost savings and efficiencies, they mostly take aim at an entrenched network of government and semi-official, or heavily subsidized, private entities that advance their own—invariably liberal—agenda at the expense of, and usually in defiance of, the will of the voters.
This is the “self-licking ice cream cone” of globalist liberalism, a kind of permanent shadow regime that functions with its own inertia and agenda. As tax dollars flow to seemingly innocuous-sounding “civil society” or “capacity building,” personnel flow between these advocacy groups and governments to advance an ideological agenda. The bureaus under question have sections with vague names such as the Office of Global Programs (at DRL), grant-making authority, and millions of dollars embedded deep in the bureaucracy with considerable opacity.
It isn’t just about the dollars, although that part is hugely consequential. It’s about the mindset. In my years at State, I saw this in the flesh. Functional offices and bureaus would seek to push their own, advocate-driven foreign policy, usually at the expense of geographic bureaus that represent our embassies overseas—the people who, you know, actually have to deal with the fallout whenever Washington comes up with some strange new diktat on whatever has become the fashionable “latest thing” among liberal elites.
Our diplomats in the field have to navigate not only differences between different U.S. agencies, but also turf battles within the State Department itself. I remember a senior official at one of the offices slated to be abolished telling me how she was opposed to having diplomatic relations with the country where I was being sent. I responded, telling her that the president, with the advice and consent of the Senate, disagrees with you.
Many of the functional bureaus being eliminated or cut back have sought to advance a favored cause or pet project or existed to promote themselves, to find a purpose in which to justify their existence. Or they had been created for realities that no longer exist. By contrast, geographic bureaus are more focused and linear—direct conduits from the secretary to the ambassador. They are the president’s personal representative to a specific country.
Also supposedly on the chopping block are some embassies and consulates. Cutting away at missions in Europe makes sense (why do we have an embassy in tiny Luxembourg or at the hopelessly compromised UNESCO in Paris?), but less so when it comes to embassies in some more unpleasant places.
Years ago, I headed two American embassies in Africa that had been “permanently” closed during the Clinton Administration (because of spite in one case and false terrorism concerns in the other) and were reopened a decade later at great expense. Embassies are, as a rule, expensive to maintain, including those in less desirable “Greater Hardship” posts. But the value add of diplomacy is to be forward deployed and engaged with the world rather than in Washington. Far better to cut D.C. offices than to cut the field.
Trump’s populist counter-revolution will be made or broken on whether it can retake control of the bureaucracy and—even more importantly—whether it can choke off government funding of its adversaries in the managerial and technocratic elite, inside and outside of government. Key to this is to strike early and to strike hard, which the administration has sought to do.
But the result can’t be mere libertarianism either. Americans have grown to expect a certain level of steady, reliable government services across a range of fields. The margin for error is narrow. What the administration is trying to do is the most difficult of stunts: rebuilding the plane while still flying it, and trying to turn it in the opposite direction.
The State Department reorganization plan is supposedly less draconian than many feared. While much is supposed to be cut, the core competencies remain, and could even be enhanced as more responsibilities and resources are placed under the geographic bureaus. One hopes that State employees will eventually embrace this new, leaner and cleaner vision of the U.S. government’s oldest executive department.
A lot of questions remain about this latest effort. Will a recalcitrant Congress go along? Will they claw back favored programs (of which there are many) and pet projects? Will the plan, like so much else in the administration’s early efforts, be stymied or delayed by endless Democratic lawfare and out-of-control courts?
There is still a lot more that needs fixing in diplomacy, from improving language ability to promoting real viewpoint diversity to streamlining, if not eliminating, a flood of required reports so that diplomats can get out of their air-conditioned, fortress-like embassies. Cutting back on the state-funded activist bureaucracy is a start.
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