AP: Secretary of State Marco Rubio unveiled a massive overhaul of the State Department on Tuesday, with plans to reduce staff in the U.S. by 15% while closing and consolidating more than 100 bureaus worldwide as part of the Trump administration’s “America First” mandate.”
Some of the bureaus that are indeed expected to be cut in the new plan include the Office of Global Women’s Issues and the State Department’s diversity and inclusion efforts, which have been eliminated government-wide under Trump.
Per AP: The proposed changes at the State Department come as the Trump administration has been slashing jobs and funding across agencies, from the Education Department to Health and Human Services.
“On foreign policy, beyond the destruction of USAID, the administration also has moved-to defund so-called other “soft power” institutions like media outlets delivering objective news, often to authoritarian countries, including the Voice of America, the Middle East Broadcasting Networks, Radio Free Asia and Radio/TV Marti, which broadcasts to Cuba.”🥸
From Marco Rubio::quote from todays op-ed, complete article at State.gov
“Today America confronts a new era of great power competition and the rise of a multipolar order with a State Department that stifles creativity, lacks accountability, and occasionally veers into outright hostility to American interests. The Department has long struggled to perform basic diplomatic functions, even as both its size and cost to the American taxpayer has ballooned over the past fifteen years. The problem is not a lack of money, or even dedicated talent, but rather a system where everything takes too much time, costs too much money, involves too many individuals, and all too often ends up failing the American people.”
The Daily Beast reports; The biggest change will be the closure of the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, which is charged with spreading American values.
Rubio claimed the bureau had become “a platform for left-wing activists to wage vendettas against ‘anti-woke’ leaders in nations such as Poland, Hungary, and Brazil, and to transform their hatred of Israel into concrete policies such as arms embargoes.”
The democracy department will be closed together with a department for refugees and migration that Rubio accused of funneling “millions of taxpayer dollars to international organizations and NGOs that facilitated mass migration around the world, including the invasion on our southern border. “ The Daily Beast
