Marco Rubio is working to make the State Department bureaucracy focused on serving American interests, not staffers looking at their DEI assignment/promotion.
Sheriff murdered. Innocent women and children blown to bits! We’ve got to protect our phony-baloney jobs. We must do something about this immediately, immediately, immediately!
Governor William J. Lepetomane (Mel Brooks), Blazzing Saddles 1974
Whenever the subject of government staffing comes up, I think of this great quote. Comical, but shows a point I’ve learned over the years. What is the primary purpose of any bureaucracy? To insure its own survival. Hell, expansion, “My cousin needs a job…”
While the DOGE hasn’t hit Foggy Bottoms as deeply as I wish, I’m seeing some great work in reforming the State Department. From of all places Foreign Policy magazine (I subscribe, keeping up with what the enemy is thinking), a good review of these efforts.
Trump’s State Department Reforms Are Necessary
These changes are a first step toward reorienting the institution for today’s geopolitical challenges
Matthew Kroenig
In July, the Trump administration enacted the most sweeping reorganization of the U.S. State Department, which it has been badly needed. These reforms are the first step toward reinvigorating the department to advance U.S. interests for a more contentious period of geopolitics.
There was a time when the State Department developed and implemented U.S. policy for its most important global challenges…however, strategy and policy development and implementation have been absorbed by National Security Council (NSC) staff, relegating the State Department to managing foreign relations (literally interacting with foreign counterparts) and playing an undersized role in the formulation of strategy and policy. As one former policy planning director told me, “There is not a strategic bone in the entire department.” As their focus has changed, the State Department has grown in recent decades.
Near the end of the George W. Bush administration in 2008 there were 62,165 employees at the department. Under the Obama administration, that number expanded by 23 percent to 77,021. During the first Trump administration, staff size was reduced to 76,317, but under Biden, it ticked upward again by another 5 percent to nearly 80,000—more than 25 percent higher than in 2008.
As the State Department grew, the internal organizational processes did not keep up. New offices and positions were created, such as the Office of Global Women’s Issues in 2009 and the Office of Diversity and Inclusion in 2021, that reported directly to the secretary of state. Management consultants have reported that chief executives’ average span of control is between five to 10 direct reports, but, prior to the recent reorganization, 25 department leaders reported directly to Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
That span of control is unrealistic for anyone, let alone someone who is also acting as the national security advisor and the national archivist. This seemingly flat organization, with everyone reporting directly to the secretary of state, regularly produced gridlock as routine memos often had to be reviewed by up to 10 bureaus—and frequently by multiple people within each bureau—before reaching the secretary’s desk.
In my first assignment in the Army, my brigade executive officer had a term for these types of people: oxygen thieves. Twenty-five department supervisors reporting directly to the agency chief is ridiculous on its face.
In 2019 I wrote an article for American Thinker on how I learned executives must husband their time. When I was a battalion staff officer it took me almost two weeks to get on the commander’s schedule for a matter. The commander told me later, “Mike, if I let people fill up my schedule, they will fill up my schedule, and then some. I need to read, review, think, react to unforeseen events, I can’t do that if I don’t have time.”
Years later I accidently brought my unit commander into a meeting (I was his acting aide-de-camp for the weekend) and after realizing the mistake, I apologized to him. He made a lucent point, “Mike, the higher you go, no matter the field, the less control you have over your schedule. My regular aide would have known not to bring me in. You know now for next time.”
In The Gatekeepers, a book on the functions of the White House Chief of Staff, it covered how Jimmy Carter did not have a chief. He had eight senior executives with direct access to him, “spokes on a wheel.” The “process” did not allow the president to have time to focus on needed issues and no one to keep him from being distracted. It showed, President Carter was reviewing the schedule for the White House tennis court.
Compare that with Eisenhower, a very experienced chief executive years before he was elected president. An aide brought him an unopened envelope, and Ike corrected the man immediately. He was never to bring him something unopened again. Eisenhower expected that by the time it reached him, his staff would have read through it, taken care of the immediate tasks required, and then, if needed, bring it to his attention. It’s not that Ike was lazy, but he needed to focus on higher items.
More on the bloat in the State Department.
Even worse, the personnel expansion was not directed to priority areas within the State Department, such as foreign service officers, regional experts, and diplomats in the field that interact with foreign counterparts. Rather, as noted above, new hires were made for new functional programs devoted to issues like human rights, climate change, migration, women’s issues, food security, and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).
These offices often pushed controversial agendas at the expense of core U.S. interests…the State Department under Biden constantly harassed foreign governments about unionizing guest workers…the U.S. Bureau of Political-Military Affairs assessed a country’s commitment to DEI before approving arms sales to allies. Advancing DEI comprised a full 20 percent of State Department employees’ performance ratings—a level equal with: leadership, communication, expertise, and management. A young foreign-service officer at a post overseas told me that “basically everything my team did was DEI” until recently.
Rubio has a different idea of how to run the State Department….“I want the Department of State to be at the center of how America engages the world—not just how we execute on it, but on how we formulate it.”
… As the department is being streamlined and empowered, the NSC is being rightsized. The philosophy of the reorganization is to strengthen U.S. diplomacy by returning power to overseas posts and regional bureaus, as well as cutting inefficiencies in functional, single-issue offices in a bloated headquarters.
Roughly 82 percent of the layoffs were civil servants in Washington and none were foreign-service officers serving overseas. The move consolidated redundant offices, such as three separate shops devoted to sanctions. Many offices devoted to niche functional issues were shut down, but the functional missions were retained and moved to the regional offices doing the real work of daily partnership management. The Bureau of Political Affairs, which includes the assistant secretaries for major regions such as Europe, the Middle East, and the Indo-Pacific, was largely spared from the cuts. Individual bureaus were also streamlined, and the secretary’s number of direct reports was reduced.
Hopefully the “secretary’s number of direct reports was reduced” to something rational, like eight to ten.
The point? You let the bureaucracy continue to grow, it will generate more useless “needs,” stealing resources and obscuring mission focus. Frankly I was not impressed by Senator Rubio, but he is growing into an exceptional Secretary of State. Thankfully this administration and in particular Secretary Rubio are working to get the State Department focused on its mission, achieving the foreign policy goals of the United State.
Michael A. Thiac is a retired Army intelligence officer, with over 23 years experience, including serving in the Republic of Korea, Japan, and the Middle East. He is also a retired police patrol sergeant, with over 22 years’ service, and over ten year’s experience in field training of newly assigned officers. He has been published at The American Thinker, PoliceOne.com, and on his personal blog, A Cop’s Watch.
Opinions expressed are his alone and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of current or former employers.
If you enjoyed this article, then please REPOST or SHARE with others; encourage them to follow AFNN. If you’d like to become a citizen contributor for AFNN, contact us at managingeditor@afnn.us Help keep us ad-free by donating here.
Substack: American Free News Network Substack
Truth Social: @AFNN_USA
Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/afnnusa
Telegram: https://t.me/joinchat/2_-GAzcXmIRjODNh
Twitter: https://twitter.com/AfnnUsa
GETTR: https://gettr.com/user/AFNN_USA
CloutHub: @AFNN_USA