In July, the Trump administration enacted the most sweeping reorganization of the U.S. State Department in a generation, and the reaction from the mainstream media was overwhelmingly negative. But the State Department was badly in need of reform. The reorganization is 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. The legendary policy planning teams under George Kennan and Paul Nitzefor example, were intellectual powerhouses often driving the United States’ Cold War strategy.
Over successive administrations, 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.”
Despite this reduction in responsibilities and importance, the size of the State Department has grown in recent decades.
According to a senior State Department official I spoke with, 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.
These real management challenges have been noted by bipartisan groups of experts and former officials for years. In 2017, for example, the center that I manage at the Atlantic Council published a report on State Department reform by a bipartisan group of foreign-policy experts. Among other recommendations, they urged “reduc[ing] the number of bureaus and offices by consolidating and eliminating functions.” They also recommended “reduc[ing] the number of layers of clearance, review, and approval to three and push decision-making downward.” In his forward for the report, former two-time national security advisor Brent Scowcroft wrote, “The department’s esprit de corps has been wounded by uneven attention to management priorities over the years … and encroachment on their basic mission—notably by the National Security Council staff and the Defense Department.”
The problem was clear to the wise people of U.S. foreign policy, yet no action was taken.
Even worse, the personnel expansion was not directed to priority areas within the State Department. Former Defense Secretary James Mattis famously said that if Washington does not spend more money on the State Department, then he will need to buy more bullets. Unfortunately, much of the growth in staff was not going to the pointy end of the spear—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 and alienated key partners by imposing progressive views, hotly contested even in the United States, on traditional societies around the world. The senior State Department official I spoke with, for example, told me one of his colleagues from a Gulf country complained that the State Department under the Biden administration constantly harassed his government about unionizing guest workers. And the U.S. Bureau of Political-Military Affairs assessed a country’s commitment to DEI before approving arms sales to allies. They also told me that 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. He started the job with a clear vision for reform, informed by his many years on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. As he stated in January after he was confirmed as secretary, “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 both secretary of state and national security advisor, he is supremely well-positioned to rebalance the roles and responsibilities of the State Department and the NSC. 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.
According to the senior official, 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.
Media reports dramatized the job losses that would supposedly gut U.S. diplomacy, but the trimming of roughly 3,000 positions from a staff of 80,000 was a modest adjustment. It simply reversed the expansion from the Biden administration and returned the State Department to the same staffing levels that prevailed during U.S. President Donald Trump’s first term.
Some might equate more staff with more diplomacy, but an inefficient organization that’s overly focused on the wrong issues will not help the United States prevail in its great-power rivalry with China.
Media reports gave the impression that the reorganization and layoffs were rushed without adequate consultation, but, according to my source, Rubio’s team began consultations on it back in January. By April, State Department leadership communicated a plan to reduce staff by roughly 15 percent. Senior career officials were then asked for their recommendations on how to streamline their bureaus. Department leadership read and responded to more 650 comments in the dissent channel—many of them supportive of the reforms—and attended congressional briefings and hearings regarding the reorganization. A working group met more than 20 times and considered feedback from career employees, Congress, and department bureaus. The State Department followed all legal requirements, communicated with its workforce, and worked for months to get the reorganization right.
Not everything worked perfectly. Some high performers who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time were let go, while some poor performers were able to keep their jobs, but federal civil service protections made it impossible to conduct the reorganization any other way. Consistent with federal law, offices and functions were let go, not individuals.
In short, the Trump administration has now begun the process of reorganizing the State Department in keeping with the United States’ current challenges. With a major war in Europe, conflicts in the Middle East, and increased Chinese aggression in the Indo-Pacific, it is obvious that efforts to strengthen U.S. diplomacy could not come a moment too soon.
