Secretary of State Marco Rubio will begin a long-overdue reorganization of the State Department, cutting about 40% of the department's offices and 3,400 personnel.
It's the most extensive overhaul of the State Department since the end of the Cold War and includes the elimination or merger of more than 300 offices. The department had become "bloated, bureaucratic, and unable to perform its essential diplomatic mission," Rubio said in April.
Rubio sent a notice to Congress outlining his plans, noting that the agency's bureaucratic growth had not translated into greater effectiveness.
"Over the past 15 years, the Department’s footprint has had unprecedented growth and costs have soared," Rubio wrote. "But far from seeing a return on investment, taxpayers have seen less effective and efficient diplomacy. The sprawling bureaucracy created a system more beholden to radical political ideology than advancing America’s core national interests."
"We have too many godd--- offices," a senior State Department official told Fox News Digital. "We’re trying to shrink offices rather than create them."
An example of the bloat is the three offices that supposedly oversee sanctions. Those three offices will be combined into one with clear lines of authority.
"We are really addressing a significant portion of the department's domestic offices and sort of merging them, combining them, trying to make them more efficient," the senior State Department official said.
There will be approximately nine new offices.
New positions include a deputy assistant secretary for democracy and Western values, as well as new immigration security offices under the agency’s bureau of population, refugees and migration to tackle President Donald Trump's immigration priorities.
Likewise, the restructuring adds a new bureau of emerging threats that will address issues pertaining to artificial intelligence, hypersonic weapons and space.
"So we're not just cutting these things," the senior State Department official said. "We're re-imagining them to advance the administration's agenda."
The reorganization structure only affects domestic offices and also seeks to cut down on the layers of bureaucracy in Washington to give more power to the embassies abroad, according to State Department officials.
This was how the State Department operated until World War II. Ambassadors were relatively free to advance the nation's agenda without Washington constantly looking over their shoulders. It made for a responsive bureaucracy, minimizing the kind of agenda hijacking we see today, as the permanent bureaucracy has its own ideas of how the nation's foreign policy should be run.
Another senior official told Fox News, "We're really shifting the focus towards our embassies out in the field, our ambassadors out in the field, giving them the tools… so that they can effectively implement the ‘America First’ diplomacy out there in the field," another senior official told Fox News.
Rubio told lawmakers on the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee overseeing foreign affairs on May 20 that the restructuring "is not designed to either cripple the department or in any way — it’s not even a cost-savings endeavor."
Rather, Rubio said the change aims to "empower" regional bureaus and embassies. Specifically, Rubio said that he receives up to 15 cables each morning from embassies around the world and that’s where the "best innovations" originate.
Don't expect a smooth transition right off the bat. These are big changes, and the State Department is a huge bureaucracy. There will be false starts and hiccups as managers feel for the limits of their authority, and bureaucratic toes are stepped on occasionally.
But there is little doubt that the reorganization is overdue and necessary for U.S. security in a changing world.
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