Reform of the State Department Gets Going

On April 29, I published in National Review an article on Trump administration plans for reforming the State Department--an awful plan apparently leaked from the White House and a serious plan publicly announced by Secretary of State Rubio. The text follows.

The Trump administration revealed two plans to “reform” the State Department in April: a White House plan that was leaked to the media, and a plan from Secretary of State Marco Rubio that came equipped with old and new org charts plus official explanations from Rubio himself.

I served at State for all eight years of the Reagan administration, departing on January 20, 1989, when the administration ended, and returned there almost exactly 30 years later — January 24, 2019, in the Trump administration. I found the place remarkably unchanged after that long passage of time. There were, happily, more women, more Hispanics, and more people of Indian or Pakistani heritage. But there were the same bureaucratic blockages, the same “never say yes” attitude from the Office of the Legal Adviser, the same cultures in the regional and functional bureaus, and the same redundancies and inefficiencies. One- or two-page documents still required an astonishing number of internal clearances, with a list of offices that had to be consulted, often adding real delays.

Over time, new bureaus and offices had been created — often for exactly the wrong reasons. Here’s just one small example: In 1992 Senator Tim Wirth (D., Colo.) decided not to run for reelection and apparently needed a job. So one was created for him in Bill Clinton’s State Department: undersecretary for global affairs. It was an unnecessary bureaucratic addition but lasted for decades out of sheer inertia.

And over time, State’s organization became anachronistic simply because the world changes. State was well organized in the Reagan era to confront the Soviet Union, which by then it had been doing for more three decades — since the end of World War II. But there has been no serious reorganization to take account of the 21st-century challenge presented by China (nor has Rubio proposed one).

So, reforms are needed — but not some of the ill-informed changes the Trump administration was apparently planning. Some of the proposals would simply have swung a wrecking ball at State, with extremely damaging consequences for U.S. interests.

What was the Trump proposal, according to a draft executive order? The New York Times reports that, to begin with, it would eliminate almost all embassies and consulates in Africa and the bureaus handling democracy and human rights, refugee affairs, and climate change. The foreign service and the State Department were to be significantly downsized. The foreign service exam that Americans who wish to become diplomats now take was to be jettisoned, with new hiring criteria that would include, according to the Times, “alignment with the president’s foreign policy vision.” The heart of the department is its regional bureaus — Europe, Western Hemisphere, Near East, Africa, and so on — and these would be eliminated, replaced by four groupings called “corps.” The Bureau of African Affairs would be eliminated entirely and replaced by a small special envoy’s office in the National Security Council. The office of the undersecretary for public diplomacy would be cut as well. The foreign service would be changed from its “current outdated and disorganized generalist rotation model to a smarter, strategic, regionally specialized career service framework to maximize expertise.”

There were some good ideas here, such as that last one — ending the practice of teaching someone Mandarin and posting him, say, to Bogotá, or sending an officer with years of European experience to serve in Dakar.

But other ideas were bizarre. The population of Africa is 1.5 billion and, by 2050, will be 2.5 billion — one-fourth of the world’s population. Eliminating State Department expertise and closing U.S. embassies would hurt U.S. diplomacy, undermine trade with this vast population, and set us back in our competition with China for influence (in securing access to rare earth minerals, for example). The proposed inattention to Africa was simply indefensible.

Eliminating the foreign service exam to find people more “aligned” with Trump policy would obviously mean that Democrats, when next in power, would fire all the new hires and replace them with Democrats. The model of a disciplined, neutral, professional career corps of diplomats is clearly preferable. I’ve heard all the arguments about how foreign service officers are left-wingers and globalists, and in my experience that’s the excuse Republican officials at State use when they are poor leaders and cannot manage their own staffs. Strong leaders and managers, such as James Baker, George Shultz, and Mike Pompeo, had no problems using the assets of the State Department to advance their presidents’ policies. Similar to eliminating the SAT exam for high school students who are trying to get into good colleges, the “solution” of eliminating the foreign service exam would simply make it much harder to judge individual merit. Let’s hope Rubio drops this dumb idea.

The leaked draft was the product of hostility uninformed by experience, presumably the work of “loyal” MAGA workers who have convinced themselves that State is evil and put down all the ideas that crossed their minds. This was intended more as revenge than as reform. Secretary Rubio’s proposed changes are something different entirely: a serious effort to reorganize State and make it work better. It is not, as some critics of the administration have called it, an “assault on American diplomacy.” Nevertheless, it deserves careful scrutiny from Congress before it is fully implemented.

Rubio’s own statement on his reforms genuflects to that hostile MAGA view of his department, claiming that it “stifles creativity, lacks accountability, and occasionally veers into outright hostility to American interests” and is a “bloated, bureaucratic swamp.” He gets more serious when he says, “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.”

Rubio proposes a 15 percent staff reduction and the elimination of nearly 20 percent of State’s offices and bureaus. The placement of what used to be the U.S. Agency for International Development into State is old news now, and it is a good idea: The aid agency is part of the foreign ministry in many Western donor countries, including the U.K., Australia, and Canada. It is also a good idea to give additional responsibility to State’s regional bureaus, which are always the heart of the department’s work. As Rubio says, “all non-security foreign assistance will be consolidated in regional bureaus charged with implementing U.S. foreign policy in specific geographic areas. This will ensure every bureau and office in the Department of State has clear responsibility and mission. If something concerns Africa, the bureau of African Affairs will handle it.”

In one area at least, China, Rubio has no reforms to offer — and that requires additional thought. Rubio told Bari Weiss in an interview about his reforms in the Free Press, “This is not a cost-cutting exercise. . . . This is a policy exercise.” What U.S. policy today is more important than that regarding China? Does Rubio think the department — and the U.S. government more generally — are well organized and well coordinated for this century’s great struggle against the PRC? That’s an area to which he should be paying more attention.

Rubio’s view of the bureau that handles human rights is hostile. He said that “the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor became a platform for left-wing activists to wage vendettas against ‘anti-woke’ leaders in nations such as Poland, Hungary, and Brazil.” He does not call for the bureau to be eliminated, presumably because he thinks that would involve a time-consuming battle with Congress, but he is missing a fundamental point: If that bureau or any other is, in his view, not acting in line with his policy preferences and the president’s, he should stop cursing the darkness and appoint a new and capable assistant secretary to run it. This same problem with the human rights bureau arose when President Reagan took office, because the bureau had indeed been “a platform for left-wing activists” under President Carter. Carter wanted it that way; Reagan didn’t, and I was honored to be selected as assistant secretary for human rights in December 1981. Too often Republicans blame “the State Department” for their own management and leadership failures. If bureau leaders can’t lead, it’s up to the secretary to find better ones — not blame a box on the org chart.

Rubio’s failures in the area of human rights go deeper than his blaming the bureau, unfortunately. He sets up a silly straw man: that U.S. foreign policy has been warped by the State Department’s prioritizing human rights policy over any other U.S. goal or interest. He told Bari Weiss this:

One final point I would make is we are entering an era in which our foreign policy has to be more focused, more pragmatic, and more balanced, and that is that we have to clearly define what is our national interest, no matter what the issue is. And then we have to pursue that.

And that means balancing things that in the past weren’t balanced. That was democracy promotion at any cost, or human rights promotion at any cost. We’re not abandoning democracy. We’re not abandoning human rights. We’re just saying that it has to be part of the overall analysis. When we decide where to spend our time and what to spend our money on.

When was this country’s foreign policy “democracy promotion at any cost, or human rights promotion at any cost”? That’s a Tucker Carlson–like fantasy about the dreaded “neocons” and their control of American foreign policy. The close relations the United States maintains (and maintained under Biden) with Egypt and Qatar are alone enough to disprove the claim that human rights and democracy promotion have overwhelmed our economic or security interests. Rubio, who used to be viewed as one of the Senate’s top supporters of human rights, is presumably bowing to the White House in these interviews. One can hope that he means it when he says that the United States will “still be involved in those things, caring about human rights.” The alternative would be a soulless foreign policy that abandons a huge U.S. asset: the association of the United States with the cause of freedom around the world.

In truth, every secretary gets the human rights policy he wants, because the human rights bureau — no matter where it fits in the org chart — has no real bureaucratic power. Rubio’s intention to strengthen the regional bureaus would make it even harder for the human rights bureau to affect policy. In the end, the only thing the human rights bureau has is the right to make an argument to the secretary. If he is known to ignore those arguments, the bureau’s influence in the department disappears. If he is personally interested in human rights issues, as for example was George Shultz, the human rights bureau can play an important and useful role. It will be up to Rubio.

Rubio does firmly get the point about the need to reform the bureaucratic clearance process — or half the point anyway. In the interview with Weiss, he said:

As the Secretary of State, I get these memos. They’re called these decision memos. And if you look at all of the boxes that have to be checked before it even gets to me, in some cases it has to be checked by six or seven people in one bureau alone before it gets to me. That’s way too long. It almost renders the State Department irrelevant. We have to shorten that approval process, and the way to do it is to get rid of all of these offices that are all chiming in, any one of whom could slow action for an indefinite period of time.

That’s right, and it can be remedied by setting a deadline for clearance — hours or one day — and excluding some extraneous offices from the process. But that would not solve the deeper problem: the search for consensus that robs the secretary of critical knowledge about the debates taking place below him.

Dean Acheson, President Harry Truman’s last secretary of state, explained the need to bring decisions all the way up to the president: Staff, Acheson wrote in his great memoir, Grapes from Thorns, is indispensable for collecting information and implementing decisions but should not be permitted to substitute for executive decision-making. “This can happen in a number of ways, but the most insidious, because it seems so highly efficient, is the ‘agreed’ staff paper sent up for ‘action,’ a euphemism for ‘approval,’” Acheson wrote. “A chief who wants to perform his function of knowing the issues . . . and of deciding, needs, where there is any doubt at all, not agreed papers, but disagreed papers.”

Acheson was right. A president, and, similarly, a secretary of state, should demand to know what his top officials are arguing about. “Disagreed papers” (or, as they are called at State, “split memos”) are essential and Rubio should demand them — not homogenized, consensus documents that hide the real battles in the building.

Rubio may have been able to sink the leaked “reform” proposals that preceded his own reorganization plan, but other actions by the administration have been disruptive and damaging to U.S. foreign policy — and probably illegal. The destruction of U.S. government broadcasting — Voice of America, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, Radio Farda in Farsi to Iran, Radio Marti in Spanish to Cuba — has been halted by several judges, but the future of the radios is bleak unless the administration rethinks its policy. Rubio should lead this effort. In his new org chart, there remain an undersecretary for public diplomacy and an assistant secretary for “global public affairs.” To do what? With what assets? Rubio’s public comments have left this unclear, and public diplomacy has always been a problem child (or an orphan) at State. Congress and the secretary should work together to decide how we can most efficiently and effectively tell the world the American story. The whole area of public diplomacy — of explaining and selling U.S. foreign policy — is critical, and absolutely no one thinks the United States does that well.

What other reforms might be truly useful? Here are a few that emerged from a project of the Vandenberg Coalition:

Intake: Just as members of Congress nominate candidates for the military service academies, ask them to nominate candidates for the foreign service. This would give opportunities to young men and women from very diverse backgrounds, as it does for the military officer corps.

Staffing: Set a reasonable staff reduction goal, such as 25 percent, seeking to eliminate redundancies and nonessential positions, outsourcing administrative and other functions when possible, and require full-time presence at the office.

Reporting requirements: eliminate redundant and overlapping reporting and outsource the work to retired and part-time workers who need not be in the main State building.

Expertise: Create a foreign service track for long-term service in an area of expertise instead of forcing officers to become generalists.

There are many other promising ideas: Congress established the bipartisan Commission on Reform and Modernization of the Department of State just last year, and some pretty distinguished members were selected. There is no evidence that Trump’s plans reflected any consultation with the commission, and members tell me there has been none. It can be hoped that, as he implements his own proposals, Rubio, a former member of Congress, will do better. In his confirmation hearing, Rubio pledged that he’s willing to work with the commission, which is chaired by Senators Chris Coons (D., Del.) and Bill Hagerty (R., Tenn.). For some of the changes Rubio seeks, congressional approval and appropriations will be necessary.

Reform of State is needed to make our diplomacy as effective as possible. Some of the proposals from Rubio and from the congressional commission will be found useful and persuasive, or at least worth trying, but other actions by the Trump administration are demolishing key aspects of U.S. diplomacy, such as Voice of America, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, and public diplomacy more generally. There should be no blank check for Rubio or for the president. Given the dangers the country faces today, we need a top-notch diplomatic corps and an effective, efficient Department of State. A wrecking ball would produce neither.