‘Bloated and Bureaucratic’ – Rubio Announces Details of State Department Cuts (2025)

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced details of cuts to his department on Tuesday, including the elimination of a division that promotes “civilian security, democracy and human rights.”

Overall, undersecretaries have been directed to reduce staff by at least 15 percent, although State Department officials earlier this week said as much as 22 percent of personnel could be dismissed. They are expected to present their proposals for firings within 30 days.

“The Department is bloated, bureaucratic and unable to perform its essential diplomatic mission in this new era of great-power competition,” Rubio said in a statement. “The sprawling bureaucracy created a system more beholden to radical political ideology than advancing America’s core national interests.”

The service reductions were not quite as drastic on some fronts as the draft released earlier. Rubio did not mention earlier threats to eliminate the lion’s share of US diplomatic presence in sub-Saharan Africa and even some consulates in Europe.

A State Department spokesperson clarified that the earlier draft was a “purely domestic plan” that “does not have anything to do with any foreign missions.”

“That’s not to say that there won’t be subsequent decisions on foreign missions, but that’s not what this is,” the official said.

While Republican skepticism of the State Department and its programs advancing security, prosperity, and American interests abroad is nothing new, it was only a matter of time before the Trump administration and its “America First” policies would try to eviscerate the department in the name of government efficiency.

Rubio confirmed previous reports that the overhaul includes plans to close 132 State Department offices and move 137 others elsewhere.

The budget cuts are subject to Congressional approval, and analysts interviewed by US media said these plans most likely would not be carried out in the next few months, if at all.

Among the scraps on the cutting-room floor is the Office of Conflict and Stabilization Operations, whose activities have included a task force that tries to prevent atrocities overseas before they happen.

State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce was quick to downplay the significance of the move, saying that the end of offices did not necessarily mean their functions would end and that their areas of focus “could be implemented in a better, more nimble, faster way.”

It will be replaced by a new office of “coordination for foreign assistance and humanitarian affairs,” which will absorb functions of the US Agency for International Development, 80 percent of which was gutted just weeks after Trump took office.

The Trump regime plan eliminates an office on war crimes, whose recent work has included documenting Russia’s treatment of civilians in Ukraine.

AFP noted that Rubio penned an essay on Substack in which he insisted that many State programs such as that office were driven by liberal values.

The Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, for example, “became 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,” he wrote.

Democrats on Capitol Hill responded by accusing Rubio of a lack of transparency and of ceding ground to China, which has topped the United States globally in the number of diplomatic missions.

“These potentially sweeping changes have less to do with streamlining the State Department and more to do with eviscerating American soft power, including our values-driven defense of human rights and democracy globally,” said Rep. Gregory Meeks of New York, the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee.