How Trump Can Remake the State Department

President Franklin Roosevelt regularly groused about foot-dragging State Department diplomats and constantly tried to work around them. A disgruntled President Kennedy complained that senior Foreign Service officers (FSOs) were attached “to the sterile assumptions and negative policies that we criticized so vigorously when we were out of office.”  JFK’s solution was to bring in new people “who understand the Kennedy policies and believe in them.”

This exasperation sounds quaint when compared to the open hostility that greeted President Trump’s first-term team at the State Department.  Trump’s first secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, was diabolically sabotaged starting on his first day. Mike Pompeo’s disappointment in Foggy Bottom was bitter and personal: “It is much to my embarrassment,” the former secretary wrote, “that during my tenure we were unable to restructure the Foreign Service in a meaningful way. The State Department doesn’t suffer from lack of numbers. It suffers from leaks, fragmentation, layers of bureaucracy, and a model of career advancement that disincentivizes risk-taking and ingenuity among the diplomatic corps.”

Yet it was not in vain. Much was learned from these backstabbing bureaucratic struggles, and now, empowered by his decisive electoral victory, the president-elect is presented with a golden opportunity to make lasting changes at State in his second term.  But it certainly will not be easy, and Secretary-designate of State Marco Rubio, whom the Senate will certainly confirm, must hit the beach at Foggy Bottom with a concrete action plan.  

When the senator arrives at the secretary’s seventh floor office suite in the Truman Building, he will discover his first major bureaucratic struggle will likely be bringing to heel the department’s “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility” (DEIA) social justice warriors.  Foggy Bottom is one of the federal government’s hardened citadels of DEIA extremism, and its defenders are preparing for bureaucratic guerrilla resistance. 

More than anything else, the outgoing Secretary Antony Blinken’s legacy is this extreme DEIA ideology that promotes radical ethnicity, gender, and race “wokeism,” all built on neo-Marxist critical race theory.  It is not only layered into all aspects of the department’s administrative processes and human resources, including all training, but the Blinken team has made DEIA into a core part of America’s foreign policy engagement.  Over the past four years, U.S. diplomats have delivered woke values in countless démarches to foreign interlocutors as stream Americana.  

Although department employees officially salute and toe the DEIA party line, among a significant number of careerists there is a sense, mostly privately expressed, that wokeism has put State on the wrong track and that Blinken’s embarrassing diplomacy has made the U.S. a laughingstock. DEIA has particularly lowered morale among straight white male employees, now effectively discriminated against in promotions and career-enhancing assignments. Many FSOs rightly believe that DEIA has unlawfully erased the merit principles mandated by the 1980 Foreign Service Act. 

Thus, Rubio will find the moment ripe to announce—presumably in step with new federal guidelines coming from the White House—the end of DEIA in all forms and a return to merit and equal opportunity, as required by the U.S. Constitution. Ending all discrimination means ending “enlightened” social justice discrimination, too.

Rubio’s arrival at State will also coincide with high-profile efforts by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE).  The bureaucracy’s Praetorian Guard across the federal government will respond to DOGE initiatives with calls for no-compromise resistance.  Nevertheless, although State leadership rarely talks about enhancing efficiency, many good careerists are themselves frustrated by a Foggy Bottom bureaucracy that suffers incompetent employees and tolerates dysfunctional stove-piped structures that never reach decisions.  A significant minority at State will be receptive to a new secretary who wants to implement new efficiencies.

An alliance of employee unions (ASFA for the Foreign Service and AFGE for the civil service) will orchestrate the defense of the status quo. “Scandalous” stories will be leaked to partisan journalists; Washington think-tankers will convoke the usual establishment experts; and “elder statesmen” FSOs will be trotted out to protest Trump’s “politicization” of the department.  They typically claim the only way to “fix” State is for Congress to increase funding for more staff and training.  Against Trump and Rubio, the status quo defenders will assert they are protecting the Foreign Service’s independence and professionalism, but the new secretary can remind them they were all strangely silent as four years of Blinken’s DEIA agenda radicalized and politicized the department.

There is certainly much to commend in taining a professional Foreign Service, but a more fundamental constitutional value is that the president must have confidence that his diplomatic corps is implementing his foreign policy agenda.  That is why a top priority for Rubio must be the removal of unreliable senior FSOs left in leadership positions by Blinken. 

When Biden’s political appointees exit the department on January 20, according to past practice, they would be replaced by their principal deputies, ly senior FSOs, and some civil servants, who then take command of bureaus and offices as the “acting” officials in charge. In the first Trump presidency, some of these career officials reed in positions of authority for many months, in some case years. Many were unsympathetic or even hostile to the president and his secretary.  If they are foolishly left in place in the second Trump administration, there is every reason to expect the same disastrous result. 

These senior FSOs and their allies will try to hold on to authority by asserting they are “professionals,” able to serve any president, but Rubio and his team should take an aggressive approach that carefully vets them all in the very beginning.  Almost all should be immediately replaced.  In the same way, the new secretary and the Trump White House should examine closely the leadership left in command at key U.S. embassies; in many cases the new administration will want to send out right away temporary chargés d’affaires to signal to host governments that Trump has changed Biden policies. 

Instead of waiting out the lumbering process of the president’s nominees clearing the Senate, as the first Trump administration did, Rubio and the White House will have two options to take immediate control inside Foggy Bottom.  One tool is highly legalistic: Rubio can rescind the delegation of his office’s legal authority to subordinates to act in his name. This is the statutory authority through which the secretary deputizes lesser officials to command State’s offices and bureaus.  

By strictly managing this legal prerogative, the secretary can later re-delegate the authority when it is determined that he has a trusted careerist or political appointee in charge.  Admittedly, this approach puts a significant management burden on the secretary’s leadership team to monitor large staff and programmatic activities from the seventh floor, but if used selectively, this recall of delegated authority can be a powerful control mechanism. 

Another tool, more straightforward and less controversial, is to use aggressively the legal authority of the Federal Vacancies Reform Act (FVRA, or “Vacancies Act”), a statute that authorizes the president to temporarily appoint trusted careerists to leadership positions as he awaits the Senate to confirm his nominees. Thus, the Vacancies Act empowers the president to replace an unfriendly careerist left in place as the “acting” official with a trusted and aligned careerist. 

The Vacancies Act’s legal authority rests exclusively with the president, but Rubio, in consultation with the White House, can use it to change overnight the department’s career leadership. Use of the FVRA could be deployed in conjunction with a strategy of recalling some of the secretary’s delegated authorities.  To be effective, though, both approaches require the secretary and his team to identify and partner with reliable careerists who are willing and able to assist the incoming administration.

Trump-aligned and conservative FSOs and civil service staff are a distinct minority in State, but they are there.  In addition to the considerable consternation caused by four years of Blinken’s DEIA extremism, many careerists are stupefied by Biden’s diplomacy: encouraging mass illegal migration; bungling the Afghanistan withdrawal; sending billions of dollars to Iran; being duped by Maduro in Venezuela.  This long list and other confused policies have sown doubts in the ranks of many career diplomats about the direction of the country.    

New employee networks like the Ben Franklin Fellowship (BFF) have emerged to provide another center of gravity for State careerists who believe U.S. international engagement should be firmly grounded in a national interest–based diplomacy.  The BFF can help provide the incoming administration a network of allies in State’s career ranks.  Looking to make long-term change in attitudes inside the State Department, BFF organizers are following the playbook of the Federalist Society, which succeeded in reorienting many hundreds of government attorneys and judges back to authentic constitutionalism. Similarly, BFF’s mission is to pull Foggy Bottom careerists towards diplomacy that promotes American sovereignty, strong national borders, fair trade practices, and skepticism about multilateralism. 

Going in to Foggy Bottom, Rubio’s team needs to ensure the Undersecretary for Management (called “M” in department bureaucratese) is firmly in their control in the very first days.  The M undersecretariat acts as the department’s “nervous system,” and putting several key M leadership positions in friendly hands will make possible fast on-boarding of Trump appointees and quick resolution of personnel snafus; it will also help disarm the administrative booby traps left behind.

State’s career attorneys, in the Office of the Legal Advisor (L), will also organize serious resistance.  They will assert their policy instructions are nonnegotiable “matters of law,” and if the secretary and his team do not heed L’s guidance they may be engaging in “unlawful” activities. It is a form of bureaucratic lawfare, and it was skillfully deployed to box in Pompeo.  Trump can best counter it from the start by using presidential FVRA authority to temporarily name a trusted careerist to take charge of State’s lawyers.  

Although remaking the State Department’s organizational chart will not be the first priority in wrangling control of the Foggy Bottom apparatus, long term there is much to do.  Senator Jesse Helms undertook the last major surgery on State’s corporate body back in 1999 in a deal he struck with then-Secretary Madeleine Albright. Helms managed to push the formerly independent United States Information Agency (USIA) and the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA) back inside State.  It was a good start that diminished the bureaucracy by eliminating two agencies (but most employees reed) and brought about (very slightly) a nimbler U.S. foreign policy.  

At the time of the Helms-Albright dealmaking, conservatives did not have the firepower to bring down the U.S. Agency for International Development.  USAID survived and continues to run U.S. foreign assistance as if it were a giant international NGO with a $50 billion budget.  The long-term strategy must include a plan to deal with USAID as well as streamline-eliminate a range of other independent foreign affairs government actors, such as the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC). 

Rubio will also need a plan to eliminate the department’s circus of “special” diplomats: special envoys, special coordinators, special advisors, and ambassadors-at-large, all floating around Foggy Bottom.  In many cases, Congress has created these positions through legislation, making them more difficult to discard, but the secretary can still limit their freelancing by vesting these “special” responsibilities with trusted assistant secretaries or senior bureau officials.  

The Musk-Ramaswamy DOGE objective should be to end the era of multiple independent foreign affairs agencies and actors that dominate Washington’s policy landscape.  Streamlining will restore presidential control and diminish foreign policy by bureaucracy.  Ideally, the United States should have one foreign affairs ministry that houses its international diplomacy apparatus and responds to the chief executive. For better or worse, that entity is the U.S. State Department with all its considerable bureaucratic baggage. Now is the historic moment for President Trump and Secretary Rubio, drawing on the decisive 2024 election, to use forceful and smart leadership to actually remake State.