U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio
US Department of State, Apr. 22, 2025
“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, and to transform their hatred of Israel into concrete policies such as arms embargoes.”
Today America confronts a new era of great power competition and the rise of a multipolar order with a State Department that stifles creativity, lacks accountability, and occasionally veers into outright hostility to American interests. The Department has long struggled to perform basic diplomatic functions, even as both its size and cost to the American taxpayer has ballooned over the past fifteen years. 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.
Bureaus and offices fight to be included on the approval chains for the most mundane of memos, only then to reach agreement on drafts that are bloated in length while stripped of all meaning. Motivated and creative State Department employees see their ideas watered down by turf battles until they give up, disillusioned, while the inboxes of senior officials are inundated with hundreds of requests for approval. While the talented and loyal are driven into indifference, radical ideologues and bureaucratic infighters have learned to play on this exhaustion to push through their own agendas that are often at odds with those of the President and undermine the interests of the United States.
An example of an out-of-control Department is the Global Engagement Center (GEC) that I shuttered last week. The office engaged with media outlets and platforms to censor speech it disagreed with, including that of the President of the United States, who its director in 2019 accused of employing “the same techniques of disinformation as the Russians.” Despite Congress voting to shutter it, the GEC simply renamed itself and continued operating as if nothing had changed….SOURCE