Bari Weiss
The Free Press, Apr. 23, 2025 (transcript)
“Suffice it to say that I do believe the United States has options, but we don’t want to ever get to that.”
QUESTION: I want to start with the report that came out today from Gabe Kaminsky and Maddie Rowley, and it’s about this major reorganization that is now underway in your State Department. It is the largest shakeup at the State Department in decades – something like 132 offices are being cut; there’s many other details – and I want to understand the significance here beyond cost cutting. How does this reorganization help advance American interests and the President’s foreign policy abroad?
SECRETARY RUBIO: Well, I think that’s important to point out. This is not a cost-cutting exercise, although it certainly will provide savings to the American taxpayer. This is a policy exercise, and here’s why. Foreign policy – mature foreign policy, realistic foreign policy – requires the balancing of both policy geopolitical considerations, which often involve pragmatism, and some level of idealism – the promotion, for example, of human rights or democracy and things of that nature. So this sort of balance.
Well, today those two entities are housed in two different places. We have a group of people that are our regions – our embassies and our regional bureaus that oversee those embassies – and they’re involved in balancing our relationships with these countries; and then you have these other entities that are only so – looking at issues from a single-source standpoint: human rights, human trafficking, whatever it may be.
These two have to be brought together. And so we get rid of those bureaus that are what they call functional bureaus, and instead we move that function – we’re not getting rid of, for example, a group of people that care about human rights, but we’re putting those people in the regions and in the embassies so that all of our foreign policy is being balanced within those bureaus. So say it’s Western Hemisphere; it’s being balanced within the Western Hemisphere, and then ultimately empowering our embassies to pursue mature foreign policy that takes all of these factors into account.
So it really is about streamlining an entity that’s continued to grow. If I – if I show you the org chart of what the State Department looked like in the ’70s and what it looks like today, it’s unrecognizable. So we have to bring back some stability, some organizational streamlining that allows us to further foreign policy in a way that balances all of the things we have to take into consideration when we pursue foreign policy, and we can deliver it efficiently and fast. …SOURCE