Marco Rubio launches mass cuts from the State Department, office closures

Washington (AP) – The Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, presented a massive review of the State Department on Tuesday, with plans to reduce staff in the United States by 15% while closing and consolidated more than 100 offices worldwide as part of the “First America” ​​of the Trump administration.

“We cannot win the battle during the 21st century with the swollen bureaucracy that suffocates innovation and assigns the scarce resources badly,” Rubio said in an email from the entire department obtained by AP. He said that the reorganization was aimed at “facing the immense challenges of the 21st century and putting the United States first.”

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The spokeswoman of the State Department, Tammy Bruce, echoed that feeling, saying that “radical changes will empower our talented diplomatic”, but would not result in the immediate dismissal of the staff.

“It’s not something that people are being fired today,” Bruce told journalists on Tuesday. “They will not leave the building. It is not a type of dynamic. It is a road map. It is a plan.”

It includes consolidating 734 offices and offices up to 602, as well as the transition from 137 offices to another location within the department to “increase efficiency”, according to an information sheet obtained by AP.

There will be a “reinvented” office focused on foreign and humanitarian affairs to coordinate the abroad aid programs that remain in the State Department.

Although the plan will implement important changes in the bureaucracy and department staff, it is much less drastic than an alleged reorganization plan that circulated some officials during the weekend. Numerous senior state department officials, including blond himself, denied that the plan was real.

The work that was believed in that supposed leaked document survived, at least as office names in a table, in the plan that Rubio launched on Tuesday. That includes offices for Africa affairs, migration and refugee problems, and democracy efforts.

It was not clear immediately if US embassies were included in the facilities scheduled for closing. The previous reports of wholesale embassy closures, especially in Africa, had caused warnings about the reduction of the United States’s diplomatic influence and influence abroad.

Some of the offices that are expected to be reduced in the new plan include the Office of Global Women’s Affairs and the diversity and inclusion efforts of the State Department, which have been eliminated throughout the government under Trump.

An office will be eliminated in a greater experience in war areas and other crises in erupting, while other offices focused on human rights and justice will be reduced or folded in other sections of the department.

Daryl Grisgraber, a policy protagonist with the Oxfam America humanitarian organization, said that this development only creates more “uncertainty” about the ability of the United States to contribute to humanitarian conflicts and that “it will only make the world a more unstable and unequal place for all of us.”

It is not clear if reorganization would be implemented through an executive order or other means.

The plans occurred a week after the AP knew that the Office of Administration and Budget of the White House proposed to gut the state department budget by almost 50% and eliminate funds for the United Nations headquarters and NATO.

Although the budget proposal was still in a highly preliminary phase and it was not expected to approve a meeting with the Congress, the reorganization plan obtained an initial assent of the approval of the Republicans in Capitol Hill.

“The change is not easy, but President Trump and the Rubio Secretary have proposed a vision to rebuild the State Department for this century and the fights we face today, as well as those in front of us,” said Idaho Senator Jim Risch, Republican President of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in a statement.

Meanwhile, the Democrats made the effort as the last attempt of the Trump administration to gut the “vital components of the American influence” on the world stage.

“In its confrontation, this new reorganization plan raises serious concerns that the United States will no longer have the ability or ability to exercise global leadership of the United States, achieve critical national security goals, resist our adversaries, save lives and promote democratic values,” said Hawaii’s democratic senator Brian Shatz.

Some legislators said the measure is a deviation from the work that Rubio supported as a senator.

“The vital work that remains in the floor of the Secretary of Secretary Rubio represents significant pillars of our foreign policy backed by Democrats and Republicans equally, including former blond senator, not ‘radical ideologies’ as he affirms now,” said New York representative Gregory Meeks, the main Democrat in the Chamber’s External Affairs Committee.

The proposed changes in the State Department occur when the Trump administration has been reducing jobs and funds between agencies, from the Department of Education to health and human services.

On foreign policy, beyond the destruction of USAID, the administration has also moved to disburse the so -called “soft power” institutions as media that offer objective news, often to authoritarian countries, including the voice of America, the transmission networks of the Middle East, Asia Radio Free and Radio/TV Marti, which transmits to Cuba.

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Amiri reported the United Nations and reads from London.