Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently announced a major restructuring of the U.S. State Department. Although the media quickly lamented the downsizing efforts and focused disproportionately on the purging of liberal influence, the overwhelming bulk of Rubio’s statements have been focused on the need to align the department with national interests and consolidate manpower in regional offices and at embassy and consulate posts around the world.
Rubio has emphasized that this is not a cost-cutting exercise. It also isn’t a neutering of U.S. diplomatic prowess. Just the opposite — he claims that, by pushing manpower out of stove-piped functional offices and into regional bureaus, he is “reversing decades of bloat and bureaucracy” while empowering the “talented diplomats” who serve on the front lines of America’s whole-of-government national security strategy and policy. It is by this reasonable intent that his efforts must be judged.
To emphasize Rubio’s concerns about the stifling nature of the D.C.-based bureaucracy, the following personal anecdote is instructive.
I was deployed as the U.S. senior defense official to Iraq for 14 months during a particularly challenging time — May 2020 until July 2021. Iranian-aligned militia groups were acting on a regular basis to hinder the authority and sovereignty of the rightfully selected leaders of Iraq, and they were still fuming about the American airstrike that had killed Iranian military leader Qasem Soleimani in early January 2020.
These groups expressed their displeasure through regular demands for a withdrawal of residual American forces, which were in Iraq there at the invitation of its government to support continued operations against the forces of the Islamic State. They also expressed their anger by conducting regular rocket strikes against American personnel, including those at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, and by threatening to kidnap high-ranking members of the American military.
The security situation grew tense for Americans in Iraq as we approached the anniversary of Soleimani’s killing. The State Department decided to evacuate the vast majority of diplomatic personnel in Baghdad for a period that dragged on for nearly six months. Ninety percent of my organization was repositioned to Kuwait during that period. A few of us remained in Baghdad to continue performing the local mission as best we could in direct support of the ambassador.
During this time, the State Department closely controlled the numbers of American personnel in the embassy to abide by the constraints established by the secretary of State and his senior leadership team. This was part of a reasonable decision-making process based on authority, responsibility, risk and visibility. Yet, a maze of D.C.-based bureaucrats went overboard in their close control of embassy activities.
Instead of allowing the ambassador to manage to the personnel constraints on his own within the limits of manpower caps, Main State’s byzantine bureaucratic structure tightly controlled not only the numbers of personnel allowed in the embassy but the individual names as well. Any swaps of personnel required explicit approval by name from Washington. It became a cumbersome exercise to get approvals even for simple manpower changes.
Such a mismatch of decision-making authority consumed a large amount of the time and energy of the remaining, sparse personnel in Baghdad. They were being micromanaged by offices that had seized control from Washington and lacked on-the-ground knowledge of the situation. The bureaucrats acted without regard to the burden they were imposing in-country.
This situation revealed itself as extreme folly when I took my first trip to visit my team that had been displaced to Kuwait. I purposefully did not swap another member of our team from Kuwait into my slot in Baghdad so that I would have the flexibility to return as needed without State Department interference — or at least, that was the flexibility I thought I was retaining by doing so.
When it was time to return, I was told that Main State needed to provide approval for such a swap. I argued that there was no swap, as my slot was vacant, but that wasn’t the way the number-crunchers at Foggy Bottom saw it. They proceeded to consume several man-hours and a few extra days to get approval coordinated through 21 different people at State Department headquarters to swap Teichert for Teichert.
It was pure bureaucratic, organizational sabotage. It ran counter to the needs of the important mission, and it subverted the authority of the ambassador — the singular individual responsible to the president for U.S. relationships with Iraq.
Rubio is enacting his organizational change to break the stranglehold of this type of bureaucratic quagmire that runs counter to American diplomatic effectiveness and responsiveness. In doing so, he will cut 700 positions and 132 offices in the sprawling structure of the State Department while shifting functional roles into regional offices where they can be managed in accordance with the needs of country teams and through the lens of regional expertise.
It is right to oversee and judge the progress of Rubio’s measures with a focus on State’s ability to perform its critical diplomatic functions in accordance with U.S. national interests. Cuts and shifts that could potentially harm U.S. priorities should be thoroughly questioned to confirm a sound rationale and rigorously judged according to outcomes.
Lingering concerns about the loss of USAID functions that have historically furthered U.S. interests should also be considered through such a robust lens, as should any manpower and functional cuts or closures at embassies or consulates around the world. After all, vital interagency roles are conducted from these locations. Any loss of American presence can quickly erode access and influence that are essential elements of national power.
In contrast, to pretend that streamlining a lumbering bureaucracy in D.C. will automatically erode U.S. interests is to neglect the bloat and dysfunction that current suffocates U.S. diplomatic efforts.
Retired Air Force Brig. Gen. John Teichert is a leading expert on foreign affairs and military strategy. He served as commander of Joint Base Andrews and Edwards Air Force Base, was the U.S. senior defense official to Iraq, and recently retired as the assistant deputy undersecretary of the Air Force ofr international affairs. A prolific author, he can be followed at johnteichert.com and on LinkedIn.
