Rubio Remaking the State Department – HotAir

The New York Times pretended to have a scoop, outlining the major changes coming to the State Department under Marco Rubio. 

The only problem with the story? It was entirely fake. 

Well, not entirely. Rubio IS shaking up the State Department; it’s just that in every other respect, the Times got it wrong. Ed wrote about the shakeup earlier today. 

You and I may think that is a big deal, but then again we knew the Hunter Biden laptop was real, the Steele Dossier was fake, and The New York Times is as professional as a kindergartener who needs a snack and a nap. 

This is fake news. The ⁦@nytimes⁩ falls victim to another hoax. https://t.co/hXSiV1t9HC

— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) April 20, 2025

The Free Press, which strives to bring you real news and smart commentary (I am more conservative than they by a long shot, but they are honest, and that is enough for me to respect them), actually DID get the scoop, and Marco Rubio has tweeted out their story, confirming it is accurate. 

Read our scoop on The Trump admin’s most aggressive shake-up at the State Department in decades: https://t.co/uvrKEnc1SS

— The Free Press (@TheFP) April 22, 2025

According to the planning documents, the State Department will eliminate 132 of its offices along with 700 positions within them. These offices are wings of the agency in Washington, D.C., that focus on a variety of foreign policy issues and are viewed by the Trump administration as no longer necessary.

The 700 positions are for civil service and foreign service employees, rather than political appointees. The elimination of the roles is in addition to the State Department’s ask for under secretaries to reduce their personnel by 15 percent.

The State Department is also transferring 137 offices to other parts of the agency to consolidate programs.

“This approach will empower the Department from the ground up, from the bureaus to the embassies,” Rubio said. “Region-specific functions will be consolidated to increase functionality, redundant offices will be removed, and non-statutory programs that are misaligned with America’s core national interests will cease to exist.”

No doubt a lot of people are going to point at the names of the agencies and departments being cut–they might as well all be named “The Department of Saving Puppies, Kittens, and Cute Babies,” by now we all know that the correspondence between what something is named in government and what they actually do is, shall we say, rather loose. 

Lots of people will react like Brandon Wu, of the lefty group “Action Aid USA,” which sent me a press release whacking Rubio. Marco Rubio is apparently a really bad guy, don’tcha know?

Secretary Rubio’s rant against the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor as the carrier of a leftist agenda lays the administration’s intentions bare: their decimation of the State Department is part of an unhinged crusade against perceived “woke” policies and practices, not a coherent plan for reform.

Climate Justice is THEIR big policy issue, and there will be a million groups like that coming out of the woodwork, weeping and wailing and gnashing their teeth about how awful Rubio and Trump are. “Democracy” will fall everywhere unless we triple the State Department budget. 

“Building democracy” generally means “sparking color revolutions,” and “fighting misinformation” means censoring opinions and inconvenient facts. Heck, they even have a TERM for inconvenient facts: “malinformation,” which sounds even worse than misinformation, but simply means “true things we don’t want known.”

The State Department was very big into stopping malinformation and promoting color revolutions. The CIA may do a lot of covert ops, but the State Department has been their piggy bank at least since Bush/Obama vastly expanded the intelligence community and aggressive meddling and nation-building. 

The Free Press goes into great detail about the restructuring–covering with far better facts and analysis than the Times–and while the authors seem a bit queasy about slashing the “This Department Does Very Good Things So Don’t Worry Your Sweet Little Head What Exactly We Do” bureaucracies, former State Department insiders understand that no bureaucracy really does what was intended after a few years. 

It’s why private businesses of any size restructure after a few years or a decade–bureaucracies are gonna bureaucracy. They get bloated, diverted by shiny objects, and become kingdoms. 

Rubio seems to want the State Department to do State Department things instead of spending its time meddling with domestic projects and remaking every country in the World Economic Forum’s image. 

I’m happy with that. Go Marco!