Leaked memo reveals plan for big State Department overhaul | EUROtoday

A leaked draft of an govt order to reorganize the U.S. State Department reveals plans to slash whole departments and bureaus coping with the whole continent of Africa, human rights, girls’s rights, worldwide spiritual freedom, and local weather change whereas tightening political management over the international service and handing extra authority to the White House and political appointees.

The contents of the memorandum, which doesn’t comply with the same old construction of govt orders, have been first reported by The New York Times and Bloomberg.

The State Department has denied the doc’s authenticity, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio dismissing it as a “hoax” in a publish on X (previously Twitter).

But the specifics of the draft doc, which was obtained and reviewed by The Independent, monitor intently with Trump administration efforts to undercut the institutional data and authority of nonpartisan civil servants in different elements of the chief department in addition to the administration’s push to alter the conduct of American international relations to a extra transactional mannequin that prioritizes uncooked, bare self-interest over conventional values-based diplomacy that works by means of multilateral alliances.

It lays out what it calls a “disciplined reorganization” of the division that will remove a devoted bureau for African Affairs in favor of a White House-run “Special Envoy Office for African Affairs” that will give attention to counterterrorism, acquiring entry to “critical natural resources,” and conduct solely “select bilateral diplomacy” on “particular temporary matters” whereas shuttering many of the division’s embassies on the African continent.

It would additionally remove the division’s Office of Women’s Global Issues, the U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate and the Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs, the Special Envoy for Afghan Women, Girls, and Human Rights, and shut down the division’s places of work and bureaux answerable for public diplomacy and public affairs, instructional and cultural outreach, and exchange the Office of Foreign Assistance with a brand new “humanitarian affairs” bureau to hold out “limited functions” beneath supervision of a “Government Efficiency Department” and requiring “explicit written approval” from the president for “all positions and duties” associated to international support.

If enacted, the plan would symbolize probably the most vital reorganization of the division because it was based in 1789. It would cement a seismic realignment of America’s international coverage equipment from a professionalized international service devoted to advancing democracy, human rights and different conventional American values to a extra politically insular and tightly managed diplomatic cadre working with much less autonomy and extra ideological scrutiny beneath tighter management from the White House.

The transfer would even be a big step in direction of the reimagining of the international support ecosystem which State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce and others have been promising for months. The company’s press secretary, in repeated situations at each day information briefings, has assured journalists that the US’s dedication to international support has not wavered, and is as an alternative being reworked right into a extra environment friendly course of.

By requiring the president to personally log out on “all positions and duties” associated to America’s international support technique, the brand new course of will implicitly add at the very least one new layer of pink tape to that course of — a layer managed by a commander-in-chief who has been publicly dismissive of the utility of soppy energy.

Chief International Correspondent Bel Trew contributed reporting