President-elect Donald Trump is planning to immediately shake up the State Department by moving new officials into top roles.
A source familiar with the situation tells Fox News that the new Trump administration will immediately move new officials into key operational roles at the State Department to ensure the department is carrying out the Trump foreign policy agenda from day one.
Normally, career State Department officials will oversee these key positions while political appointees await Senate confirmation. The Trump team is bringing in dozens of “senior bureau officials” to ensure the career employees have Trump-aligned officials over them. The source says the transition has already identified the senior bureau officials who will be taking over.
The source also says this move affects more than 20 additional key roles at State. Reuters reported last week that Trump officials have already asked others to step aside, bringing a total of about 30 senior positions affected by this initiative. They include all of those working as undersecretaries and overseeing key regional, policy and communications bureaus.
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Asked to comment, a spokesperson for the transition team told Fox, “It is entirely appropriate for the transition to seek officials who share President Trump’s vision for putting our nation and America’s working men and women first. We have a lot of failures to fix, and that requires a committed team focused on the same goals.”
Trump’s transition team recently asked three senior career diplomats to step down from their roles, according to a Reuters report.
Dereck Hogan, Marcia Bernicat and Alaina Teplitz, the career diplomats who were allegedly asked to leave their roles, oversee the State Department’s workforce and internal coordination.
All three of the career diplomats named in the report have worked under Democratic and Republican administrations, Reuters noted. Unlike political appointees, diplomats do not typically resign when a president leaves office.
Throughout his political career, Trump has gone after the “deep state,” and this move could be seen as part of his efforts to fundamentally change the government on a bureaucratic level.
Trump has never hid his disdain for the government agency responsible for foreign relations, dubbing it the “Deep State Department” during his first term, reflecting his belief that career diplomats were working to subvert his agenda.
Trump is likely to work in tandem with his Secretary of State nominee, Marco Rubio, who, during his confirmation hearing, said that State employees would need to work towards Trump’s “America first” agenda and pledged to make the agency “relevant again.”
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“What has happened over the last 20 years under multiple administrations is the influence of the State Department has declined at the expense of other agencies, and also at the expense of National Security Councils, because it takes so long for the State Department to take action,” said Rubio.
“And so, increasingly, you stop getting invited to the meetings, and they stop putting you in charge of things, because it takes too long to get a result.”
He said that “the core mission of the department has not been well-defined” in the modern federal bureaucracy, and “it’s our obligation to define that.”
“We want the State Department to be relevant again, and it should be because the State Department has a plethora of talented people who are subject-matter experts and who have skills in diplomacy. And it’s not being fully utilized, because, increasingly, on issue after issue, we’ve seen the State Department marginalized because of internal inertia, because of the way the structure works. We have to be at that table when decisions are being made, and the State Department has to be a source of creative ideas and effective implementation,” he added.
Rep. Brian Mast, R–Fla., chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told reporters that he was looking to root out those at State who had directed the so-called “woke” funding programs at the department.
“If you have people that are writing grants nefariously supporting a radical agenda, like doing drag shows abroad and trying to find this vague tie and not tying things to U.S. national security interests, then they should be aware that we’ll be looking for them, and we will be looking for creating authorities to make sure that their existence doesn’t continue in the State Department.”
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