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A little-known grantmaking entity within the State Department created an anti-Israel program without adequate authorization during the Biden administration. Now, President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio plan to shut it down.
The Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL) offered nearly $1 million to nonprofit groups for investigating alleged human rights abuses in Israel, the Gaza Strip, and the West Bank, the Washington Free Beacon reported in 2022. DRL instructed applicants to “collect, archive, and maintain human rights documentation to support justice and accountability and civil society-led advocacy efforts, which may include documentation of legal or security sector violations and housing, land, and property rights.”
While the Biden administration canceled the grant before DRL could award the money, it left the bureau’s grantmaking authority—its Office of Global Programs—intact. After President Trump froze foreign funding programs earlier this year, Rubio announced that the Trump administration plans to go a step further last week. The State Department’s plan involves closing down the Office of Global Programs, eliminating a 38-person staff of career bureaucrats and transferring remaining grant programs to regional offices.
The move is part of a broader effort to align federal bureaucrats at Foggy Bottom with the Trump administration’s policy priorities. When it comes to DRL’s grantmaking power, the administration believes that regional offices staffed with political and diplomatic appointees are less likely than career agency employees in Washington, D.C., to contradict those priorities.
“As the Secretary likes to say, we want to work from the ground up, from the embassies out in the field back to the regional bureaus, and that’s where we’re going to do our business,” a State Department official said. “The other offices—the DRLs of the world—they’re there to support that effort. They’re not off doing their own thing. They’re aligned with what we’re doing, they’re aligned with the policy out in the field.”
Ensuring that the State Department’s numerous bureaus acted in service of the president’s policy aims was nearly impossible, another department official told the Free Beacon, given the broad discretion entities like DRL and its Office of Global Programs wield and the number of “rogue people” within the agency.
In fact, bureaus like DRL have hiring authority, making it difficult even to know how many people work within a given entity. After the reorganization, the agency will empower political appointees and diplomats pursuing President Trump’s priorities.
“We’re taking the ability to make new grants and putting it into the regional bureaus, where it’s more aligned with the policy,” a State Department official said, “so that we don’t get in a situation where the policy side of the house [is] saying one thing, and then DRL [is] over here on the other side making all these grants that are 100% counter to what we’re saying on the policy side.”
Rather than anti-Israel bureaucrats using taxpayer money to fund anti-Israel grants, appointees in regional offices—in concert with the agency’s policy wing—will soon call the shots.
Officials confirmed to the Free Beacon several other planned changes to the organizational structure of the department, including drastically reducing the size of the Secretary’s Office of Global Women’s Issues (S-GWI), which in 2023 presented its “women of courage award” to a biological man who identifies as a woman.
That office, which a senior State Department official said has “long strayed from its intended mission” and made decisions that “led to [its] own self-destruction,” currently maintains a staff of 33 career bureaucrats. Rubio plans to eliminate all but the ambassador-level S-GWI head, the Trump-appointed Cate Dillon, who is focused on “America-First” issues.
The State Department will also shutter the climate-focused Office of Global Change and reorient the Bureau of Energy Resources to focus on critical mineral supply chains amid the administration’s campaign to source valuable commodities outside China.
It will dramatically shrink several others—including the Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations, the Bureau of Energy Resources, and the Office of Global Criminal Justice—in an effort to streamline the agency and eliminate redundancies.
In certain cases in which Rubio cannot unilaterally do away with a particular position, the Trump administration will simply leave it vacant.
This includes the Special Representative for Racial Equity and Justice, the Special Advisor for Disability Rights, the Climate Change Support Office, the Special Envoy for LGBT Rights, and the Special Envoy for the Closure Of Guantanamo Bay prison camp, among others.
“We’ve gotten a bunch of special representatives and things that we just haven’t filled because they don’t align with the priorities that we’re currently working under,” a State Department official said. “We’re taking them off the books.”
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