Most of the United States\u2019 special envoys will be abolished and their responsibilities reassigned as part of the State Department overhaul, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told Congress on Monday, including moving the cybersecurity office under the Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Lawmakers of both parties, think tanks and even the diplomats\u2019 association have long called for absorbing some of the countless U.S. envoys and special representatives into related offices, to help reduce redundancies across the State Department\u2019s notoriously unwieldy bureaucracy. But the idea has attracted new scrutiny amid the Trump administration\u2019s plans to drastically cut the State Department\u2019s budget and concerns that Trump was eschewing the promotion of American values overseas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In each case, the envoys\u2019 staff and their budgets will be absorbed by the office taking over their functions. That shift will free up significant funds that Tillerson can draw upon as he restructures other parts of the agency, said a State Department official, who wasn\u2019t authorized to comment by name and requested anonymity. For example, merging the cyber envoy into the broader Economic and Business Affairs bureau will boost the latter\u2019s budget by $5.5 million.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Of 66 current envoys or representatives, 30 will remain, a cut of 55 percent. Nine positions will be abolished outright. Twenty-one will be \u201cintegrated\u201d into other offices, five merged with other positions, and one transferred to the U.S. Agency for International Development, the government\u2019s foreign aid arm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
While State Department officials stressed that changes to the flow chart don\u2019t necessarily signal a change in priorities, in some cases the policy implications are clear. Elimination of the Guantanamo closure envoy dovetails with Trump\u2019s plans to keep the prison open. The president has pulled the U.S. out of the Paris global climate deal and threatened to do the same with the Iran nuclear deal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Tillerson, in a letter to Congress, said he believed the State Department could \u201cbetter execute its mission\u201d by integrating some positions, pointing out concerns that the current system diluting the government\u2019s effectiveness by creating multiple power centers dealing with the same issue. The number of special envoys has grown over the years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The pruning offers the first concrete information about how Tillerson\u2019s sweeping overhaul will affect the State Department and its approximately 75,000 employees. Since taking office in February, Tillerson has been scouring the agency and soliciting input from diplomats about how to trim the agency down. A roughly one-third budget cut and elimination of thousands of jobs are expected.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Trump administration will keep envoys or at-large ambassadors for women\u2019s issues, hostages, Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, human trafficking, HIV\/AIDS and Holocaust issues. There will no longer be special envoys for the Arctic, Syria, Myanmar, Libya, Haiti, Sudan and South Sudan, though regional offices will assume those portfolios. The envoy for six-party talks in North Korea, currently vacant, won\u2019t be filled.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In a 2014 report, the American Foreign Service Association, which represents career diplomats, recommended retaining only a handful of envoys while eliminating or merging the rest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Some special envoys are mandated by Congress. The Trump administration will ask lawmakers to repeal those mandates.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Most of the United States\u2019 special envoys will be abolished and their responsibilities reassigned as part of the State Department overhaul, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told Congress on Monday, including moving the cybersecurity office under the Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":46200,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-noindex":"","_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-nofollow":"","_yoast_wpseo_canonical":"","_acf":"","_yoast_wpseo_primary_category":10,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_smg_distribution_targets":[]},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"coauthors":[819],"class_list":["post-14807","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cyber"],"acf":{"subheadline":"","legacy_arc_id":"WUPQJT75YNER5OPFUONVTIEM3U","arc_canonical_url":"\/civilian\/2017\/08\/29\/state-department-bureau-to-get-funding-bump-by-absorbing-cyber-envoys-duties\/","remove_feature_photo":false,"is_sponsored":false,"subtype":"","redirect_url":"","disable_inline_ads":false,"native_logo_pretext":"Presented By:"},"yoast_head":"\n