Congress: The Missing Link in State Department Reform

The administration’s approach to the State Department reorganization is unlikely to work without congressional authorization and oversight.

BY EVAN COOPER

The Trump administration has taken a seemingly drastic approach to State Department reform. First, the remnants of USAID were merged into State’s regional bureaus. This was followed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s sweeping reorganization, which eliminates most staffing in the Bureaus of Conflict and Stabilization Operations and Population, Refugees, and Migration; the Office of Global Partnerships; and dozens of other offices. The plan also seeks to cut at least 15 percent of State’s U.S.-based workforce through the reduction-in-force procedure and early retirements.

While the attempt to shrink the size of the department is unprecedented, many of the second Trump administration’s State Department reforms are drawn from past efforts by his first administration and others, which ultimately did not stick. They risk failing again for the same reason: a consistent inability to work effectively with Congress. Both sides are at fault; administrations have not engaged Congress to codify reforms for the long term, while the modifications to State that Congress has pushed are done without buy-in from the bureaucracy.

The administration’s “move fast and break things” approach to the State Department is unlikely to work if there is not congressional authorization of these changes, followed by oversight and evaluation of enacted reforms.

Reforms Again and Again

Every administration in the 21st century has attempted to reform the State Department, and some of these efforts are reflected in the Trump administration’s recent moves. For example, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice sought to overhaul foreign assistance, trying to align it with the strategic diplomatic goals of the George W. Bush administration while making assistance more transparent and ensuring greater oversight.

This push for reform was “due in large part to the Secretary’s inability to answer congressional inquiries regarding U.S. spending on democracy promotion,” wrote Gerald Hyman in a 2008 report published by the Carnegie Endowment. Similar concerns about democracy promotion spending have been cited by the Trump administration as reason for cutting foreign assistance; moving assistance programs under the purview of the regional bureaus; and drastically shrinking the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor.

The Obama administration undertook an even broader approach to State Department reform than the Bush administration, implementing the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review (QDDR). Ultimately, the QDDR did not live up to its name, with reviews published only in 2010 and 2015. In 2012 a group of senators (including then-Senator Marco Rubio) introduced the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review Act, which sought to codify the QDDR process and authorized the Secretary of State to establish an Office of Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review.

Every administration in the 21st century has attempted to reform the State Department, and some of these efforts are reflected in the Trump administration’s recent moves.

While the QDDR effort obtained support from Congress, there was no institutional buy-in on the State side to facilitate the continuing review process. “Stakeholders largely viewed the resulting document as anchored by wish lists instead of real strategy,” Daniel Runde and Helen Moser wrote in an assessment of the 2010 QDDR process for the Center for Strategic and International Studies. One of the principal recommendations in the 2010 QDDR was that State reduce the use of contractors—a recommendation that was never pursued and has since returned as a goal of the second Trump administration’s State reform agenda.

The first Trump administration did go to Congress with a State Department reform proposal in 2017 that aimed to “improve the efficiency, effectiveness, and accountability of the executive branch.” According to the 2021 Congressional Research Service (CRS) report, “Congressional Oversight of the State Department: Review of Selected Organizational Reform Efforts,” Congress viewed the “Redesign” plan with hostility and “was able to leverage its oversight authorities to prevent the Trump administration from implementing a major reorganization” of the department. The proposed reforms in 2017 included merging USAID into State; Trump’s team did not seek approval from Congress for such a merger the second time around. The Trump administration appears to have taken the lesson from its first reform effort that it should act without the support of Congress and only later ask Congress to codify the changes it has made.

The Biden administration’s Modernization Agenda took a more focused approach than the first Trump administration and sought to work with Congress to enact its proposed changes. Notably, this led to the creation of the new Bureau of Global Health Security and Diplomacy, which has had bipartisan support from Congress and which the second Trump administration has not sought to eliminate. Other aspects of Biden’s Modernization Agenda, however, that do not enjoy broad congressional support, particularly those related to workforce modernization, have quickly been overturned by the current administration. Republican members of Congress, including Rubio, criticized the Biden administration’s diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts at State. The incoming Trump administration celebrated its early elimination of the Office of Diversity and Inclusion, seeing it as a political win that was unlikely to receive pushback from Congress.

The Way Forward: The Role of Congress

Several lessons from past reform attempts should inform future efforts. The most important is that while reform proposals should come from the executive branch, they must be designed with workforce buy-in and congressional support in mind.

The executive branch decides how to deploy the State Department. To do this, it must understand what the institution’s capabilities and weaknesses are. The executive branch should source ideas from within the department’s ranks and choose which ideas it wants to advance. But those ideas need to be communicated to Congress early on, with a focus on explaining why the changes are needed and identifying how Congress can help sustain any changes past the current administration. Successful reform efforts will not be implemented in four- or even eight-year cycles; they require funding and oversight from Congress and cultural adoption from within the bureaucracy.

To be successful, reforms need to be implemented through a consistent and iterative process, which has thus far been lacking.

Congress’ best tool for implementing reforms is a State Department authorization, but lawmakers have failed to pass a stand-alone authorization bill since 2002. While State Department authorizations have been tacked on to the National Defense Authorization Act for the last three years of the Biden administration, these bills only authorized appropriations on a narrow set of issues rather than broadly authorizing State Department accounts. Furthermore, as the 2025 CRS report “Foreign Relations Reauthorization: Background and Issues” highlights, attaching State authorization to NDAA legislation includes committees in the decision-making that would not otherwise have oversight authority over State. This contributes to the narrowing of the authorizations and prevents funding for new initiatives.

For a future State authorization to be successful, the administration will need to work with Congress, specifically the House Foreign Affairs Committee and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to understand what is politically viable. State should strive to make Foreign Service (FS) and Civil Service (CS) officers available to speak with Congress about how structural changes would affect their jobs, which could provide useful information to Congress while helping obtain buy-in from the workforce.

Use the Congressional Commission

The Congressional Commission on Reform and Modernization of the Department of State, which was authorized in 2023 and fully funded in 2024, offers a useful forum for information sharing between the executive branch and Congress. The commission was designed to bring together lawmakers, State’s leadership, and outside experts to elevate not just useful concepts for reform but insights into how they can be implemented. The commission should be utilized by both sides to put forward concepts for reform and test their viability before going through the legislative process. There is a risk that the commission will fall by the wayside under the Trump administration, but members of Congress and the administration should staff and employ the body for their own benefit.

The commission should prioritize engaging the longest-serving members of the FS to develop an understanding of what the opportunities and impediments are to receiving institutional buy-in for reforms. The QDDR was an earnest attempt to implement a procedure that could be adopted by future administrations, but it was so far detached from the experience of State Department personnel that it came to be seen as an aspirational review divorced from practical plans for implementation. High-level reviews that do not receive support from the workforce risk bureaucratic slow-rolling and quiet resistance.

The reform process should engage with employees early and in depth but should not off-load responsibility onto them. There is a risk of tasking the workforce with a burdensome review, only for their own reform proposals to be dismissed; when that happens, the process will ultimately be seen as superficial by those whose buy-in matters most. Mandated integrated country strategies, for example, create a large amount of work for missions but rarely lead to significant policy changes and are thus seen by many in the FS as perfunctory. Asking the workforce to develop ideas for reform without providing the resources needed to implement the ideas is a recipe for a disillusioned bureaucracy.

State Department reform does not have a finish line to be crossed. To be successful, reforms need to be implemented through a consistent and iterative process, which has thus far been lacking. There is a rich body of ideas for changes to State Department operations, but implementation of those concepts has failed because of a disjointed relationship between the State Department workforce, executive branch leadership, and Congress. As the Trump administration attempts to reshape State, it should view both Congress and State’s workforce as integral partners in this process rather than impediments to its vision. It will only be through the work of department staff, funded and overseen by Congress, that any positive reforms will last beyond the current administration.

Evan Cooper is a research analyst at the Stimson Center where he leads a project on reimagining U.S. diplomacy.

 

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