Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a longtime Convention of States endorser, inherited what the Trump administration saw as a corrupted State Department. But, even as news broke on Tuesday about Elon Musk’s intentions to “significantly” reduce his time spent with DOGE, the former senator from Florida borrowed Musk’s chainsaw and took matters into his own hands.
In a move that stunned status quo apologists in the media, Rubio unveiled his plans to shutter 132 State Department offices and slash personnel.
“Today is the day,” he wrote on social media. “Under @POTUS’ leadership and at my direction, we are reversing decades of bloat and bureaucracy at the State Department. These sweeping changes will empower our talented diplomats to put America and Americans first.”
According to The Free Press, which exclusively obtained internal documents about Rubio’s reformation, undersecretaries at the State Department have been “instructed within 30 days to present plans to reduce their U.S. personnel in individual departments by 15 percent, according to a senior State Department official. These include six top offices employing thousands of people.”
This major announcement comes less than one week after Rubio nuked Joe Biden’s “government-censorship complex,” formerly known as the Global Engagement Center (GEC).
Both moves angered critics, who called the State Department’s new direction “a blow to U.S. values.”
“Eliminating the State Department’s senior most human rights official sends a clear signal that the Trump administration cares less about fundamental freedoms than it does about cutting deals with autocrats and tyrants,” said Christopher Le Mon, who served in the Biden administration, about one of the positions Rubio intends to cut.
The Secretary of State defended the cuts as necessary to shrink government waste and modernize the department.
“Today America confronts a new era of great power competition and the rise of a multipolar order with a State Department that stifles creativity, lacks accountability, and occasionally veers into outright hostility to American interests,” he stated in a post on Substack. “The Department has long struggled to perform basic diplomatic functions, even as both its size and cost to the American taxpayer has ballooned over the past fifteen years. The problem is not a lack of money, or even dedicated talent, but rather a system where everything takes too much time, costs too much money, involves too many individuals, and all too often ends up failing the American people.”
Between targeting the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) — the government program responsible for administering foreign aid — and discontinuing other superfluous State Department projects, the Trump administration has signaled its intent to redirect government spending toward initiatives with more immediate benefits for the American public. To that end, Musk’s chainsaw has once again come in handy.
Watching the power-drunk statists lament the loss of their prized unconstitutional, multimillion-dollar-per-year programs serves as a teaser for how they would react to an Article V convention — the ultimate weapon against a bloated government authority. If this is how they respond to reformation, just wait until we unleash our revolution!
Using Article V of the U.S. Constitution, we can propose amendments limiting federal spending, power, and terms of office and restore our government to the Founders’ original intent. To join the movement, sign the COS petition below.
‘Reversing decades of bloat and bureaucracy’: Marco Rubio slashes jobs at State Department
Published in Blog on April 23, 2025 by Jakob Fay
