Trump draft proposes radical reshaping of State Department

Neil Munshi and Simon Marks, Bloomberg News on Apr 20, 2025

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A draft Trump administration executive order circulating among U.S. diplomats proposes a radical reduction to and restructuring of the State Department, according to a copy of the document seen by Bloomberg.

The changes, if implemented, would be one of the biggest reorganizations of the Department since its founding in 1789. The 16-page draft has been spread among diplomats around the world, according to officials familiar with the document.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Sunday called the reported overhaul “fake news” in a post on X.

The order would eliminate dozens of positions and departments, including those dealing with climate, refugees, democracy and Africa, as well as the Bureau of International Organizations, which liaises with the United Nations. It would also include a sharp cut to diplomatic operations in Canada.

The proposals continue the Trump administration’s repudiation of the U.S. role in the multilateral world order that it helped create.

Under the changes, the sprawling State Department would be reorganized into four regional bureaus covering Indo-Pacific, Latin America, the Middle East and Eurasia. An unspecified number of “non-essential” embassies and consulates in Sub-Saharan Africa would be shuttered.

The changes should be made by Oct. 1, according to the draft.

The draft order was first reported by the New York Times. A spokesperson for the U.S. embassy in Nairobi declined to comment.

It remains unclear if the entire contents of the draft order will be signed by President Donald Trump. One senior official in Africa said information circulating within the State Department about reforms that are set to be announced to the foreign service — potentially as soon as Tuesday — would be less sweeping than those described in the document.

Some employees writing on a foreign service-dedicated Reddit page also expressed doubt about how such an order could be implemented.

“I suspect this is being leaked as a red herring designed to make us grateful for a more modest but still unpopular reorganization,” wrote one user. “It will be basically immediately challenged and enjoined, and then ‘implementation’ will be dragged out until Trump is voted out.”

Africa, Canada operations

The order as written would eliminate, among others, the Bureau of African Affairs, the special envoy for climate, the Bureau of International Organizations, and the Office of Global Women’s Issues, as well as a number of other public diplomacy and public affairs bureaus.

“Diplomatic relations with Canada shall fall under a significantly reduced team delegated as the North American Affairs Office (NAAO) within the Office of the Secretary,” according to the document. That includes a substantial downsizing of the U.S. embassy in the capital, Ottawa.

Diplomatic staff would now be assigned to regions, where they would be expected to stay throughout their careers, rather than rotate around the world; current diplomats who don’t want to join the regional ranks could apply for a buyout until Sept. 30.

A new foreign service exam would also be formulated requiring “alignment with the President’s foreign policy vision,” according to the draft memo.

The prestigious Fulbright scholarship, which has sent thousands of promising students around the world for studies, would be recast as “solely for master’s-level study in national security-related disciplines” with priority “given to programs with intensive instruction in critical languages,” including Mandarin Chinese, Russian, Farsi and Arabic.

The order would also end fellowships associated with historically Black Howard University in Washington, as part of the Trump administration’s rollback of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.

Under the plan, the Bureau of Humanitarian Affairs would “assume any mission-critical duties previously carried out by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID),” which the administration has largely shuttered over the past few months and put under State Department control.

“All positions and duties must receive explicit written approval from the President of the United States,” according to the order.

The State Department’s workforce includes some 13,000 members of the Foreign Service, 11,000 Civil Service employees, and 45,000 locally employed staff at more than 270 diplomatic missions worldwide, according to its website.

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