Tillerson to abolish most special envoys, including Guantánamo Closer
BY JOSH LEDERMAN
AUGUST 28, 2017 8:47 PM
WASHINGTON
Most of the United States 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 the
office of an ambassador assigned to help close the Guantánamo Bay prison.
Special envoys for Afghanistan-Pakistan, disability rights, climate change
and the Iran deal will be eliminated under the plan. But President Donald
Trumps administration plans to keep envoys for religious freedom, fighting
anti-Semitism and LGBT rights, despite speculation from critics that it
would seek to downgrade those priorities.
Lawmakers of both parties, think tanks and even the diplomats 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 Departments notoriously unwieldy bureaucracy. But the idea has
attracted new scrutiny amid the Trump administrations plans to drastically
cut the State Departments budget and concerns that Trump was eschewing the
promotion of American values overseas.
While State Department officials stressed that changes to the flow chart
dont necessarily signal a change in priorities, in some cases the policy
implications are clear. Elimination of the Guantánamo closure envoy
dovetails with Trumps plans to keep the prison open. The president has
pulled the United States out of the Paris global climate deal and threatened
to do the same with the Iran nuclear deal.
Of 66 current envoys or representatives, 30 will remain, a cut of 55
percent. Nine positions will be abolished outright. Twenty-one will be
integrated into other offices, five merged with other positions, and one
transferred to the U.S. Agency for International Development, the
governments foreign aid arm.
In each case, the envoys 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 wasnt 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 latters
budget by $5.5 million.
Tillerson, in a letter to Congress, said he believed the State Department
could better execute its mission by integrating some positions, pointing
out concerns that the current system diluting the governments effectiveness
by creating multiple power centers dealing with the same issue. The number
of special envoys has grown over the years.
Today, nearly 70 such positions exist within the State Department, even
after many of the underlying policy challenges these positions were created
to address have been resolved, Tillerson wrote.
The Miami Herald reported Aug. 2 that the Trump administration had included
$1.2 million for salaries and operational expenses for the State
Departments Special Envoy for Closure of the Guantánamo Detention Facility
a position created by Barack Obama in his failed bid to close the prison.
A State Department official advised at the time that the line-item was not
an error, but a reorganization of the Department of State was underway.
The pruning offers the first concrete information about how Tillersons
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.
Those anticipated cuts have driven down morale among diplomats, as Tillerson
has acknowledged, playing into concerns that Trumps America First
approach means the U.S. will stop promoting human rights or helping the most
vulnerable global populations.
The Trump administration will keep envoys or at-large ambassadors for
womens 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, wont be filled.
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.
Tillersons letter responded to legislation passed by the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee in July that took aim at the proliferation of special
envoys by forcing Tillerson to tell Congress which positions he wanted to
keep, and to secure Senate confirmation for all envoys in the future. Sen.
Bob Corker, R-Tenn., the committees chairman, praised Tillerson for working
to to responsibly review the organizational structure of special envoys.
Some special envoys are mandated by Congress. The Trump administration will
ask lawmakers to repeal those mandates.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson arrives to sit in the front row with
national security adviser H.R. McMaster, center, and White House Chief of
Staff John Kelly, right, for a joint news conference with President Donald
Trump and Finnish President Sauli Niinisto, Monday, Aug. 28, 2017, in the
East Room of the White House in Washington. CAROLYN KASTER ASSOCIATED PRESS
EM
On the 49th Parallel
Thé Mulindwas Communication Group
"With Yoweri Museveni, Ssabassajja and Dr. Kiiza Besigye, Uganda is in
anarchy"
Kuungana Mulindwa Mawasiliano Kikundi
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