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 "Pamoja na Yoweri Museveni, Ssabassajja na Dk. Kiiza Besigye, Uganda ni katika machafuko"
_______________________________________________ Ugandanet mailing list Ugandanet@kym.net http://kym.net/mailman/listinfo/ugandanet UGANDANET is generously hosted by INFOCOM http://www.infocom.co.ug/ All Archives can be found at http://www.mail-archive.com/ugandanet@kym.net/ The above comments and data are owned by whoever posted them (including attachments if any). The List's Host is not responsible for them in any way. ---------------------------------------