The State Department on Tuesday became the first department to launch a Substack as part of its mission to spread President Donald Trump’s America First message on emerging platforms and bypass the filter of “legacy, traditional media outlets.”
“In an era where Americans are inherently distrustful of legacy media outlets, the State Department is committed to communicating President Trump’s America First message on new and emerging platforms without spin, bias, or censorship,” Taylor Black, the State Department deputy assistant secretary for global affairs, said in a statement to Breitbart News.
Secretary Rubio, in an interview with Catherine Herridge, a former CBS reporter and now independent journalist, said that it is crucial to reach the public in the new media landscape, which includes platforms such as Substack and X, formerly Twitter.
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He explained:
We have to go where the people are, and so we need to communicate with people. We need to be able to – this is their State Department. It’s not my State Department. I’ll be here for a number of years, and then my job is done, and I’ll go back to being a private citizen. But this will always be their State Department. And we’re doing – making decisions every day, and they deserve to hear from us. Where are people getting their news and information? That’s where we need to be delivering our news and information…
…
What we can’t allow to have happen is we can’t allow our message to solely be provided through the filter of legacy, traditional media outlets whose – sadly, I don’t mean to hurt their – I’m not trying to be mean here – but their readership is down, their viewership is down, their ratings are down. I have – we have to take our message where people are getting their news and information, and in these sort of long-form interviews where you’re getting serious questions and can provide answers to nuanced issues, not little sound bites that they run during the cable news hour for news and entertainment purposes. So, we’ll engage everybody, but we almost certainly see a greater emphasis on independent journalism because that’s where people are getting their news and information. [Emphasis added]
Secretary of State Marco Rubio launched the department’s Substack, with an article titled “A New State Department to Meet the Challenges of a New Era,” highlighting the need to reform the department’s bloated bureaucracy.
“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,” Rubio wrote.
He remarked, “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.”
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“Motivated and creative State Department employees see their ideas watered down by turf battles until they give up, disillusioned, while the inboxes of senior officials are inundated with hundreds of requests for approval. While the talented and loyal are driven into indifference, radical ideologues and bureaucratic infighters have learned to play on this exhaustion to push through their own agendas that are often at odds with those of the President and undermine the interests of the United States,” he continued.The reorganization would eliminate 132 agency offices, bringing the number down to 602 from 734. Senior officials will have to present plans on how they will reduce personnel by 15 percent.
He noted that one prime example of the State Department’s out-of-control bureaucracy was the Global Engagement Center (GEC), which he said the GEC schemed with media outlets and tech platforms to censor free speech, including President Donald Trump, who its director accused Trump of using “the same techniques of disinformation as the Russians.”
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This is why Rubio said he has moved institute a broad “reorganization” of the State Department.
He continued:
We will drain the bloated, bureaucratic swamp, empowering the Department from the ground up. That means regional bureaus and our embassies will now have the tools necessary to advance America’s interests abroad because region-specific functions will be streamlined to increase functionality. Redundant offices will also be removed, and non-statutory programs misaligned with America’s core national interests will cease to exist. All non-security foreign assistance will be consolidated in regional bureaus charged with implementing U.S. foreign policy in specific geographic areas.
Beyond waste, fraud, and abuse, the Secretary said that the State Department’s bloated bureaucracy has led many sub-bureaus of the department to push left-wing activism such as mass migration:
Until now, overlapping mandates paired with conflicting responsibilities created an environment ripe for ideological capture and meaningless turf wars. With a bloated budget and unclear mandate, the expansive domain of the former Under Secretary for Civilian Security, Human Rights, and Democracy (known internally as the “J Family”), provided a fertile environment for activists to redefine “human rights” and “democracy” and to pursue their projects at the taxpayer expense, even when they were in direct conflict with the goals of the Secretary, the President, and the American people.
The Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor became a platform for left-wing activists to wage vendettas against “anti-woke” leaders in nations such as Poland, Hungary, and Brazil, and to transform their hatred of Israel into concrete policies such as arms embargoes. The Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration funneled millions of taxpayer dollars to international organizations and NGOs that facilitated mass migration around the world, including the invasion on our southern border. [Emphasis added]
Democrats did not approve of the reorganization; House Foreign Affairs Committee Ranking Member Greg Meeks (D-NY) said that the move would eviscerate “American soft power, including our values-driven defense of human rights and democracy globally.”
Despite this partisan criticism, Rubio believes that the realignment would help America meet the challenges of the future.
“The American people deserve a State Department willing and able to advance their safety, security, and prosperity around the world, one respectful of their tax dollars and the sacred trust of government service, and one prepared to meet the immense challenges of the 21st Century. Starting this week, they will have one,” Rubio concluded in his post.
Sean Moran is a policy reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on X @SeanMoran3.
