Institutional Realignment at the U.S. Department of State

Panelists discuss the recent reorganization of the U.S. Department of State, including the reasons behind the structural changes and the impact on U.S. humanitarian efforts and broader foreign policy objectives.

This meeting is presented by RealEcon: Reimagining American Economic Leadership, a CFR initiative of the Maurice R. Greenberg Center for Geoeconomic Studies.

ROBINSON: Welcome to today’s Council on Foreign Relations meeting on “Institutional Realignment at the U.S. Department of State.” I’m Linda Robinson, senior fellow for women in foreign policy here at the Council, and I’ll be presiding over today’s session.

This event is presented by CFR’s RealEcon, Reimagining American Economic Leadership Initiative. I’d like to welcome and briefly introduce our speakers.

Anne Richard served as assistant secretary for population, refugees, and migration from 2012 through 2017, as well as other positions at State and in the U.S. government. In her nonprofit career, she was a founder of the International Crisis Group, vice president at International Rescue Committee, and currently sits on the board of the International Organization of Migration.

Daniel Runde is currently senior advisor at BGR Group and the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He served in senior roles at USAID and the World Bank, and his experience spans a host of efforts such as the BUILD Act, working on reauthorization of the Export-Import Bank, Prosper Africa, and promoting U.S. leadership across multilateral institutions.

Our third panelist is Ambassador Tony Wayne. He’s currently distinguished fellow in residence and lecturer at American University, following a forty year career at the State Department. He retired at the highest rank of career ambassador, serving as ambassador in Mexico and Argentina, deputy ambassador in Afghanistan, as well as, I believe, the longest serving assistant secretary for economic and business affairs—during which, he helped found the Millennium Challenge Corporation—and also principal deputy assistant secretary for Europe.

I welcome all three of you, and we will jump right into the conversation. Our purpose is to discuss the major changes being made at State and the implications for U.S. policy, writ large. In the first round, I’d like to ask each of you to summarize, from your vantage point and experience, what you regard as the most notable changes to the State Department’s reorganization, programs, and funding. The administration’s fiscal year ’26 budget request proposes a 22 percent reduction from the FY ’25 enacted level, but the budget process is still ongoing. I would just note, the House Appropriations Committee has reinstated some funding in its version of the bill but the Senate hasn’t acted yet.

So what I would like to do is first turn to Anne Richard and ask her to address the humanitarian and refugee program changes and lay out the dimensions of those changes, for those who may not be aware. Also, I’d like to ask you, Anne, if you would, to just briefly explain the impact of the shuttering of USAID, because it has had a major role in implementing quite a bit of U.S. foreign assistance. It has its own portfolio of programs, many of which did not migrate over. So if you could take that on in a kind of brief summary to let us know what you consider is most impactful here, Anne. Thank you.

RICHARD: Thank you, Linda. Thank you, Council on Foreign Relations, for hosting this in the dog days of August. And I want to give a shoutout to my predecessor as PRM assistant secretary, Eric Schwartz, whose idea this panel was. And also to acknowledge that Tony Wayne, and Dan Runde, and myself were frequent partners on Zoom calls starting in the fall of 2021, working together because we were so concerned about Afghan allies of the U.S. being in danger. And so I am thrilled that these are my partners on the panel.

The Trump administration has claimed that it is leading a reform effort. But instead, it has destroyed the humanitarian and human rights leadership of the U.S. government and the resettlement of refugees in America. The U.S. tradition—this U.S. tradition, which enjoyed bipartisan support for decades, had saved millions and millions of lives over the years all around the world. The unplanned break in funding has had catastrophic consequences. And people are dying. And if you don’t take my word for it, check with experts. Read the Lancet, the Boston University folks. That’s been well established.

The contributions the U.S. has made in the past, this track record, requires not just aid money but also expertise. USAID, its Bureau for Humanitarian Affairs, and other agency leaders, and the State Department’s Population, Refugees, and Migration Bureau, Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor Bureau, their professionals had that expertise, as did partners from the private sector—from the nonprofit sector. This was a public-private partnership, in the best sense. But the overwhelming majority of people involved in these operations were not corrupt or incompetent. And to suggest that is grossly insulting to those involved, and misleading to the public.

Now USAID is gone and PRM and DRL made much smaller—and we can talk about the details of that at the right moment. PRM has been reoriented to resettle Afrikaners and assist in deportations. And claims that the things that I’ve described as destroyed can be reconstituted inside the State Department now, or that aid flows have resumed, are simply not credible. So that’s the headline for my piece.

ROBINSON: Thank you, Anne, for getting us started. And I think this flows well to my question to Ambassador Wayne. I’d like you to comment on what you see as the major changes. And this idea underlying the realignment is that the regional bureaus will shoulder many of these functions, albeit at a drastically reduced funding level, that was previously the purview of the functional bureaus. And I think you are well-placed to talk about those differences in expertise, as well as how embassies may be affected by these changes. Thank you.

WAYNE: Well, thanks very much for the invitation. And thanks for getting us all together here. It will be a fun conversation.

There’s a lot to do. And, clearly, the State Department is still figuring out how it’s going to do what’s left to do, and how it’s going to choose among the many things that can be done to help other countries around the world. I mean, one of the just really big challenges is the challenge to move everything into the State Department and get it running. And as of right now, it’s not exactly sure how that’s going to take place. Putting everything in the geographic bureaus, on the one hand, is going to work because it has to work. On the other hand, it’s not going to work because you need people to organize it, think about it, think about the different aspects of assistance. And that assistance is—development assistance is very important, but there’s also responding to disasters that’s tremendously important. And dealing with all the refugee flows and dealing with other stuff. How does this all get integrated and come together?

On the one hand, having it largely now be in one building you should be able to coordinate this. On the other hand, if you have geographic bureaus thinking that they can mix things up at their own level, that’s going to be a problem also, because you do need somebody to set basic standards of what you’re going to put in place, and then have that work, with adjustment by regional bureaus. Plus, you’re going to have all the embassies. And they’re going to want to make adjustments for their own needs. There’s going to be a real desire on the part of a lot of ambassadors to give special assistance, special help to certain governments. There are other governments they aren’t going to be so hot about giving assistance to, but the humanitarian needs are going to demand that things be done there.

And so there’s going to be that demand that we’ve always had to work with the United Nations, to work with the other international organizations, to work with other partner countries, and bring that together in an organized way to help people, to keep people alive. And that’s sort of independent of governments, in a lot of ways. (Laughs.) It works a lot better if you have a helpful government, but you still have to work together to keep people alive. So there’s going to be a massive organization task going on. A lot of this is now going to be centered—more of it’s going to be centered in the State Department, with USAID coming in and being—parts of it left—absorbed into different parts of the State Department. And it’s just going to be a big challenge to organize this going forward and to make it be effective.

ROBINSON: Thank you, Ambassador. I want to turn to Dan now, but I might just make a very quick note. There are so many particulars that we are not going to have time to cover today, but simply in the procurement, the administration of funding, all that expertise largely resided over at USAID, and getting funding that’s approved, obligated, is one of the key challenges. But, Dan, I’d like to take you up to a strategic level and ask you to comment on what you think are the principal goals and elements in this realignment, and what do you see as some of the major issues on implementation of a full-scale change of this sort. Thank you.

RUNDE: Yeah, thanks. I’m really happy to be on this panel with Anne Richard and Ambassador Wayne, both people I like and admire a lot. And I’m happy and grateful for CFR for having me.

Let me just suggest the following. I think we need to look at the Trump administration’s approach to global affairs through the lens of burden sharing. In many ways, what the Trump administration has been attempting to do is renegotiate the condo fees of global leadership, whether you see it at NATO, or whether it’s the Global Fund for AIDS, or whether it’s how many refugees we take, or how much we donate to the United Nations. So if we take that as a frame, I think that’s one important frame we should use as we think about the reorganization. Because I think that’s one of the main things.

I think, at the same time, they’ve tried to sharpen a conversation around what they see as core national interests. And they have a specific frame, whether it is do our actions make us more prosperous, more secure, and I forget the other one, please forgive me—and make us safer. So please forgive me. OK. But I think it’s an interesting and important frame. And we have to operate and listen to how they’re thinking about it in order to have a conversation with the administration and with the Congress about this. I think, third, I think we have to think about this in the context of great-power competition, though I think it’s sort of secondarily. But I think it’s those three things.

And then I think that if we go back to January 20, 2025, there were there were lots of movements about how could we reform the State Department. There was the Commission, the Hagerty-Cardin Commission, that hasn’t been fully launched yet, but that’s a bipartisan commission. There were many recommendations by AFSA. Many on this call will know what AFSA—the American Foreign Service Association. I think Ambassador Wayne was involved with that. There’s also been attempts during the Obama administration through the QDDR process—if you people remember that, I’m sorry for using all these lingo—but basically an attempt to kind of think about, like, how do we align goals and resources between AID and the State Department?

The other thing I would also just say is that there are thirty—I don’t remember if it’s thirty or thirty-five—members of the OECD that have foreign aid programs. And something like thirty of the thirty-five, the foreign aid program is under the foreign ministry. So you have some—I think, some basic things. I think there’s some really big questions. I think this is a live conversation. This is a live conversation with the Congress. I think this is an open conversation with the administration. I think they’re open to specific ideas within their framing of burden sharing and sort of does it make us safer, more prosperous, and more secure? I think they’re open to a conversation. I think how a conversation happens, I think, is going to require a different approach than sort of the usual approach that I’d have said when I was full time at CSIS. But I think, you know, we can have a conversation about that with the audience.

I do think there’s, like, several big questions, and I’ll stop, Linda. Is, OK, do we want to be in something or do we want to renegotiate the burden sharing? So you’ll see this in the U.N. conversation. So, for example, my wife was an ambassador at the OAS. And I learned that at the OAS—for a different country, not for the United States. For the OAS that U.S. paid 60 percent of the budget until, like, seven or eight years ago. That’s crazy. Now we’re doing 50 percent. I still think that’s crazy. And I know there’s some formula at the U.N., and it’s complicated, but that’s nuts. So, like, we probably need to—if you want us to stay in the OAS, we probably—I don’t know what the number is, probably 20 percent—but we’re not doing 50 percent. I don’t think anyone should do that.

Let me just give you another example, and I’ll stop after this. Linda. You know, we’ve had PEPFAR for twenty years. I’m very in favor of PEPFAR. The CIA did an analysis in the ’80s and ’90s saying, like, if we didn’t deal with HIV/AIDS in Africa there were national security consequences for that. And they were right. There were—it was a moral imperative and national security imperative. But there’s fourteen focus countries. I don’t know how many have actually graduated from PEPFAR. I think the answer is, like, almost zero. So let me just use the example of South Africa. So ChatGPT tells me that China—that South Africa spends $600 million a year on interest to China. And then at the same time, we give them $500 million a year in PEPFAR. And they have a $3 billion a year defense budget, of which they buy most of their weapons from Russia, China, and Iran. And then in their spare time, they spent a lot of time giving the Israelis a hard time at the ICC. So, like, I have a really hard time understanding, like, why are we—so in the case of South Africa, like, please explain to me why are we doing that?

ROBINSON: We’ll get into this more. Thank you, Dan.

RUNDE: Yeah.

ROBINSON: Yeah. So let me go back now to this question of impacts and implications. And start with Anne again, because I think you—I’d like you to say more about the impacts in the humanitarian sphere, and the questions that actually spring—follow on from some of what Dan is saying. Who is stepping in to pick up the ball? Are there international organizations or countries that seem to be willing? I noticed some of them have actually cut some of their aid. And so I think the other question is, what is the U.S. ability to rally others to renegotiate the share of the burden, which the U.S. has been the overwhelming leader in this field? Thank you, Anne.

RICHARD: Well, during the Obama administration it became very apparent that the humanitarian needs around the world were growing and growing. The world as a whole needed to do more to resolve conflicts. And in the meantime, humanitarians had to do what they could to keep people alive. And so it became apparent that the normal way of doing things, where you have Western Europe, the U.S., Canada, and some Pacific countries coming together to be the major donors to development and to humanitarian activities, was not enough. And so there was a great push made to get more money from—or, more involvement from the private sector, from the Gulf states, for example, from nonprofit supporters. That whole initiative of pooling funds had to be upgraded.

Now what’s happened to these? The U.S. pulled out. And the idea is it’s temporary. But that doesn’t really instill confidence in partners that at a moment of great need we are saying we need to stop things. I’ve been involved in other reform efforts at State. I’ve been involved in management of other do-good organizations. And you need to introduce reforms without sacrificing the mission of your organization in the first place. There are ways to be smart about this. And I think one of the things that I find really dismal about what’s happening now is that some of the people in charge really don’t know what they’re doing.

I saw that the person who will now be in charge of foreign assistance at the State Department, who’s twenty-eighty years old, in his remarks to the New York Times podcast was distressed when he met with one government who said they didn’t like the way U.S. representatives did not appreciate their sovereignty. And I immediately went back to meeting with Middle Eastern ministers, where the first ten minutes of a meeting on Syrian refugees, or Iraqi refugees was a lecture to me on their sovereignty. And after those ten minutes I would say, I agree. You are a sovereign country. Not in dispute. Let’s talk about what we can do to protect the rights of the refugees who have come to your country. Let’s see how the U.S. can help you with this dilemma that you find yourself in.

And so this idea that somehow diplomacy is never offending anyone or never pushing a hard proposal is kind of nutty. You know, these are complicated conversations. And what you need is a good understanding of how working together can produce better outcomes than going it alone.

ROBINSON: Thank you, Anne. And I’d like to ask our veteran diplomat, Ambassador Wayne, what do you think are the foreign policy implications of this radical resizing of the. U.S. effort, please?

WAYNE: Well, I think the one temptation is going to be, clearly, to pick out people that are friends, we decide are friends, and to focus more assistance there. But the other need, as Anne was pointing out, is going to be to meet humans in a suffering situation who need help at the same time, whatever government happens to be in charge of that area. So this is going to have to be something that will be sorted out by this administration going forward. My hunch right now is that they’re going to want to lean toward helping those who are more friendly to us, but they won’t exclude general donations and other things. But I think they’re going to argue that this should be a smaller portion of what we have to offer.

But this is part of what needs to be discussed and debated right now in the administration. And this is part of why it is important to decide who are the main players going to be, how are they going to have this discussion? Both within the bureaucracy, within the government, and then go out and talk to other donors and others in dealing with this. It’s not an easy answer. You could have a situation where the United States clearly favors countries that it has a positive attitude toward, for one reason or another. Sometimes a good, positive attitude because there they’re good actors and doing the right things. Sometimes a positive attitude because they have something to give to us that we need, and we’re looking to get a pay—to pay them off for doing that.

And that’s going to be mixed together in doing this. And what we need is an organ—a well-organized system for debating these kind of issues, the many other issues that are going to come up, depending on the kind of aid assistance that’s involved, and sorting that through. And as of right now, I think that’s yet to be developed in any formal way.

ROBINSON: Thank you. Dan, I’m going to come back and follow up on your comments, and ask you to say whether you think this, I don’t know, tough love approach, if you will—that might be understating it a bit—can actually influence our friends to do more? But also the critical point you raised about our competitors globally. And I know there’s been some back and forth in the public debate about whether China and Russia are actually willing to come into the soft power game, but we see them playing major roles, of course, in Africa and elsewhere, where I know you’ve worked. So give me your thoughts.

RUNDE: Yeah, thanks. I really think my colleagues have really said some interesting and, I think, thought-provoking things. Let me just—I’ll just—I do think that if we look at NATO—so, for decades we’ve tried—I Googled this one time—and, like, find quotes from President Eisenhower, President Kennedy, President Johnson, President Nixon, President Carter, President Clinton, about European allies, burden sharing on NATO. And there are, like, some really mean—really mean statements from former presidents. And so the fact that there’s been this achievement of getting European governments, I think, partially out of fear of Russia because of the illegal invasion of Ukraine—largely because of that—but also because I think President Trump has pushed them to say you need to do more, and has—you know, has been—taken, maybe, I think, a different approach, has been—I think, in the case of NATO, it’s been effective.

I think in the case of global health, I think it remains to be seen. But I had a conversation with a senior person from a big foundation yesterday about this. And I said, like, what’s the number where you really need from the United States on global health? And then I said—I went through my whole South Africa thing and said, like, how many countries have been—you know? And there’s been a six times the amount of increase in taxes collected in Africa in the last twenty-five years. And so a number of countries can afford to pay for basic human needs. Like, tell me—and then, tell me about innovation, tell me about other things. All I’m saying is, is the same playbook we’ve been doing for twenty-plus years, and the same—is that the right approach in AID? Because clearly, like, the administration signaling they’d like to revisit this.

And what’s the number you really need from us? And what do you need us to do? And then who’s going to do what in the meantime? I don’t think big philanthropy is going to fill that void. I actually think the answer on something like global health is going to be funded by countries themselves. Even some of the world’s poorest countries have an increasing amount of resources to finance some of the basic human needs. I also think the costs on some of these interventions are going down because of innovations and breakthroughs. So I think there’s opportunities there.

So I would just say that I do think—I also think with a lot of these multilaterals—I had a laissez-passer—everyone on this call probably knows what that is—when I worked at the World Bank Group for three years. I don’t speak French. I speak Spanish. But my point is that, you know, that I think we were kind of on autopilot for a long time. We’re a member of 130 U.N. agencies. I’m very in favor of American leadership in multilateral institutions. Can we afford to exit five or six of them? I think we can. You know, I saw that Secretary Bessent said we’re not getting out of the IMF and the World Bank and the regional multilateral development banks. We’re not going to leave the U.N. We’re sending really serious people there. And I think as we look at some of these important institutions, in the first Trump term we got punched in the mouth when China ran a fabulous campaign, a really good article about this was called “Outfoxed and Outgunned in Foreign Policy” about the FAO election and how they beat us in terms of the American-backed candidate.

And so I think there’ll be some kind of—I think there’ll be a recognition that we need to remain involved in multilateral institutions. But as I said earlier, like, I don’t think we should be spending 60 percent of the budget on the OAS. I don’t think it’s 50 percent. I could probably go with 20 (percent). And someone could tell me on the call that, no, it’s 25 percent. But it ain’t 40 percent. So I think there needs to be a real reckoning on some of these things. I think we still need America to lead on certain things. I think the United States still needs to be involved in lots of things. I also think we need a State Department that has the right skillsets, languages, expertise to meet the challenges.

Let me just say one other thing, Linda, and I’ll stop. But let me just list some things that are important to the Trump administration: critical minerals, ports, subsea cables, oil, gas, and coal. Responding to, say, a big storm in a part of the world or a funny-named pandemic that I can’t spell, there could be another one of those, all of these are things that we’re going to need foreign aid for or emergency response. And then there are also some things that are important in a sense of human—in terms of human rights or in the democracy area. It’s certainly less—it’s less prominent than in the Biden administration. But things like Christians in Africa, Christians the Middle East, dissidents in Cuba, dissidents in Iran. So there are things where there’s going to need to be—there will continue to be significant need for resources. And I think that all that requires expertise, systems, et cetera. I’ll stop there.

ROBINSON: Thank you. So I think we have time for one lightning round before we open up to questions. And I’d like each of you to just tee-up what you think is the most important reform, or the reform or revised approach that you think could gain bipartisan support. And, Ambassador, I’d like to begin with you. And I thought perhaps you would draw on, well, your long career, but I know in Afghanistan you had the mandate to coordinate nonmilitary assistance in the U.S. government and across the donor community. And I thought perhaps you have some lesson about how you think State could work better, and a way that we could put some of Humpty Dumpty back together, in a mutually agreed way.

WAYNE: Well, in that instance, for example, what we really had to do was sit down with all the other agencies, often that were working under us in that situation in Afghanistan, come up with a joint approach, and then get Washington to grapple with that and come up with some solutions. And get other people at the same time—we would reach out from Afghanistan and get others’ points of view and get them to come along in that way. So I think there’s going to be a lot of having to bring people along in any approach that we take. And it is going to be recognizing that we have a big role to play. Maybe not the 40 percent role, as Dan was saying, but still, 20-25 percent role is a big one. And it makes a lot more sense if there’s coordination between people going forward.

And it also makes a lot of sense if you can actually have honest discussions about what should be done in each of these areas, not a lot of just sort of automatic, well, they got 20 percent for this, so they should get 20 percent over here. This is going to be some tough discussions that have to go on. So there needs to be a good formula. There needs to be good formulas in our embassies, in our State Department, across our government, and then with our partners. And so one of the really important things to do is to develop good ways of talking to other people in a coordinated way. It’ll be a little bit different in this administration. They’ll be a few different priorities that go forward. (Laughs.) But getting that agreement on how you work with others to bring people along is very important.

There’ll be some places where we’re going to give a lot of assistance because of other reasons, but they’re going to be other places where it’s important that we be there but it’s not the center of everything that we’re doing. So we’re going to have to sort out between those two. And I think this will take a lot of creative work by this administration, even with some of their big different views about how we go about tackling these problems.

ROBINSON: Anne—thank you, Ambassador. Anne, I’d like to ask you if you could see any potential for rebuilding some of the programming that is lost, using arguments that would resonate across the aisle. And I would note, just as an example, the global health portfolio is one that seems to have received more bipartisan support, with some of the restoration of funding happening, at least in this House report that I mentioned. Democracy Fund, they’ve also funded that. They’ve preserved the Women Economic Empowerment Fund. I’m just curious whether you might pull that thread and see if there’s a way—I know you’re looking at just the potential millions of lives being lost. So I sympathize with where you’re coming from. But if you were trying to make a case for a program, what argument would you use?

RICHARD: Well, first off, I would not have a single individual in charge of allocating and justifying foreign assistance and allocating across many, many, many different goals, and have that be the same person who’s leading the charge on humanitarian response, Because, having had the great privilege of working very closely with my opposite numbers at USAID, we were, for my tenure, world leaders, in meeting with our opposite numbers who cared about humanitarian response, doing it right. Moving away from patriarchal systems, colonial-era overhang, and moving towards a greater fostering of leadership from among the recipients of that aid. That was absolutely a major goal of the Biden administration.

And so those are two very different full-time jobs. I’ve done parts of both. And I think that they require people who have experience and backgrounds that lend themselves to being a good, strong spokesperson for American spending on these things. And that you need—so I would trade in the one person we have now, who doesn’t have much background in these issues, to replace it with two people who could speak very strongly about these things, including the Congress.

I also think that some of the remains of the PRM and the DRL bureaus are being given buzzwords for different offices that are very problematic. In PRM, it’s proposed that there be an Office of Remigration. The term “remigration” is used in Europe by fascist political parties to suggest that nonwhite communities should—and their descendants—should go back to where they came from. There’s no reason, given that, that that be the name of an office at the State Department. Also, DRL—

ROBINSON: Anne, I’m sorry, I have to open us up to a question. And I promised Dan one last lightning round. You can work in your comments in our Q&A period in just a moment.

Dan, really very quickly, given your business background, I wonder if you can just say a quick word about how to improve the return on investment of U.S. foreign assistance dollars. I know you helped set up the DFC. What could help State improve its impact and effectiveness?

RUNDE: So I think there have been some really interesting questions put on the table. Like, who decides? Is it the ambassadors, the undersecretaries, the F bureau? So I think there’s a series of sort of plumbing questions that I think are open. I also think there was a period of time when other—there’s twenty other agencies that do foreign assistance or play roles in different parts of international affairs. And it’s, of course, the DFC. I was very supportive of the creation of the DFC. I think you’ll see the DFC grow. And I think there’s a scenario two or three years from now where there’s more DFC activity than ODA, than foreign—traditional foreign aid. I think that’s possible. I’m not sure that will happen, but it’s possible.

And so should the F bureau or the secretary of state have some kind of oversight over all—the Department of Agriculture, the EPA, or the Department of Justice? Up until the 1990s, there was a rule by OMB saying State and AID were the only ones allowed to do this stuff. And at some point, that was lifted. And so there was—people went and were able to do whatever they wanted. There may be some pluses to kind of—so I think there’s a question about who decides. And I just think we’re going to have a whole series of challenges where we’re going to need to partner with the private sector. Some of it is going to be—I think we absolutely want to strengthen the Export-Import Bank. We have the Export-Import Bank reauthorization next year. In theory, there’s a reauthorization in the next sixty days of the DFC.

So these are important tools. They’re not the only tools. So we need foreign aid. We need export credit. We need the DFC. You know, we need the kinds of functions that TDA does. Now, how that’s organized—I’ve had a very happy career staying away from org chart discussions. So, like, where it sits and who—but I do think the question who makes the decision does matter. And I think my bias would be, it’s, like, well, we’re going to make this organization. We ought to make a play to say, OK, well, the Secretary of State is going to have the lead on this stuff and have some kind of unique coordinating across the interagency because of burden sharing, great-power competition, and just the challenges that we are presented with. Over.

ROBINSON: Good. Thank you. Excellent. I’d like to turn back to Anne Healy now to organize us for the Q&A.

OPERATOR: Thank you.

(Gives queuing instructions.)

We’ll take our first question from Teresita Schaffer.

Q: Thank you. I am Teresita Schaffer, known to people who know me as Tezi. I’m a retired Foreign Service officer, retired ambassador, and I am affiliated with McLarty Associates.

A lot of the things that we’ve been talking about this morning are presented as binary and black and white. And most of them are not. I don’t want to make this into a whole paragraph of statements, but I want to pick out a couple that concern me. To start at the end, Dan mentioned return on investment. In fact, there are two—there’s one very interesting article in a recent Foreign Affairs by Andrew Natsios, a former head of AID, which makes suggestions for how we ought to reform AID. On the same theme, there’s an organization called Devex, whose CEO was a former student of my late husband’s at Georgetown, taking a slightly different approach, but looking at the same—at the same topic. There’s a lot of ideas out there, any one of which could be compatible either with having AID as a separate organization or as having it as an appendage at the State Department. But you’ve got to know what you’re doing. And you can’t get rid of everybody who knows how the system has worked.

Secondly, internally I think this administration needs to have an actual discussion on U.S. interests. Why is it that PEPFAR is in line with U.S. interests? Leaving aside your example of South Africa, Dan. Because it’s a disease that can spread and that can reach us. The whole idea of why this is in our interest is something that everybody needs to have straight. And, yes, the current administration gets to have the casting vote on that, but there should be a well-publicized perspective on why this is in the United States’ interest.

Third, the discussion about countries that we’re friendly with or want to help for other—for more selfish reasons, and NATO—the NATO countries finally started contributing more to their own and to the alliance’s defense, that’s all true. But think about the case of Canada. It’s very hard to induce more cooperation with a country about whom the president is saying in public we want to annex you. That is not going to induce cooperation from anybody, no matter—

ROBINSON: Ambassador Schaffer—pardon me, Ambassador. I do apologize for interrupting. I think we have a few hundred people on the call and I need to move on.

Q: OK, that’s fine.

ROBINSON: And Anne to please give us someone—and please ask a question that will help our panelists respond succinctly. Thank you.

OPERATOR: We’ll take our next question from Esther Brimmer.

Q: Good afternoon. And, first, thank you so much for this outstanding conversation. And my warm regards to everyone on the panel. I’m so glad to have you together thinking about these serious issues and the importance of diplomacy and development to the United States, and the world at large.

If I may raise three points. The first is how we might continue to address cross-cutting issues. In the various statements the administration has made, one of the things they would comment about, of course, the importance of regional bureaus, which I fully understand, but also recognizing that there are issues that span bureau. So obviously I have a deep affection for international organizations and the IO Bureau, but, of course, thinking that it’s actually quite challenging to work on issues that span both geographies and different areas. So how do we organize to do that? I will say we created an office in IO on regional and functional affairs to help coordinate our positions in regional organizations and at the United Nations, because we were saying different things in different places. Obviously, you know, the Trump administration got rid of that in their first term, but I’ll say, how do we address these complex issues? And since diplomacy will need to be at the fore, how can we try to make the case for diplomacy in these areas?

The second is, what might be the future way of organizing ourselves? I remember the QDDR. How can we have a regular discussion of our priorities going in the future, is it quadrennial or whatever, for multiple administrations? And the third thing is, the importance of information to diplomacy. And just could we—in a world where the use of technology is changing, particularly, how might we find resources for technologies to help diplomats use the best of technology going forward? Thank you.

ROBINSON: Thank you so much, Esther. Big plate of questions. What I’d like to do is ask each of the speakers to pick the one you want to make a comment on. I am very eager to get as many people into this conversation as possible. So I might start with who has their hand up. Dan, do you want to start? And then we’ll go to Anne and Ambassador Wayne.

RUNDE: Gosh, sorry, my chubby fingers. Sorry. It’s like that moment where you’re, like, trying to unmute. Sorry about that.

So, nice to see—nice to hear everybody on the call. Nice to hear you, Ambassador Schaffer. And I think—I think these are—I think these are all interesting and important comments. Let me take former Assistant Secretary Brimmer’s comments about—those are—those are really good questions. Let me take the tech one. I do think you’re just going to—we’re seeing a—I’m not going to say something that’s, like, super profound here. But we’re seeing a rapid acceleration of technology in the world. I think we want folks to adapt a technology that’s kind of pro-democracy, and pro-West, and pro-American. You know, I think that’s, you know, simplistic. I mean, I can barely use my iPhone, but even I know this. But it seems to me that between kind of datacenters—we’re going to need a lot more energy. We’re going to need, like, SMRs, and gas, and hydro to power all this AI, including in the Global South.

And so I think you’re going to see a lot of interest at the intersection of tech and the intersection of energy, because there’s just not going to be enough energy to power all this AI, even in places—whether it’s Paraguay or whether it’s someplace like Guatemala. And so I think there’s going to be a step-change of energy demand, including in Africa. And then let me just make—put a pitch in, Linda, for something. I think we should be thinking about swinging for the fences projects. I posted something in Newsmax because I knew—I knew the Trump administration reads Newsmax. And I said we ought to have a legacy project in Africa. And it ought to be on restarting the Inga Dam project. Many of you may know what that is. Well, this is like President Trump was told thirty or forty years ago that the ice rink couldn’t be built in New York City, and he got the best ice rink builders in Canada to build the Trump rink in New York.

My view is people said, like, you can’t build the Inga Dam. We ought to call it the Trump Dam. And we ought to do a mega project and do—and make a thirty-year commitment to the Trump Dam, and now the Inga Dam. And it’ll power 500 million people and be bigger than PEPFAR. So I think we should be thinking about a big legacy project for President Trump that benefits American business and is something that’ll be remembered fifty years from now, and is in line with the partnerships and the hopes and aspirations of countries. And people will say they can’t get it done. And my guess is, if it’s not President Trump—heck, China has pulled out of the Inga thing. So if it’s not President Trump, I know who’s going to do the Inga Dam. Thanks.

ROBINSON: OK. Anne, reply to the point of your choice, please. Oh, you’re muted. I’m sorry, you’re still muted.

RICHARD: I’m still muted?

WAYNE: There you go.

RICHARD: Thank you. Thank you to Tezi and Esther.

And picking up on the idea Esther mentioned of cross-cutting issues. There’s a very good point about this in an article on the Just Security website by Scott Busby and Charles O. Blaha, who are former DRL leaders. And they talk about why regional bureaus are responding to the embassies, and the situation on the ground, and the relationship with the government, whereas in DRL they could nurture human rights experts who were more critical of those governments and had ideas about how to discuss these issues in a more powerful way, perhaps, by raising them and by producing, for example, the Annual Human Rights Report, which has come out this year but is generally criticized as having pulled a lot of its punches.

The State Department is built this way to have these cross-bureau tensions. I once worked at Peace Corps headquarters. And if you weren’t working on helping the volunteers have a successful tenure as volunteers, you were missing the point. In the State Department, you have to work on the economics of a country, and the security of a country, and the cultural aspects of a country, and the relationships with the United States. And these things are not always aligned perfectly. And so it’s a much harder thing to do when you have multiple missions. And that’s where leaders who understand that are so critical for leadership at the State Department.

ROBINSON: Thank you. And Ambassador Wayne, please.

WAYNE: So I would just add, I think that the point that Anne made there is a very good one. But what we have to have going on then are a number of different dialogues that bring different groups of people together, often touching on the same countries or the same country, and have that work smoothly to sort through the priorities. And that means some people won’t be happy, and then other people will be happy. But you need an adequate system for talking about the different challenges that are coming up. They all aren’t going to fit with one country. One country is not going to—in most cases, isn’t going to get all six or seven of the things that it wants to get, or that its specialists want to have. But they might get most of them.

But you have to work with others. And that’s one of the real challenges within the State Department and what people are going to have to sort through now with the new coming end of USAID, of other people, is how to make that work going forward. And that really is how do you get your bureaucracy to work? How do you have the different conversations sort through and still come out with a number of recommendations? It can be done, but it’s going to take really hard discussions. And everybody won’t be happy coming out of these meetings.

ROBINSON: Thank you.

WAYNE: But I think that’s what we have to get through and right now we’re still sorting that out.

ROBINSON: Operator, we’re ready for the next question, please.

OPERATOR: We’ll take our next question from Moises Mendoza. Mr. Mendoza, please accept the unmute now prompt.

Q: Yes. OK, can you hear me?

OPERATOR: Yes.

Q: Excellent. Yeah, hi. So my name is Moises Mendoza. I’m actually a serving Foreign Service officer. And I most recently was working at the United Nations, where I was a Security Council negotiator.

And I’m going to try to ask this question in a way that will not get me in trouble. But I think there’s a lot of misunderstanding of what Foreign Service officers do. And the reality is, we’re mostly doing ground-level diplomacy, around—you know, we’re doing consular work, dealing with local business leaders, et cetera, helping Americans. We’re not usually negotiating with Sergey Lavrov. You know, that often—that usually happens at a much higher level than us, with political appointees.

And so my question is, how do you see the core work of FSOs changing with all of these changes? Does it become more focused, sort of, on this consular stuff, and less on policy? And I’m also curious about how you see the ambassadorial, you know, appointment process changing, because I looked at AFSA’s sort of list of political and career ambassadors today, and I don’t think there has been a single career ambassador who’s going through the process right now. They’re all political, which is really striking. But that’s it for me. Thank you so much.

ROBINSON: Thank you. I think this is an excellent question. And gets actually back to Ambassador Schaffer’s how do you define U.S. interests. And I’d like to just ask if each of the panelists would like to make a quick reply. Thank you.

WAYNE: Sure. Well, let me start off. I think that what you have, one, the appointment process, hopefully, is just starting, is going to shift in this administration. (Laughs.) There’s a lot of advantage of having people with diplomatic experience, both career and non-career, in these jobs. And you can get to situations where you do not have fluent and good options coming out of discussions if you if you don’t have people that really understand how things have been done over twenty years, what’s changed, how to change them.

Secondly, on—let’s see what was the—other question was related to—help me out here. Remind me.

RICHARD: I can say something about the information flow that Esther referenced also. You know, there’s this massive amount of information that is contained within the Department of State and its embassies. And when I was an assistant secretary, I sometimes felt that I wasn’t getting what I needed when I needed it. I thought that the traditions of the bureau to provide papers, and this is across the department, with what they anticipated you’d be asked was very good, very strong. But what wasn’t done so much was an education across the department, because everyone is so busy going great guns in the direction of what their responsibilities are that what’s missing, I think, sometimes from inside the department, is a sort of education across the department. I don’t know if Tony agrees with me or not on that.

WAYNE: Well, you know, that is important. But what’s important is to get the key facts and the key aspects of our problem down and ready for people to look at, either for an individual meeting or to have a discussion. That’s why there is such an important role of having the right kind of discussions in an embassy, across a country team, and in the department with all the—with the key players from different bureaus, to come together and actually get a sharing of different perspectives so you could sort things out. Otherwise, you’re just going to end up with different bureaus going in different directions and having, you know, a lot of faulty outcomes. It doesn’t mean everybody’s going to be happy, but at least you can sort through the direction you’re going and you can hear about all the key issues.

ROBINSON: I think what I’d like to do, if you don’t mind, is go out with the few remaining minutes that we have and ask our operator to see if the person asking the question could direct it to one of our panelists. And maybe we can get in three or four more responses before we need to close it out. Thank you.

OPERATOR: We’ll take our next question from Timothy Wirth. Mr. Wirth, please accept the unmute now prompt. OK, it looks like we’re having technical difficulties with that line. We’ll take the next question from Anne Witkowsky.

Q: Thanks, everyone, for a fabulous panel. I’ll be brief, because our time is short.

I want to comment on Anne’s point about separating what I would call crisis response from steady state planning. I think that makes a lot of sense. And I can imagine a need to rebuild the crisis response capabilities that were extant at USAID inside the State Department. There are many cases in which crisis response directly implicates our national security. The 2014 West Africa Ebola response is a really perfect example of that, which I had the opportunity to work on.

But getting back to the steady state planning, I have a question. I would direct it mostly at Anne, but I’d really be very interested in what Dan and Tony have to say—Ambassador Wayne have say about this as well. What would you think about—there been many points made about the need for enhanced coordination, of setting—across agencies—of setting objectives, directing assistance in ways that we can appreciate better serve the objectives that we’ve set. I worked on the Global Fragility Act, implementing it. I will say I did that as the last assistant secretary of the Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations, a bureau that’s been eliminated under this reorganization. But there’s no reason to give up on the bipartisan work that we began implementing under the law. And Linda Robinson has written an excellent article on this very point.

So my question to you all is, have you thought about a more elevated planning process that maybe takes some of the learning from DOD, helps to set priorities in a more effective way? We have an opportunity to do that now, given the changes that are underway the State Department. And to help us prioritize not only our foreign assistance through an elevated process, but then, as Dan points out, prioritize the coordination with DFC, TDA, World Bank, and other organizations that together will make our objectives more likely to be achieved? Thank you. Over.

RICHARD: Thank you, Anne, for asking a question and identifying that you were, until recently, assistant secretary for CSO. Because CSO also is merged into—just pieces of it are merged into what’s left under the F bureau under these plans. And I think that having better planning is, of course, something that people who care about good government have been seeking from the State Department for years and years and years. You know, there’s a part of the State Department that was focused on the noontime briefing the next day. And that alone, responding to everything going on in the world, is a tough assignment. (Laughs.) But having better planning was not something that the State Department was well known for.

And, you know, I remember working with Tony on this for Madeleine Albright, trying to get assistant secretaries to look at all of the resources going to their regions, and trying to balance these issues, and have a way of caring about everything, but explaining about it in a sort of proportional way. And it was something that did not get high marks from people at the Office of Management and Budget, in part because they were dealing with DOD where these things are done with a great deal more resources behind it. So is this a good idea, what you’re proposing? Yes, absolutely. Is it easy to introduce, and bring through, and improve what’s already there? No. That’s hard.

And also, very few secretaries of state want to be remembered for their contributions to the planning process. They want to achieve Middle East peace. They want to, you know, change the course of human events. And so in a domestic Cabinet-level agency, I think you can be much more—you can get further along with these things, because it’s seen as good practice. But I don’t hear anybody inside the current administration looking for an improved planning process at the State Department.

ROBINSON: I’m so sorry, Anne. Your such eloquent remarks. I want to give one minute each—I know we’re at our time. But I do want to give Ambassador Wayne and Dan Runde just a minute to wrap up your thoughts here. And, again, want to thank you. And we have so many people here on this call. I think it’s an indication that we need to continue exploring the issues. So, please, Ambassador, comment briefly. I apologize.

WAYNE: I’d say, Dan’s been waiting for a little bit. Dan, why don’t you go ahead?

RUNDE: Thanks, Ambassador Wayne.

Look, we’ve had a broken budgeting process for a really long time. And I also think we have a broken appointments process. ChatGPT—I’m now really dangerous with this—what percentage of political ambassadors were there in the Biden administration? Forty-one percent. What percentage of political ambassadors are in the Trump one? Forty-three percent. So I think that we have an appointments process that’s broken. And, also, like, if you look at how long it takes for someone to get Senate confirmed, if you go back to, like, the Reagan administration or George H W Bush and you compare it to now, it’s insane.

And so one of the reasons you’ve seen things like, well, am I going to put somebody forward or not? And President Trump has said, I want the Senate to come back during August. And they said, oh no, I don’t want to do that. And then they didn’t allow for recess appointments during this period was, you know, that—so we have a whole bunch of broken things. And we’ve had a series of broken things for a long time. I don’t think anybody on January 20^th would have said, you know, the arrangement of foreign assistance was properly set up, or our State Department was necessarily fit for purpose for the 21^st century. I think those are—I think those are two fair statements.

WAYNE: I think that’s right. And I think if you ask the incumbents privately about it, they would agree with you. (Laughs.) That there’s a lot more that needs to be done. So basically just to say that you’ve got to build in a planning and discussion timeframe. There has to be. You have to be able to do that. And you’ve got to deal with everything you have to do on a regular basis. Look at the assistant secretaries, deputy assistant secretaries. They’ve got to run all the relations that are ongoing in a lot of these geographic bureaus, and others too, with the countries that are out there—both your partners and then the countries that need help. It’s really hard to do that, let alone to take time to plan.

So there’s a lot to do here. These are all important points. And we’ve just got to do our very best to make them happen. And thanks, Linda, for getting us to talk about that and think about it.

ROBINSON: Yes. I want to thank all of you. And I want to thank everyone who’s joined this call today. We have upwards of 200 people. And I do hope we can continue the conversation on so many important issues. The transcript and audio will be posted on our CFR.org website. And thank you again so much. Have a great day.

(END)

This is an uncorrected transcript.