US lawmakers propose sweeping State Department reforms

U.S. lawmakers introduced legislation Thursday that includes both structural and policy reforms for the U.S. State Department — and hews closely to the reorganization that has been led by Secretary of State Marco Rubio. The legislation includes a collection of bills authorizing different parts of U.S. diplomatic and development operations, leadership, oversight, and policy, and aims to “fix what was once a broken State Department by reasserting command and control,” according to a press release from Republicans on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. The committee will debate the text — and any proposed amendments — in a markup scheduled for next week. While Republicans on the committee painted the reauthorization proposals as part of a bipartisan effort that incorporated priorities from both parties, the committee’s top Democrat, Rep. Gregory Meeks from New York, said the minority has been shut out of the process. President Donald Trump’s administration has already carried out a massive overhaul of U.S. foreign assistance programs — without any official legislative approval. The congressional process underway now could provide that legal backing, or give lawmakers a chance to make their own mark on the future of U.S. development and diplomacy. The legislation faces a long road to bipartisan agreement, however, and previous attempts to reauthorize the State Department have fallen short. A congressional aide told Devex it is hard to imagine Democrats supporting legislation that would codify the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development and “the destruction of foreign aid as we know it.” To become law, it would also require companion legislation from the Senate. In a statement, Rep. Brian Mast, a Republican from Florida who chairs the committee and has led the reauthorization process, said the proposed legislation “ensures every dollar and every diplomat puts America First and is accountable to the president's foreign policy.” “It also prevents ideologues masquerading as diplomats from using their posts to push left-wing agendas instead of America's interests. This bill is not just a reform for today, or for President Trump; it is a lasting framework that will strengthen the State Department and benefit every commander-in-chief who follows," Mast added. The release describes the legislation as the “product of nine months of open, transparent, and bipartisan work…built from more than 2,300 Member priorities.” All seven statements of support for the package of bills come from Republicans. The committee’s top Democrat has rejected the claims of a bipartisan process. In a Sept. 5 letter obtained by Devex, Meeks, the ranking Democrat on the committee, pointedly criticized Mast for excluding Democrats from the bill drafting process — and for the committee’s overarching failure to “meet the moment” with oversight of the Trump administration’s foreign aid overhaul. “While the Administration took unprecedented actions to dismantle core instruments of soft power, the Committee has stood idly by: conducting little oversight, declining to hold the Department accountable when Administration officials refuse to answer Committee requests for information, and now moving forward with a sweeping State Authorization bill, the text of which you have refused to thus far share with the Minority, but which we understand will codify a diminished State Department and repeal all statutory reporting requirements and other bipartisan provisions passed as recently as last December by a Republican-controlled House,” Meeks wrote. Another foreign affairs committee staffer pushed back on that characterization, noting that Democrats on the committee — including Meeks — had multiple priorities included in the final bill text. Several of the bills outline the leadership structure of different parts of the State Department. The bill dealing with key foreign assistance positions would establish an undersecretary for foreign assistance and a director of foreign assistance oversight. An additional bill — which stretches to 248 pages — layers a raft of policy reforms on top of that new structure. Some of them mirror priorities emerging from the White House. For example, the bill calls for the creation of a “global health compact” model aimed at shifting the responsibility for funding and implementing health programs from the United States to partner countries. According to the bill, these compacts would detail the requests from partner countries, a proposed funding amount, a plan for phasing out that funding, metrics and benchmarks to monitor progress, and a strategy for private sector involvement. These compacts would also “perpetuate the wind-down” of PEPFAR, the flagship global AIDS program, on a country-by-country basis through “a phase-out of funding,” which would be reduced each fiscal year. Many lawmakers “would be interested in exploring” a global health compact model, the first congressional aide told Devex. But they added that “none of the background or homework has been done to get us there for this bill,” such as holding public hearings about what the impact would be for affected populations, or roundtables with experts in global health. “The idea that you would just write legislation that carries this out without doing the homework … could be really dangerous,” they said. The bill also echoes suggestions from the Trump administration that foreign assistance should be tied to countries’ friendliness towards the United States. It would require the State Department to report to Congress on other countries’ United Nations voting practices and “the responsiveness of those governments to United States policy on issues of special importance to the United States.” The Senate is currently working on its own version of a State Department reauthorization bill that it hopes to attach to the National Defense Authorization Act, which governs the U.S. Department of Defense and other national security programs. Speaking at the Council on Foreign Relations earlier this week, Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, a Democrat from New Hampshire, contrasted that Senate process with the reauthorization effort in the House. “We need to make sure we’ve got a Senate position because I don’t think the partisan position of the House is the correct one as we’re looking at a State authorization,” she said, adding that the Senate version is bipartisan, even if not everyone agrees on every provision.