# Department of State The **Department of State** is the oldest cabinet department (established in 1789) and the lead agency for U.S. foreign affairs — running diplomacy, the embassy and consular network, the career Foreign Service, treaty negotiation, passport and visa issuance, and most foreign assistance. The Secretary of State is fourth in the line of presidential succession and has traditionally been the senior Cabinet officer, the President's principal foreign-policy adviser and the public face of American diplomacy abroad. For the KB, State matters as the institutional home of the "globalist" foreign-policy establishment that the populist right has spent a decade attacking — the striped-pants Foreign Service, the multilateral-institution reflex, the human-rights and democracy-promotion apparatus, all recast as a [[Deep State]] redoubt working against an [[America First]] agenda. State is also the department where the second term's signature institutional demolition occurred: the effective dismantling of USAID and the folding of its remnants into the department, collapsing the independent foreign-aid agency that had operated since 1961. ## Leadership (2025–) [[Marco Rubio]] was confirmed Secretary of State on January 20, 2025, by a 99–0 vote — a rare unanimous confirmation that reflected his long [[Senate Foreign Relations Committee]] tenure and hawkish bipartisan credibility. Rubio's tenure has been defined by the absorption of USAID, a hard turn against multilateral commitments, and the reorientation of the department toward a transactional, sovereignty-first foreign policy. The contrast between his unanimous confirmation and the disruptive agenda he has implemented is itself notable: a conventional-seeming nominee executing an unconventional dismantling. Public diplomacy is run by Under Secretary [[Sarah Rogers]] (from October 2025), whose office has made European speech regulation its main target. That campaign produced the December 2025 visa bans on five European regulators and researchers and, in October 2026, pressure on governments that sponsored a European disinformation conference ([[Disinfo2026 Conference]]). ## Major components and bureaus Tracked as plain references until individual pages are built: - **The Foreign Service** — career diplomats staffing ~270 embassies, consulates, and missions; a prime target of loyalty screening and [[Schedule F]]-style reclassification. - **Regional and functional bureaus** — the geographic bureaus (Europe, East Asia, Near East, etc.) and functional ones (Democracy/Human Rights/Labor, International Organizations). - **Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR)** — State's analytic arm and one of the 18 [[Intelligence Community Hub]] elements. - **Consular Affairs** — passports and visas; the immigration-adjacent lever of foreign policy. - **[[Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration]]** — historically the refugee bureau. Since the May 2025 reorganization it houses the **[[Office of Remigration]]**, which funds and negotiates [[Third-Country Removal]] deals. The office is named for the European far right's word for mass expulsion ([[Remigration]]). - **Absorbed USAID functions** — foreign-assistance and development programs, sharply reduced and brought under direct State (and political) control. ## The capture lens State appears in the [[Project 2025]] blueprint as a department needing rapid political control of its senior ranks, loyalty vetting of the career service, and the dismantling of offices seen as advancing diversity, climate, or human-rights priorities at odds with the administration's agenda. The patterns the KB tracks: - **USAID demolition** — the elimination of the independent aid agency and absorption of a shrunken remnant into State, ending decades of insulated development work. - **Foreign Service loyalty pressure** — purges, reassignments, and screening of career diplomats framed as rooting out resistance. - **Multilateral retreat** — withdrawal or defunding of international organizations and agreements. - **Refugee bureau turned removal bureau** — the 2025 reorganization repurposed PRM's work with and payments to foreign governments into third-country deportation deals, through an office whose name is a white-nationalist term of art. *Hollowed, not abolished.* See [[Office of Remigration]]. - **Democracy-promotion rollback** — gutting the human-rights and democracy-assistance functions that defined post-Cold-War State. ## See Also - [[Marco Rubio]] - [[Project 2025]] - [[Schedule F]] - [[Intelligence Community Hub]] - [[Deep State]] - [[Cabinet Departments Hub]] - [[Office of Remigration]] - [[Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration]] - [[Federal Agencies]]