President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have shut down a controversial State Department office that sought to fund anti-Israel investigations. The Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor’s (DRL) Office of Global Programs, which previously proposed nearly $1 million in grants to monitor alleged human rights abuses in Israel, parts of the West Bank, and Gaza, will be eliminated entirely. Rubio’s State Department will transfer all grantmaking authority to regional bureaus staffed with politically accountable appointees.
Under the former Biden Administration, the DRL instructed grant recipients to “collect, archive, and maintain human rights documentation to support justice and accountability and civil society-led advocacy efforts, which may include documentation of legal or security sector violations and housing, land, and property rights.”
“We’re taking the ability to make new grants and putting it into the regional bureaus, where it’s more aligned with the policy,” one State Department official told the Washington Free Beacon. The official said this action is vital in ensuring “that we don’t get in a situation where the policy side of the house [is] saying one thing, and then DRL [is] over here on the other side making all these grants that are 100% counter to what we’re saying on the policy side.”
Officials confirmed that the Office of Global Programs employed 38 career bureaucrats who operated with little oversight. The Trump administration will remove their authority and redirect remaining programs to field-driven regional offices to ensure compliance with presidential priorities and expunge targeted anti-Israel bias.
“As the Secretary likes to say, we’re working from the ground up, from the embassies out in the field back to the regional bureaus, and that’s where we’re going to do our business,” an official explained.
The administration also plans to shrink or dissolve several other offices seen as advancing political agendas inconsistent with its vision. These include the Office of Global Women’s Issues (S-GWI), the Office of Global Change, and the Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations. Officials will also leave several positions vacant, such as the Special Envoy for LGBT Rights, the Special Representative for Racial Equity and Justice, and other roles created during the Biden administration.
Rubio will likewise reduce the S-GWI to a single Trump-appointed ambassador, removing 32 career staffers. As one senior State Department official observed, the S-GWI has “long strayed from its intended mission.” It made decisions that “led to [its] own self-destruction.”
