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On the Issue of State Department Funding [1]

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Date: 2024-06-22  

Diplomacy is a weapon for building lasting peace for our nation and our world, but the United States Congress thinks otherwise.

Former US Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said during the Donald Trump presidency: “If you don’t fund the State Department fully, then I need to buy more ammunition.” Given the wrangling over the forthcoming US federal budget, ammunition is no problem, but it’s a different story for American diplomacy, as writers Alice Nason and Tom Corben stated in their story “Back to the Future for the State Department.”

Congress recently proposed a State Department and Foreign Operations budget $12 billion below what the Joe Biden Administration had requested, a $7 billion drop from the previous year. Proposed cuts target ideological hot-button issues for Republicans - funding for climate and gender-related programs. The proposal would also reduce USAID and funding for multilateral organizations.

This bill is only the starting point for negotiations, and many of its more controversial elements will likely be resolved when the House and the Senate reconcile their budget proposals later this year. The bill does not help the State Department’s hopes of steady—let alone increased—funding. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has warned of “huge trade-offs” if the Department were to face further cuts to those it already endured last financial year. These trade-offs will likely be felt in US outreach in the Indo-Pacific. The State Department’s 2023 Indo-Pacific Engagement Report had already identified a $41.3 billion shortfall in aid and diplomatic resources needed to compete with China’s influence over the next five years. Further cuts would only worsen that deficit.

These developments prove that Biden’s best efforts to put the State Department “back at the center of foreign policy” are being rolled back. The US Foreign Service suffered steep budget cuts, a hiring freeze, and an exodus of career professionals throughout the Trump Administration. The State Department has spent recent years making up for lost ground; after losing 10 percent of its workforce under Trump, the foreign service has since rebounded to its former level. A recent Congressional Research Service report illustrated that funding under Biden has also increased. Though Congress has not met the Biden administration’s requests dollar for dollar, State Department funding far exceeds Trump-era levels. However, the job is far from over.

Budget caps negotiated by Biden and Congress last year spurred cuts across the federal government, including within the State Department and Foreign Operations Program. As a result, appropriations for essential USAID and diplomatic functions have depended upon supplemental spending packages, which, as months of political infighting over Ukraine assistance demonstrated, are far from a reliable means of funding US strategic priorities.

Political battles have also frustrated diplomatic appointments at various points. By July 2023, a backlog of more than 60 State Department nominees to various posts had emerged in the US Senate. Though this number has declined, the wait time for confirmation has generally been longer for Biden nominees than past presidencies.

As Blinken warned before entering office, the Trump administration's cuts “penalize you in all sorts of ways that will go on for generations, not just for a bunch of years.” Lost expertise, including the edging out of experienced, apolitical personnel, is difficult to regain. Staffing challenges have also been compounded by global crises, with several senior career diplomats resigning in protest of the administration’s approach to events in the Gaza Strip.

Theoretically, the State Department's job is to solve problems through diplomacy to avoid war. While it's true that diplomats don’t always take this path, the State Department’s budget is only a fraction of the Defense Department's budget. A big part of the story is that it doesn’t have the lobby and economic power of the military-industrial complex. When does our country's citizenry start to push the political class on the issue of diplomacy? If we don’t, we could see some drastic consequences.

Jason Sibert is the Lead Writer of the Peace Economy Project

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