State Department reorganization could imperil cyber diplomacy

The Trump administration’s plan to overhaul the State Department for the modern era could halt the U.S.’s recent progress on countering global cyber threats and building alliances around digital issues.

As part of a reorganization plan that Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced on Tuesday to “bring the Department into the 21st Century,” the recently created Bureau of Cyberspace and Digital Policy would be moved to a different part of the department, and a separate bureau would be created to handle emerging threats.

Both of these changes alarm experts and former officials.

Rubio wants to move the cyber bureau into State’s economic-affairs wing, where it would report to the under secretary for economic growth. That would represent a demotion for the bureau, whose leader currently reports to the deputy secretary of state, and could shift the department’s cyber-diplomacy approach toward purely economic matters. 

Supporters of the cyber bureau’s current structure argue that it reflects the multifaceted nature of cybersecurity, whose challenges are not purely military or economic.

“To the extent the cybersecurity portfolio stays under the Economic U/S, that is not a place for hard security issues that will likely get less attention in that reporting chain,” Chris Painter, who served as the top U.S. cyber diplomat from 2011 to 2017, told Cybersecurity Dive.

The reorganization plan also threatens to splinter the cyber diplomacy mission. A new Bureau of Emerging Threats housed in the arms-control wing will “focus on cybersecurity and the proliferation of artificial intelligence, among other areas,” according to The Washington Post.

The State Department did not respond to a request for comment about the changes to cyber diplomacy.

“Splitting cyber threats and building digital ecosystems does not make sense,” Adam Segal, director of the Council on Foreign Relations’ Digital and Cyberspace Policy program, said in a LinkedIn post “The two are mutually reinforcing.”

Segal also noticed the apparent dissolution of the Office of the Special Envoy for Critical and Emerging Technology, which does not appear in the new plan.

Rubio’s proposal “will lead to fragmentation and turf battles over tech policy in State,” Segal told Cybersecurity Dive, “the exact problems [the cyber bureau] in part was created to address.”

Congressional oversight

The reorganization proposal could run into problems in Congress, which by law must approve any restructuring. Lawmakers codified the responsibilities of the cyber bureau in the Fiscal Year 2023 defense authorization bill, and the Trump administration’s changes to the cyber mission represent “the opposite of what was mandated” in that bill “to achieve better coordination,” said Painter, who is now a nonresident senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The defense bill incorporated language from bipartisan standalone legislation, the Cyber Diplomacy Act. The top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, New York Rep. Gregory Meeks, co-sponsored the Cyber Diplomacy Act, as did Rep. Michael McCaul, a Texas Republican who previously chaired the committee. Their offices did not respond to requests for comment about Trump’s plan.

The changes to the cyber bureau are unlikely to dominate conversations on Capitol Hill about the reorganization, but the experts who pay close attention to the bureau and have championed its early work say that its progress is now under threat.

“Splitting its responsibilities between two bureaus with different reporting chains … will likely lead to conflicting policies and turf battles,” Painter said. “If this is the result, it hardly seems like the way to achieve either efficiency or effectiveness.”