Hats off to Secretary Rubio for essaying a clean-up of the State Department. His plan is to reform the agency he describes as “bloated, bureaucratic,” and “beholden to radical political ideology.” He will have his work cut out for him. For decades, the department has operated as a kind of rogue operation within the executive branch, defying presidents — and common sense — in order to advance its career staffers’ leftist causes.

Mr. Rubio is touting his plan for “sweeping changes” that “will empower our talented diplomats to put America and Americans first.” He stresses the need to fix a department that “stifles creativity, lacks accountability, and occasionally veers into outright hostility to American interests.” On that last point, the secretary is being, well, diplomatic. Even under President Biden, the agency erupted in revolt over policies like, say, America’s support for Israel.

We dubbed that recalcitrance the “Battle at Foggy Bottom,” and by the end of the 46th president’s term America’s foreign policy often seemed like a house divided. The State Department started to blanch at Washington’s support for Israel weeks — not months — after the October 7 attacks. That is hardly surprising. The Times reported as long ago as 1971 that State comes down “only very rarely on the Israeli side.”

Mr. Rubio’s slimming down of State could have the added virtue of aligning America’s foreign policy with the vision of the commander in chief. When we last wrote on the mishegas at State, we quoted President Truman’s desire “to make plain that the President of the United States, and not the State Department, is responsible for making foreign policy.” Article II’s vesting of the executive power in the president allows for no other way.

That hasn’t stopped what has been called the “striped-pants set,” a reference to the careerists at State, from trying to push their own agendas. During President Trump’s first term, “resistance” was a byword for many State lifers. In 2003, during the presidency of George W. Bush, Speaker Gingrich decried elements within State who were engaged in “a deliberate and systematic effort to undermine the president’s policies” relating to the Middle East. 

Secretary Kissinger framed the problem at State as one of resistance to presidential leadership. “If the president wants options,” he once said, the career diplomats offer three: “Option 1 is nuclear war; Option 2 is surrender; Option 3 looks strangely like existing policy.” That’s one reason why Nixon and Kissinger often sidestepped State and ended up “conducting operational policy more and more from the White House,” as historian Peter Rodman put it. 

Foggy Bottom obstructionism even tried to hold back one of the highlights of President Reagan’s Cold War diplomacy, urging more cautious rhetoric toward the Soviets. Reagan, to his credit, would have none of it, overruling the careerists who in 1987 warned him not to proclaim at Berlin “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” That episode, Rodman said, “is a vivid example of a president’s possessing a strategic and moral insight that escapes his experts.”

Even Truman wasn’t immune from misdirection from State, especially during the civil war between Free China and Chairman Mao’s communist insurgents. Critics like Congressman Walter Judd of Minnesota lamented that malign influence from career diplomats, including some with communist affinities, steered Truman away from supporting Free China’s Chiang Kai-shek, helping lead to Mao’s triumph on the mainland in 1949.

All the more reason, then, for Mr. Rubio to redouble his efforts to restructure and reorient a department that, he contends, “has long struggled to perform basic diplomatic functions, even as both its size and cost to the American taxpayer has ballooned over the past fifteen years.” A purging of political bias within the halls of State is long overdue. As America’s top diplomat reckons, the department “all too often ends up failing the American people.”