After a marathon markup where lawmakers clocked nearly 26 hours of debate, the House Foreign Affairs Committee endorsed a series of bills that would overhaul and reauthorize the structure of the State Department in its first top-to-bottom reauthorization in more than two decades.
Chair Brian Mast, R-Fla., took a piecemeal approach to the reauthorization, spreading the work across nine bills. That gave members a chance to vote against any they found politically difficult, but in the end they all advanced.
Lawmakers worked their way through at least 225 amendments, the overwhelming majority from Democrats who opposed GOP efforts to codify the Trump administration’s unilateral shuttering of the U.S. Agency for International Development and Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s sweeping reorganization of the State Department. In the summer, Rubio spearheaded an effort to consolidate and eliminate numerous Foggy Bottom offices, including ones focused on refugees, human rights and regional multilateral diplomacy.
