White House Proposes Drastic Cuts To State Department And Funding For Un, Nato And Other Groups

The White House's Office of Management and Budget has proposed gutting the State Department's budget by almost 50, closing a number of overseas diplomatic missions, slashing the number of diplomatic staff, and eliminating funding for nearly all international organizations , including the United Nations, many of its agencies and for NATO headquarters, officials said.

The proposal, which was presented to the State Department last week and is still in a highly preliminary phase, is not expected to pass muster with either the department's leadership or Congress, which will ultimately be asked to vote on the entire federal budget in the coming months.

Officials familiar with the proposal say it must still go through several rounds of review before it even gets to lawmakers, who in the past have amended and even rejected White House budget requests. Though the proposal is preliminary, it gives an indication of the Trump administration's priorities and coincides with massive job and funding cuts across the federal government, from Health and Human Services and the Education Department to the U.S. Agency for International Development .

Notes from an internal meeting about the proposal have been circulated in online chat groups among foreign service officers since the weekend but exploded Monday when the State Department was due to present a separate unrelated reorganization plan to the OMB.

One senior U.S. official familiar with the OMB proposal called it "aggressive" in terms of cost-cutting, but also stressed that it was an early outline that mirrored what OMB chief Russell Vought sought to do in President Donald Trump's first administration when he served in the same job. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal administration deliberations.