Secretary of State Marco Rubio walked into the State Department on Tuesday for the first time in his new job, taking the reins of the main agency carrying out U.S. foreign policy at a time of violent global crises and as other nations begin engaging with President Trump.
After greeting employees at a ceremonial gathering, Mr. Rubio went into a meeting with his counterparts from India, Japan and Australia to discuss issues in the Indo-Pacific region, an area that, in his eyes, China seeks to dominate.
The State Department and the United States Agency for International Development, which works under Mr. Rubio’s authority, have begun halting the disbursement of foreign aid money, following an executive order signed on Monday by Mr. Trump.
The move immediately affects programs aimed at alleviating hunger, disease and wartime suffering around the globe, as well as ones that help nations with economic development.
Mr. Rubio was sworn in as secretary of state at 9:30 on a frigid Tuesday morning by Vice President JD Vance. He arrived at the flag-festooned entrance hall of the State Department at 1 p.m. to applause, as hundreds of employees strained to get a glimpse of him and his wife, Jeanette Rubio, and their four children. Lisa Kenna, a career diplomat who is serving as Mr. Rubio’s executive secretary, as she did for Mike Pompeo in the first Trump administration, introduced the new secretary.
Mr. Rubio thanked the many diplomats working overseas, then laid out Mr. Trump’s foreign policy goal: “That mission is to ensure that our foreign policy is centered on one thing, and that is the advancement of our national interests, which they have clearly defined through his campaign as anything that makes us stronger or safer or more prosperous,” he said.
“There will be changes, but the changes are not meant to be destructive, they’re not meant to be punitive,” he added.
He said that “things are moving faster than ever” around the world, and that the department had to act at “the speed of relevance.”
“We need to move faster than we ever have because the world is changing faster than we ever have,” he said, “and we have to have a view that some say is called ‘look around the corner,’ but we really need to be thinking about where are we going to be in five, seven, 10 or 15 years.”
That analysis of a troubled world and the challenges to American foreign policy overlap with concerns that Mr. Rubio’s predecessor, Antony J. Blinken, expressed in several of his final public interviews.
“We all have this intravenous feed of information, and we’re getting new inputs every millisecond, and the pressure to simply react is more intense than it’s ever been,” Mr. Blinken said in an interview on Jan. 14 with David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker. “And no one has the distance, the buffer, to really try to reflect and to think before you act. At least it’s really much harder to do that. The speed with which things is happening is much harder.”
Mr. Rubio also sent out a cable outlining his vision to the department’s employees.
The meeting at State Department headquarters on Tuesday among the top diplomats from the Asian nations, which form a nonmilitary coalition known as the Quad, had been scheduled before the transition from the Biden to the Trump administrations. Mr. Rubio planned to have bilateral meetings with each of the foreign ministers after the Quad talks.
Mr. Rubio was the first cabinet secretary named by Mr. Trump to be confirmed. He had been in the Senate representing Florida since 2011 and served on the Foreign Relations and Intelligence Committees. He was unanimously approved by the Senate on Monday evening.
Mr. Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants, has been especially outspoken on the need to confront the Chinese Communist Party.
Mr. Trump’s executive order on foreign aid is the presidential directive that has had the most immediate effect on operations at the State Department and at the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID. On Monday, Mr. Trump signed an order to halt any disbursement of foreign aid funds and designation of new funds pending a 90-day review under guidelines to be issued by the secretary of state.
That means millions of dollars that would usually go to support programs across continents — programs that provide basic daily sustenance for many people — are being frozen.
Nongovernmental groups and contractors who have been using the money on programs are scrambling to figure out what to do, and many programs in impoverished and war- or disaster-stricken parts of the world could suddenly end, a U.S. official said.
The executive order said the 90-day assessment would look at “programmatic efficiencies and consistency with United States foreign policy.”
“The United States foreign aid industry and bureaucracy are not aligned with American interests and in many cases antithetical to American values,” it said. “They serve to destabilize world peace by promoting ideas in foreign countries that are directly inverse to harmonious and stable relations internal to and among countries.”