State Department

“I must say, Joe, I, 70,000 people, a thousand days. I'm not sure I left that place materially better than where I began. We did a lot, but we had to work around and through what was the most resistant, unaccountable bureaucracy, the one that I've ever been a p…”

“The State Department is fundamentally different than that. Three unions, civil service rules. You couldn't promote based on merit, right? You couldn't allocate resources. You'd get appropriate funds. You couldn't allocate resources on a risk-adjusted basis”

“We proposed a budget, Joe, about two-thirds of the State Department budget think Forty five billion instead of seventy billion. And each year, both Republican and Democrats alike on Capitol Hill said, nope, we're going to give you a seventy billion.”

“And so the State Department training and hiring program needs to be fundamentally redone, focused on mission, not on diversity, equity, and inclusion, but based on pure merit.”

“We've had some very interesting job applicants come by that we haven't interviewed. We due to the nature of our work, we can only hire US persons, but that doesn't mean people still don't try to sneak in, or we catch some things that are not quite adding up. A…”

“And that's why we're doing deals around the world on energy, on minerals, and on infrastructure, and it's incredibly exciting about the progress we've made.”

“We're planning on ruling out three more by the end of June.”