Tillerson’s Nairobi Visit Highlights Proposed Spending Cuts

NAIROBI, Kenya — Secretary of State Rex Tillerson laid a wreath Sunday at the August 7th Memorial Park here that commemorates a suicide truck bombing 20 years ago that killed more than 200 people. That attack may have done more to transform the State Department than any other event of the past 50 years.

In the wake of the 1998 attack, the department hired tens of thousands of security guards for posts around the world and made other changes that today cost nearly $7 billion annually, which is almost half of the $15 billion that Tillerson wants eliminated from the department’s budget.

Tillerson has twice proposed slashing the department’s budget to about $35 billion from about $50 billion, saying that doing so would return spending levels to those before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. He is expected to testify on Capitol Hill in the next two weeks to explain his reasons for the proposed cuts, which have received a chilly reception in Congress.

Critics say those cuts are misguided and could even cost lives.

Tillerson is in the midst of a five-nation tour of Africa, his first as secretary of state, and the visit to the memorial park — an island of green space where the damaged U.S. Embassy once stood — was the most somber event of the trip. He laid a wreath at a wall with the names of the victims inscribed and then gave brief remarks.

“As all of you well know, in 1998 terrorists thought they could demoralize and destroy the Kenyan and American people by attacking the U.S. Embassy here in Nairobi,” Tillerson said. “Of course, they were wrong. Nearly 20 years later, we meet here to honor those who we lost and those who were injured.”

Tillerson has made safety a focus of his tenure, saying in nearly every speech to employees that he considers safety not just a policy but a value.

The bombing of the embassy here — and, on the same day, one in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania — showed that terrorist groups could target U.S. facilities all over the world, even in countries deemed relatively secure.

“We realized that our people weren’t safe anywhere,” said Bill A. Miller, who was acting assistant secretary for diplomatic security until last year.

The State Department now has 45,000 security employees, representing more than half of the department’s 75,000 employees, Miller said. The security bureau’s budget is more than $5.8 billion, with security construction costs adding another roughly $1.5 billion annually.

Michael Evanoff, the current assistant secretary of state for diplomatic security, said Tillerson had never suggested he would cut the department’s security budget. “At no time has he ever said to me he wants D.S. to look at cutting,” Evanoff said, referring to the security bureau. “He’s always been very supportive.”

Without cuts to the department’s ballooning security expenses, Tillerson would need to look elsewhere.

The other major program that has grown since the 1990s is the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, known as PEPFAR, which was begun in 2003. Along with a malaria program, PEPFAR costs about $8 billion and has been widely credited with treating much of the African continent. In Kenya alone, the program costs about $1 billion and delivers antiretroviral drugs to 1.1 million people.

Tillerson, who has proposed some cuts to PEPFAR, was due to visit an HIV/AIDS clinic on Saturday where a handful of young women were going to explain how vital the program is, but the visit was canceled because he was sick. In interviews, the women said they were deeply concerned about the proposed cutbacks.

On Wednesday, a group of more than 200 HIV researchers, including Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, a Nobel laureate who helped discover the HIV virus, sent an open letter to the Trump administration denouncing the proposed cuts. Both Republican and Democratic lawmakers on Capitol Hill have vowed to preserve PEPFAR’s funding.

Steve Goldstein, the undersecretary for public diplomacy, said in an interview Sunday that there were other places to cut the department’s budget besides security programs and funding for HIV/AIDS programs. Tillerson has proposed cuts to a broad range of aid efforts, and has pushed out hundreds of experienced diplomats.

“It’s easy to take two or three programs and add them up and say this is where the cuts are, but that’s not really the fair way of looking at this,” Goldstein said.

But the vast expansion of funding for security and anti-AIDS efforts since the last time the department had a budget similar to what Tillerson has proposed suggests that, if he cannot cut them, he then must make significant cuts in diplomatic staff, which even before Tillerson’s tenure had been steadily shrinking since 2010, said Patrick Kennedy, the undersecretary of state for management in two previous administration.

“If Secretary Tillerson’s budget cutting continues, the number of State Department people overseas will be significantly reduced,” Kennedy said. “And the department will end up becoming a landlord for other U.S. government agencies abroad rather than the diplomatic service this country needs.”