In an Aug. 7 op-ed for The Hill, two leading experts on international religious freedom warned that a recent State Department reorganization could weaken America’s ability to defend persecuted believers worldwide.
The change moves the International Religious Freedom Office back under the State Department’s human rights bureau — reversing its direct reporting line to the secretary of State and placing it under the bureau’s agenda and operational control.
Thomas Farr, the first director of the Office of International Religious Freedom and president emeritus of the Religious Freedom Institute, and David Trimble, the institute’s current president, said this structure restores the “bureaucratic isolation” that stifled the office for nearly two decades after its creation in 1998.
They argue it undoes key reforms from 2016, championed by Sen. Marco Rubio, that amended the International Religious Freedom Act to free the office from the human rights bureau, give the ambassador direct access to the secretary, and authorize coordination of religious freedom policy across the federal government.
“If this move stands,” they wrote, “it may harm international religious freedom policy during the Trump administration, and provide a dangerous precedent that the next progressive secretary of State will certainly exploit.”
Farr and Trimble recalled how the 2016 changes helped the office flourish under Ambassador Sam Brownback, who used his independence to gather foreign ministers in Washington, call out religious persecutors from Beijing to Tehran, and promote religious freedom as a driver of human dignity, stability, and US security interests.
“[Brownback] demonstrated that a bold and robust U.S. international religious freedom policy can benefit human rights and human dignity for everyone, and can benefit America’s national security,” they said.
While the authors welcome the new role of undersecretary for Foreign Assistance, Humanitarian Affairs, and Religious Freedom, they stress that burying the office inside the human rights bureau undermines the 2016 amendments to the International Religious Freedom Act. Farr and Trimble note that those reforms were designed to give the ambassador independence from exactly this type of subordination.
They urged the State Department to preserve the ambassador’s full legal authority, conduct a six-month review of the changes, and be prepared to restore direct reporting to the secretary if the office’s influence suffers.
“State Department leadership must proceed with extreme caution in this reorganization to avoid the mistakes of their predecessors,” the authors concluded, “who all-too-often weakened U.S. international religious freedom policy by isolating it within the State Department’s enormous bureaucracy.”