REX TILLERSON/STATE: “Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson said Thursday [9-14-17] that the most important thing he could do during his tenure was to make the State Department more efficient, and in a lengthy letter to employees he promised that the efforts would yield significant savings.
To his critics, his remarks and the letter outlining his proposals were simply more evidence of their contention that the former petroleum engineer is still acting like a corporate chief executive and not the nation’s chief diplomat.
In the letter, Mr. Tillerson wrote with a businessman’s shorthand that his plan ‘contains seven ambitious proposals with investments that will generate a minimum deliverable of 10 percent ($5B) in efficiencies relative to current (FY2017) spending over the next five years, with an aspirational general interest target of up to 20 percent ($10B).’…
Since the day Mr. Tillerson arrived at the State Department, aides have remarked that one of the few aspects of the job that seemed to truly delight Mr. Tillerson, a former chief executive of Exxon Mobil, were detailed discussions about decision trees and bureaucratic hurdles.
For just as long, veteran diplomats have pointed out that tinkering with the department’s organization chart is the kind of necessary but thankless duty that a secretary usually assigns an assistant. A low-level assistant.”
-Gardiner Harris, “Diplomacy? Tillerson Says His Top Priority Is Efficiency,” The New York Times online, Sept. 14, 2017