United States Department of State

• 1. Introduction

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  The United States Department of State holds a distinction that most Americans never think about: it was the very first federal agency created under the new Constitution, signed into law by President George Washington on the 27th of July, 1789. Before the army had a proper department, before the Treasury was formally organized, there was the State Department. Its job was to handle the young nation's relationships with the rest of the world. Yet when Thomas Jefferson took charge as its first secretary, the entire operation consisted of just six people, two diplomatic posts, and ten consular offices. How did an agency that small become one of the most powerful institutions in the world? And what does it actually do on a given Tuesday? Those are the questions this documentary will explore.

• 2. From Committee to Department

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  Before the State Department existed, the Continental Congress handled foreign affairs through a committee. In 1775, the Congress of the Confederation created the Committee of Secret Correspondence, borrowing the idea from Massachusetts, where colonists had used committees of correspondence to coordinate with one another. Two years later, in 1777, it was renamed the Committee of Foreign Affairs. That body remained temporary, not a true bureaucratic institution. In 1781, Congress replaced it with something more permanent: the Department of Foreign Affairs, with an office of secretary of foreign affairs at its head.

  Then came the Constitution. Drafted in September 1787 and ratified the following year, it placed foreign affairs squarely in the hands of the president. The First Congress moved quickly. On the 21st of July, 1789, it approved legislation reestablishing the Department of Foreign Affairs under the new government. Washington signed it six days later. That legislation, the source notes, remains the basic law of the Department of State to this day.

  That September, Congress made a further change: it renamed the agency the Department of State and piled on a roster of domestic duties that sound almost random today. The new department was responsible for managing the United States Mint, keeping the Great Seal of the United States, and administering the census. Most of those tasks were eventually handed off to other agencies as the 19th century progressed. But the secretary of state still holds two domestic responsibilities from that original mandate: serving as keeper of the Great Seal, and being the officer to whom a president or vice president who wishes to resign must deliver the written declaration of that decision.

• 3. Building a Bureaucracy

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  In 1833, Secretary of State Louis McLane gave the department its first formal internal architecture. He reorganized it into seven named bureaus, covering everything from diplomatic correspondence to pardons, copyrights, and the library. His successor, John Forsyth, promptly cut that number down to four the very next year, collapsing the structure under a chief clerk. The tension between expansion and consolidation would play out repeatedly over the following decades.

  Patent oversight landed in the department's lap in 1793, when responsibility was transferred from the cabinet to State. Congress did not formally recognize the superintendent of patents role until 1830. A Commissioner of Immigration existed briefly between 1864 and 1868. By 1870, Secretary of State Hamilton Fish had reorganized the whole operation into twelve bureaus, some of which consisted of a single person doing the work of an entire office.

  The department's biggest structural problem in the 19th century was money. Both the diplomatic and consular services lacked enough funding to support actual careers. That gap had a predictable consequence: appointments went to people wealthy enough to sustain themselves abroad, combined with the common practice of hiring on the basis of political connections rather than ability. The system rewarded those with the right networks over those with the right skills.

  The Rogers Act of 1924 was the first serious attempt to fix that. It merged the diplomatic and consular services into a unified Foreign Service, put promotions on a merit basis, and created a famously difficult examination to screen incoming candidates. The act also established the Board of the Foreign Service to advise the secretary on managing the corps, and a separate Board of Examiners to run the testing process.

• 4. War, Surveillance, and the Cold War

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  During World War I, the State Department's Bureau of Citizenship took on a responsibility it had never held before: vetting every single person who entered or departed from the United States. New branches opened in New York and San Francisco to handle the volume. By the war's final months, the bureau had split into two separate offices, the Division of Passport Control and the Visa Office, each focused on a different piece of border management.

  In 1964, at the height of the Cold War, a discovery at the United States Embassy in Moscow changed the department's security posture permanently. Listening devices were found inside the embassy. In response, Seabees were assigned to the State Department, forming an initial unit called Naval Mobile Construction Battalion FOUR, Detachment November. They were immediately dispatched to a newly built embassy in Warsaw to sweep for surveillance equipment. That assignment became permanent in 1966. Two years later, a Seabee named William Darrah was credited with saving the U.S. Embassy in Prague from a potentially catastrophic fire. By 1985, State Department security records listed 800 department security employees, 1,200 U.S. Marines, and 115 Seabees on duty.

  The post-World War II period brought a transformation in scale. As the United States emerged as a superpower and its Cold War competition with the Soviet Union intensified, the department's workforce grew from roughly 2,000 employees in 1940 to over 13,000 by 1960. The foreign affairs budget that sustained this workforce, large as it sounds, represented little more than 1 percent of the total federal budget, a proportion that held into the 21st century.

• 5. Historic Firsts at the Top

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  In 1997, Madeleine Albright became the first woman to serve as secretary of state, and also the first foreign-born woman to hold a Cabinet position. The milestone did not remain singular for long. Colin Powell, who led the department from 2001 to 2005, became the first African-American to hold the post. His immediate successor, Condoleezza Rice, was simultaneously the second female secretary of state and the second African-American to hold the role. Hillary Clinton became the third female secretary when she was appointed in 2009.

  The current secretary is Marco Rubio, appointed by President Donald Trump. His confirmation vote in the Senate on the 20th of January, 2025, was 99-0, a margin that signals the rare bipartisan consensus that can still form around senior diplomatic appointments. The secretary of state is, by protocol, the first Cabinet official in the order of precedence and sits in the presidential line of succession, reflecting the original weight the Founders placed on the position.

• 6. Exchange, Education, and Outreach

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  The Fulbright Program, founded by Senator J. William Fulbright in 1946, distributes 8,000 grants each year for graduate study, research, university lecturing, and classroom teaching. More than 360,000 people have participated since the program began. Fifty-four Fulbright alumni have won Nobel Prizes; eighty-two have won Pulitzer Prizes. The program operates in over 160 countries, with bi-national Fulbright Commissions running the program locally in 49 of them.

  Acceptance rates vary dramatically by country and grant type. In the 2015-16 cycle, 30 percent of Americans who applied to teach English in Laos received grants, and 50 percent of those applying to do research there were successful. In Belgium, those numbers fell to 6 percent for English teaching and 16 percent for research. The variation reflects differences in competition, funding levels, and bilateral relationships.

  The department runs several parallel exchange programs. The Young Southeast Asian Leaders Initiative, launched by President Barack Obama in Manila in December 2013, targets emerging leaders between 18 and 35 from the ten ASEAN member states and Timor Leste. The Young African Leaders Initiative, begun in 2010, brings emerging African leaders to the United States for six weeks through the Mandela Washington Fellowship; in 2014 the program expanded to include regional leadership centers in Ghana, Kenya, Senegal, and South Africa. The Kennedy-Lugar Youth Exchange and Study program, established in 2002, focuses on high school students from countries with significant Muslim populations.

• 7. A Global Footprint

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  The State Department maintains 271 diplomatic posts worldwide, second only to China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Inside the United States, around 5,000 employees compile and analyze overseas reports, handle logistics, communicate with the American public, manage the budget, and issue the passports and travel warnings that most citizens encounter as their only direct interaction with the department.

  The Harry S. Truman Building in Washington's Foggy Bottom neighborhood has been the department's home since May 1947. Before that address was settled, the department moved through at least six locations in the capital alone after relocating from Philadelphia in 1800. The building was originally intended to house the Department of Defense; when it was renamed in September 2000, the choice of Truman's name was deliberate, honoring a president whose commitment to internationalism and diplomacy was central to his presidency. The most recent renovations were completed in 2016.

  In 2014, the department began expanding into the Navy Hill Complex across 23rd Street NW from the Truman Building. That 11.8-acre campus had its own layered history: it housed the World War II headquarters of the Office of Strategic Services and was the first headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency. A joint venture between the architectural firms Goody, Clancy and the Louis Berger Group won a $2.5 million planning contract in January 2014 to start the renovation work.