SECRETARY TILLERSON: Good morning, all. Just wanted to check and make sure it was still morning. And hello to all of you, and also hello to the constituent offices that are watching, as well, and really pleased to have the opportunity to at least spend a few minutes with you here at the tri-missions, and talk about a few things that are happening around the department and whatnot.

But first, let me thank you for what all of you do in the tri-missions for us, and representing the U.S. interests and advancing U.S. foreign policy day in and day out. I appreciate those of you that find yourself deployed overseas, away from home with your families – and I see we got some great looking family members here, as well. And the support that you get from your families, I know, is really important to your ability to carry out the mission here, and we appreciate that.

And having been deployed overseas myself, unaccompanied, I know what it’s like to be away from home and miss family events. And we know there is a sacrifice involved with any foreign deployment, even if it is in Paris. (Laughter.) There is – you’re still missing things, and I understand that. You’re missing birthdays, you’re missing events with family back home, and that’s part of serving overseas. So thank you for your willingness to serve in that regard.

And in particular, I also want to recognize and thank our locally employed members of the family, because a lot of the rest of us come and go on a fairly frequent basis with assignments, and you’re really the continuity for our tri-missions here, in terms of helping people on board, maintaining the continuity in our relationships, our operational capability. And you are vitally important to our success, as well. So thank you for that.

I know it’s – there is a broad range of issues we could talk about with three missions, and we don’t have time to talk about all of those. So I was just going to talk more broadly about things that I know have been some challenges in the past year just as colleagues of yours in other countries have had, to help American citizens that have found themselves embroiled in terrible, terrible terrorist attacks, and I know you’ve had to deal with that here in France, with the terrorist attacks.

And American citizens find themselves in need of help, advice, they’re scared, not sure what to do, and that role you play is really critical. And that’s when America all of a sudden realizes, gee, we do have missions and embassies overseas, and a lot of them don’t know, otherwise. But I appreciate the way all of you have dealt with those very difficult and trying times in those situations here. And as you know, you have colleagues in other countries that face those same challenges from time to time, and it is important, what you do for our American citizens that are here.

The important policy issues we’re dealing with here in France, and more broadly, Europe: maintaining strong sanctions support, as we want to send Russia a message that they’ve got to restore the sovereign territory of Ukraine. And we know that sanctions architecture gets a little wobbly from time to time, so I appreciate the strong efforts on the part of this office to communicate with our French counterparts and with other European counterparts how important that is.

We also have important NATO commitments, and France is really stepping up to increase their NATO commitments. This is the bedrock of our security alliance in Europe, and the U.S. is firmly committed to that alliance, and committed to strengthening it by having everyone doing their fair share, as well.

So, from a security standpoint, these are two important issues for us.

And then, obviously, very important: economic and trading relationships. And the mission here is central to that success, as well, and we appreciate your facilitating so many – we know we have so many agencies that come in and need the assistance of the mission here to engage in our economic issues, as well. So thank you for what you do.

Let me say just a quick word about the department and the redesign that’s going on that you’re reading a lot about, most of which is not particularly accurate. So let me share with you a little bit.

As you know, this started shortly after I arrived in the department. The first thing we asked is to hear from each of you. So we did a little survey. Some of you – I hope all of you participated. Maybe not everyone, but we had 35,000 responses to the listening tour, I called it, that was conducted early on. And we sat down and did extensive interviews with more than 300 of your colleagues, face to face. And this was really to help me understand what’s important to you, what makes you get up and come in and go to work every day, what makes you want to make the sacrifices on behalf of the American people.

And we learned a lot. And I needed to learn, because I’m new to this organization. And it’s important for me to understand you. And so there were really two purposes in that listening tour: help me understand you; but also have you tell us what’s working, what’s not working, where do you see opportunities for us to make this department run better. So we got that out of the listening tour, we got it through the face-to-face interviews. And then we opened these portals into the process, and many of you have continued to communicate with us through the portals.

We then established employee-led teams. So these are all your State Department colleagues that are leading this redesign effort. So we went from phase one, which was kind of the listening aspect, to then creating some teams to take all of this feedback we got and help us begin to identify where are the opportunities. And that’s been phase two. And they’ve been working hard, and they’ve got a very long list of opportunities, which is great, because they’re very enthusiastic about it. I think we have over 170 distinct ideas that we think are worthwhile to pursue. How we get to those 170 is now a phase three challenge. But we are moving now from phase two to phase three so we can begin to talk more specifically with you about what’s coming out of this redesign effort.

And I kind of put it in two characterizations when we look at all the things that have come out of this. We’ve got leadership issues that we want to address to strengthen the leadership within the department, and that manifests itself in a lot of different ways. And then we have modernization of the department. And we’re putting those two together, leadership plus modernization, which is going to give us a more effective State Department.

Within the modernization piece there is kind of – there is a set of programmatics, I call them, which are really getting at the work you do day in and day out. And again, your colleagues have been helping us map how this work gets done. And what comes out of that mapping process is – that’s where we identify the duplication, we identify the many, many layers that get in the way of people being able to deliver more nimbly with less effort. That’s where we begin identifying interface issues with other agencies, certainly, as well.

And so now, out of that is coming a number of projects to try to address these areas of duplication, extra work, extra layers of work, why it takes so long to get certain things done, the inefficiencies of it.

And then there are some projects. Now, the projects are things like a modernized IT system – surprise, surprise, that that would come out of this exercise. I know anyone that’s joined the department probably within the last 10 years came out of a university or maybe – wherever they were, with an IT system that looked like it was 21st century, and jumped into an IT system that was still buried in the 20th century. And that was a bit of a shock for me, because in my old life I had a 21st century IT system. And we need to fix that. We need to address it, because you have to have modern tools. I mean that’s – the amount of time that you lose with an inefficient systems platform is something that we can and will fix.

Now, it’s going to take a while to build a new IT platform, but we’ve been engaged with appropriators, and they understand how important that is, so we’re going to get the funds to start the process.

But in the meantime, there are some things with the platforms we’re using now that we can at least make them run a little better for you, so we actually have a couple of layers of teams working on the IT system itself. That’s an example of a project.

We’ve got some modernization to our HR systems, and processes of how you interface with that system to pursue your career ambitions. Pursuing postings at – we need to make that easier for people to know what’s out there, what’s available, what do I qualify for, what do I need to do to be considered. And today it’s – what we’ve learned is it’s kind of a cumbersome process, and it shouldn’t be. It should be easy for you to interface with that system.

We’ve got other areas that we’re looking at to modernize our policies, to recognize today’s working families. In society in general, in the U.S., two-career families are pretty normal any more. And our policies don’t really fully recognize that, in terms of how we help you, as a two-career family, dual-working spouse family, continue to advance your career and pursue your aspirations. So we’ve got some modernizations of policies that we’re taking a hard look at that we’re going to try to address to make all of that work better for you.

I want to say a word about the hiring freeze, because I think it’s probably been the most misunderstood part of this. The hiring – I left the hiring freeze in place because we had not done this work. But what I knew is, out of all of this we’re going to get some level of efficiency. And so my view was, well, we’ll at least get normal attrition. And normal attrition is going to get us about eight percent over the course of the next couple of years or so. And that way, we will get to that number, just through normal retirements and people that are normally leaving. And then we are still hiring backfill, so we stay on that trend.

So, in the hiring freeze – and I know one of the areas that has really created some issues for folks are EFMs. Now, those are really important positions. I have signed, since we put the hiring freeze in place, over 2,400 exceptions to the hiring freeze. So it’s really – it’s a hiring freeze, but it’s a hiring freeze that’s intended to have local leadership look at their needs, tell me what you need, and we’ll approve it.

And so, what it’s done was just a little bit of a blunt instrument to have everyone be a little more disciplined about filling their positions. So some posts had – in the past had 30 positions. When they looked at it they decided they really only needed 18, so they sent in a request for an exception to 18, and we approved it. And I think, in all of the exceptions that have been sent forth to me, it’s been less than a dozen that I’ve not approved.

We also continue to hire and run our Foreign Service skills. We have over 300 new Foreign Service officers this year, already. All of our programs continue to operate. And if you look at our numbers today, we have – we’re within 10 Foreign Service officers of being exactly where we were in October of 2016. And so we’re – we have plenty of talent, talented people that are fulfilling the roles so the State Department can carry out its mission.

And I want to acknowledge and thank the leadership team here. All three charge d’affaires have stepped up to leadership roles, because we don’t have ambassadors in these jobs yet. We know that. It’s our intent to fill them. We are having a few issues with confirmations and getting people through the process in Washington. But in the meantime, the tri-mission hasn’t missed a beat, because you’ve got good leadership, you’ve got people that are willing to step up. And that’s true all over the world in our posts and our missions, and it’s true back in the State Department as well. So we have great people, career people, stepping up into assistant secretary roles and under secretary roles, filling those positions, and our policy and our execution continues on.

And I like to remind people of that, because I like to remind the people on the Hill in Congress of that, that you really need to appreciate the depth of talent within the State Department and the capability of the people. And when you worry that somehow foreign policy is adrift because we got some assistant secretary jobs that aren’t filled yet, or we’ve got some ambassador positions that aren’t filled yet, you really don’t understand the talent of the State Department that’s available to you. Because nothing stops, it just keeps going. And that’s what I’ve learned in the time I’ve been here.

And so I’m very proud of this organization, I’m very proud of the people in it. I really admire your skill, your talent, and I admire your passion that you bring to the job every day. And it is – it’s inspiring to me.

So let me just close it right there by telling you how much I appreciate what you do for us every day, day in and day out. For those of you that are deployed here, you are the face of America, you represent our American values to the people that are here in France and elsewhere, where you interface with people. And we appreciate the way you do that every day on behalf of the American people.

And so again, thank you. Thanks to the families that are here. I appreciate everything you’re doing for us. Thank you.