WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump`s top diplomat Marco Rubio unveiled a restructuring of the US State Department on Tuesday that will cut positions and scale back human rights offices, saying the `bloated` organisation was ideologically out of sync with the administration.

Rubio billed the plan as a major shake-up in the State Department, long a bete noire for many conservatives, although the outline was less drastic than drafts that have circulated _including one of which would have virtually wiped out day-to-day diplomacy in Africa.

`The Department is bloated, bureaucratic and unable to perform its essential diplomatic mis-sion in this new era of great-power competition, Rubio said in a statement, referring to US rivalry with China.

`The sprawling bureaucracy created a system more beholden to radical political ideology than advancing America`s core national interests.

One key change will be eliminating a division in charge of `civilian security, democracy and human rights`. It will be replaced by a new office of `coordination for foreign assistance and humanitarian affairs`, which will absorb functions of the US Agency for International Development gutted at the start of the Trump administration with the elimination of more than 80 per cent of programmes.-AFP