9. Agency for International Development · Minor
Eliminate the duplicative Mission and Bureau Resource Requests
Printed page 271 9. Agency for International Development
“This should include eliminating the duplicative Mission and Bureau Resource Requests; speeding up the availability of appropriations by delivering to Congress within 60 days the report required by Section 653(a) of the Foreign Assistance Act (FAA); and fast-tracking the approval of Congressional Notifications (CNs) and other pre-obligation requirements.”
What has happened
- Not started
The requirement survives the reorganization at State, in State's own rules. The Foreign Affairs Manual and Handbook still impose it: 4 FAH-3 H-114.2-2, "Mission and Bureau Submissions", provides that "each overseas post (mission) and each bureau participate in the formulation of the Department's budget through the Mission Resource Request/Bureau Resource Request process", that "[t]he Mission Resource Request (MRR) is the first step in the State budget formulation process", and that each bureau "submits its budget request through its BRR for review and inclusion in the Department's budget request to OMB"; and 5 FAM 112 provides that "[a]ll Department organizations must follow the guidance in this subchapter when establishing the Bureau Resource Request (BRR) and the mission Resource Request (MRR) for information technology investments". The dating matters here: 5 FAM 0110's acronym list was reissued as change transmittal CT:IM-348 on **2025-08-11**, six weeks after USAID stopped implementing foreign assistance, and it still carries "BRR (Bureau Resource Request)" and "MRR (Mission Resource Request)", with 5 FAM 119.2 defining the MRR as "the first and critical step in the annual planning process that informs the Senior Review process and culminates in the submission of the President's Budget to Congress". That is the Department restating the requirement in force after the event that might have abolished it. Recorded under §3b as the record moving the other way.
- Not started
USAID notified Congress on 2025-03-28 that it would realign some functions to the State Department by 1 July 2025 and discontinue the rest, and on 2025-07-01 the Secretary of State announced that USAID officially ceased implementing foreign assistance. The Mission Resource Request and Bureau Resource Request were the joint State-USAID budget planning submissions; USAID's side of them ended with the agency, but nothing found eliminates the requirement at State. Cluster negative search A in docs/research/ch-09.md (round 3, ticket 11, batch 11b) covers this item: Federal Register full text for the named object over the whole window, the state.gov sitemap URL list (68,040 URLs), and the 119th-Congress nomination record. Federal Register full text "Mission Resource Request" returns 0 documents for the window, and no state.gov page describes the abolition of either submission.
- Secretary Rubio press statement: On Delivering an America First Foreign Assistance Program - notice to Congress of the USAID reorganization, realigning some functions to State by 1 July 2025 and discontinuing the rest
- Marco Rubio, "Making Foreign Aid Great Again" (State Department Spanish text): from 1 July 2025 USAID officially ceases to implement foreign assistance, which passes to the Department of State
Research log
What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence
Research notes
Researched 2026-08-28.
Reviewed 2026-09-06. Status unchanged, and the negative is now a positive finding: the requirement was not eliminated, it is still in the Foreign Affairs Manual. An earlier review said that browsing 1 FAM and 2 FAH by hand would settle it, because the sections had not been located. They can be located: the Foreign Affairs Manual’s own full-text search (fam.state.gov) accepts an exact phrase and returns each section’s title, its change-transmittal date and its location.
Control test. “Mission Resource Request” → 14 hits; “Bureau Resource Request” → 15; a nonsense term → 0. The search discriminates, so both the positive and any negative taken from it are real. Quoting matters: the same words unquoted return 6,516.
The other in-force sections the search surfaced, read but not cited because their change transmittals predate the evidence window: 4 FAH-3 H-114.2-2 (07-09-2024), the operative requirement quoted in the 2025-08-11 event; 2 FAM 425, “Mission resource request” (03-10-2023), which applies it to remote missions; 5 FAM 119.2 definitions (11-22-2024); 18 FAM 301.1-3, Budgeting (10-20-2022); and 12 FAM 054.1-2, Bureau Planning (03-07-2016). The window-dated 5 FAM 0110 transmittal is what makes the finding citable rather than merely true.
Reach of the negative: it is now strong about State’s own rules, which is the right place to look for an internal budget-planning requirement and the place the earlier review pointed at. It remains true that these submissions have no Federal Register footprint — “Mission Resource Request” returns 0 documents for the window — and that no state.gov page announces an abolition. State’s site search cannot add anything: it still returns an identical page for a real query and for a nonsense one (measured 2026-09-06), even though state.gov’s document pages now open normally.
- Action
- eliminate
- Object
- Mission and Bureau Resource Requests
- ID
- 711