By: John Yang & Dan Sagalyn for PBS News Hour

Featuring: Cindy Dyer

For 25 years, the State Department has had an office tracking the scope of human trafficking and working to combat it. In 2023, more than 133,000 victims were identified globally, leading to more than 18,000 prosecutions. Last week, the Trump administration drastically cut that office’s staff. John Yang discussed more with Cindy Dyer, the former ambassador to monitor and combat trafficking.

By: Desirée Cormier Smith, Kelly M. Fay Rodríguez and Beth Van Schaack

What a difference eight years makes. During President Trump’s first term, then-Sen. Marco Rubio pushed the president to expand his human rights diplomatic agenda. Rubio recognized that promoting human rights abroad is in the national interest. He urged the president to appoint an assistant secretary for the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor — commonly known as DRL — after the position was left vacant for nearly two years. He co-sponsored the Women, Peace and Security Act (ensuring that the U.S. includes women in international conflict negotiations), spoke out against the torture of gay men in Chechnya and co-sponsored the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act.

By: Jessica Stern

Last week, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio released his proposal to reorganize the Department of State—and it’s a doozy. When I joined government as the U.S. special envoy for the human rights of LGBTQI+ persons, after a career working for human rights organizations, I found many of the clichés about government inefficiency to be true. However, Rubio’s plan—which includes reducing U.S.-based staff by 15 percent, cutting 132 offices, and transitioning an additional 137 offices into other parts of the department—is the equivalent of wielding a chainsaw when the patient deserves a scalpel.

By: Abby Finkenauer and Geeta Rao Gupta

Recently, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth bragged about ending the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) program at the Department of Defense, calling it “woke” and “divisive,” and claiming that the “troops hate it.” His words are not just reckless. They are dangerous, dishonest, and uninformed.

Let’s set the record straight. WPS is not just a diversity program. WPS promotes women’s leadership in our armed and security forces — not for window dressing, but for reasons of operational efficacy and readiness. It calls for the meaningful participation of women in peace negotiations, counterterrorism operations, and post-conflict stabilization based upon empirical proof that these efforts are more effective when women are involved. It is also about prioritizing the protection of the most vulnerable in conflict: women and children.