It’s been a rough week for Secretary of State Marco Rubio. First, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and his policy chief, Elbridge Colby, stopped the shipment of U.S. weapons to Ukraine without so much as informing him. Then, news leaked that Ric Grenell, a special presidential envoy with a nebulous remit, was running a diplomatic channel to Venezuela in parallel to Rubio’s—also without consulting him. Meanwhile, Rubio has been put in charge of two key national security organs—the State Department and National Security Council—whose staff are in the process of being culled into irrelevance. (USAID, where he also served as acting administrator, has already been dismantled.) “He gets to fly around the world and have meetings with presidents, but he’s not setting policy,” one senior State Department veteran told me. “There’s no sign that he has any power or influence.”