H.R. 3571 would require the Department of State to establish an Office of Subnational Diplomacy to support the interactions of state and municipal governments in the United States with foreign governments. It also would require that office to provide annual reports to the Congress on its activities.
For this estimate, CBO assumes that the bill will be enacted in fiscal year 2020. Under that assumption, the department could incur some costs in 2020, but CBO expects that most of the costs would be incurred in 2021 and later.
On the basis of information about similar activities conducted by the department’s Bureau of Global Public Affairs, CBO estimates that the department would move some existing staff in the Bureau to the new office and hire an additional five employees at an annual cost of $200,000 each. In total, CBO estimates that creating the new office and satisfying the reporting requirement would cost less than $500,000 in 2020 and a total of $5 million over the 2020-2025 period. Such spending would be subject to the availability of appropriated funds.
