Rubio oversees the freeze on foreign aid and met with Asian diplomats on Day 1

Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s first visit to his new job at the State Department comes as the main agency that conducts US foreign policy amid violent international crises and as other countries align with President Trump.

After greeting workers at a ceremony, Mr. Rubio moved on to discuss issues in the Indo-Pacific region with his counterparts from India, Japan and Australia.

Mr. Rubio was quietly sworn in at 9:30 a.m. Tuesday morning by Vice President J.D. Vance. He arrived at 1 p.m. at the state department’s flag-draped lobby as hundreds of staff anxious to see him and his wife, Janet Rubio, and their four children. Lisa Keena, a career diplomat who served as Mr. Rubio’s chief secretary, introduced the new secretary, as Mike Pompeo did for the first Trump administration.

Mr. Rubio thanked the many diplomats working overseas, then laid out Trump’s foreign policy goal: “This mission is to make sure that our foreign policy is focused on one thing, and that is to put our national interest first.”

“There will be changes, but the changes are not destructive, they are not meant to be punitive,” he added.

“Things are moving faster than ever before” in the world, he said, adding that the department needed to act and respond quickly.

A meeting of top diplomats from the four countries that make up the non-military alliance known as the Quad was scheduled for Monday before the transition from the Biden to the Trump administration. Mr. Rubio was scheduled to hold bilateral meetings with each of the foreign ministers after the first Quad talks.

Mr. Rubio was the first cabinet secretary appointed by Mr. Trump. He has been in the Senate representing Florida since 2011 and has served on the Foreign Relations and Intelligence Committees. It passed the Senate unanimously Monday night.

Mr. Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants, has been particularly vocal about China and the need for the United States to confront the Chinese Communist Party on various issues.

Some of Mr. Trump’s executive orders affect activities at the State Department and the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID. Monday, Mr. Trump The order is signed Pending 90-day review to suspend allocation of foreign aid funds and new funds, as directed by the Secretary.

Nongovernmental groups and contractors who have been using the money for programs are scrambling to figure out what to do, and many programs in poverty-stricken, war-torn or disaster-stricken parts of the world could end abruptly, a U.S. official said.

The 90-day review will look at “program efficiency and consistency with United States foreign policy,” he said.

“The U.S. foreign aid industry and bureaucracy are not aligned with American interests and, in most cases, at odds with American values,” he said. “They serve to disrupt world peace by promoting ideas in foreign countries that are directly opposed to harmonious and stable relations between nations and nations.”