This guy posted a good summary of how Rubio consolidating roles has made him so effective

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Here is my operating theory on why Marco Rubio is the best Secretary of State in generations.

It's because he unified the foreign policy apparatus—it's because he's the Secretary of Everything.

I'll assume you've seen the memes about Marco Rubio being assigned every job under the sun: he's the Secretary of State, Administrator of the United States Agency for International Development, Archivist of the United States, Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, and as of a few hours ago, some sort of Generalissimo of Venezuela. He'll certainly be in and out of even more roles during his tenure. Bet on it.

The last incredibly effective Secretary of State was Henry Kissinger, and the two share something: having multiple jobs in the administration. Kissinger was the only other Secretary of State to be the President's National Security Advisor, back in 1975.

The agencies that U.S. foreign policy operates through have not been unified for a very long time, and the lack of unity leads to coordination problems. People who work in the State Department will tell you if you ask them: they often don't know who they're supposed to be reporting to! Moreover, foreign policy is held up by large bureaucracies; it experiences sclerosis, because there are many points of failure, where anyone can clog up the whole thing, or a substantial enough portion of it that everything stops or becomes ineffectual.

Cutting agencies, destroying these points of distributed dysfunction and disjunction, and unifying foreign policy under one man who has the authority to simply make the decisions he needs to make without having to go through committees or talk to a million different people, has fixed this issue.

Marco Rubio, through being the Secretary of Everything, through having consolidated his authority, has become uber-effective, beyond what previous Secretaries of State could do, because they were, in a very real sense, subservient to bureaucratic inertia.

That and he's the child of Cuban refugees, so he just really fricking hates communists. (As we all should.)

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