United States Deputy Secretary of State
second highest ranking official of the United States Department of State
The deputy secretary of state of the United States is the principal deputy to the secretary of state. If the secretary of state resigns or dies, the deputy secretary of state becomes acting secretary of state until the president nominates and the Senate confirms a replacement. The position was created in 1972. Prior to July 13, 1972, the under secretary of state had been the second ranking officer of the Department of State.
The State Department is the only federal cabinet-level agency to have two co-equal deputy secretaries. The second deputy secretary of state, the deputy secretary of state for management and resources, serves as the "first assistant" for the purposes of the Vacancies Reform Act, but both deputy secretaries have full delegated authority to act for the secretary, if not otherwise prohibited by law.
Certain deputy secretaries of state went on to become appointed as the secretary of state, such as Lawrence Eagleburger in 1992, Warren Christopher in 1993, and Antony Blinken in 2021.
List of under secretaries of state (until 1972)
1919–1920: Frank Polk
1920–1921: Norman Davis
1921–1922: Henry P. Fletcher
1922–1924: William Phillips (first stint)
1924–1927: Joseph Grew (first stint)
1927–1928: Robert E. Olds
1928–1929: J. Reuben Clark
1929–1931: Joseph P. Cotton
1931–1933: William R. Castle Jr.
1933–1936: William Phillips (second stint)
1937–1943: Sumner Welles
1943–1944: Edward Stettinius Jr.
1944–1945: Joseph Grew (second stint)
1945–1947: Dean Acheson
1947–1949: Robert A. Lovett
1949–1952: James E. Webb
1952–1953: David K. E. Bruce
1953–1954: Walter Bedell Smith
1954–1957: Herbert Hoover Jr.
The public source identifies “United States Deputy Secretary of State” as second highest ranking official of the United States Department of State. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around United, States and Deputy.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 8, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2301213. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1972, 1992, 1993 and 2021.
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This entry incorporates text from “United States Deputy Secretary of State” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.