Open this photo in gallery: U.S. President Donald Trump, alongside Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, speaks during a cabinet meeting in the White House on April 10.BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/Getty Images U.S. President Donald Trump is mulling a major overhaul of the State Department, the New York Times is reporting, including scaling back its work in Canada, shutting down most U.S. diplomacy in Africa, and laying off diplomats and replacing them with artificial intelligence. The newspaper said it had obtained a 16-page draft executive order outlining the sweeping changes. Secretary of State Marco Rubio dismissed the story. “This is fake news,” he wrote on X, adding that the Times had fallen “victim to another hoax.” In an e-mail, the State Department said the story was “entirely based on a fake document.” The government had no explanation for where the document came from or who may have written it. The Times said the draft executive order started circulating among U.S. diplomats and officials this weekend, but the paper did not know who its author was or how far along were the discussions about restructuring the department. The State Department’s Canada desk would be subsumed into a North American affairs office, the Times reported the proposed order as saying, with a “significantly reduced team” and a much smaller embassy in Ottawa. Ariel Pollock, spokesperson for the U.S. embassy in Ottawa, had no comment on the draft order and referred questions to State’s central press office. Clémence Grevey, a spokeswoman for the Canadian Foreign Affairs Ministry, said the department might not be able to respond on Sunday because of Easter. According to the newspaper, the draft order would also abolish the department’s Bureau of African Affairs and shut down a swath of embassies and consulates across sub-Saharan Africa by Oct. 1. Instead, a new special envoy for African affairs would focus more narrowly on “counterterrorism” and “extraction” of natural resources, and report directly to the White House. The Canadian overhaul would be part of a larger reorganization and consolidation of State, in which regional bureaus covering specific parts of the world would be merged into just four bigger ones, the Times said. The order would also shut down offices handling democracy and human rights, refugees and migration, and climate change. The moves would entail eliminating the jobs of many diplomats and other State Department workers, the Times reported. Writing documents, crafting policy and planning operations, the draft executive order said, would now be done in part by AI. The Times report comes at a time when the U.S. is increasingly focused on Canada, even as it pulls back from its international partnerships as part of a sweeping program of cuts intended to shrink the government and purge career civil servants. Mr. Trump has repeatedly called for the U.S. to annex Canada as its “51st state,” though he has mostly stopped bringing up the topic since the federal election campaign started. The President has also vacillated erratically on how to target Ottawa in his global trade war. He first demanded that Canada do more to stop fentanyl smuggling into the U.S. After Canada complied, however, he levied tariffs anyway, before abruptly pausing some of them. Canada has been hit hard by Mr. Trump’s 25-per-cent tariffs on steel, aluminum and autos, as well as tariffs on any other Canadian and Mexican goods traded outside the countries’ free-trade agreement. The President’s threats of using “economic force” to push Canada into joining the U.S. are central to the April 28 election. Neither the Liberal nor Conservative campaigns responded to requests for comment on the purported executive order. Since taking office in January, Mr. Trump has already moved to fire swaths of State Department staff, but some of those moves are currently tied up in court. He is also attempting to effectively dismantle USAID, a once 10,000-strong international aid organization, and fold its handful of remaining employees into State.