The State Department’s diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI)-focused hiring practices have led to concerns about potential inefficiencies in hiring and the quality of the Foreign Service staff, according to a Heritage Foundation report.
“Ideologically driven bureaucrats at the State Department have ignored objective standards to create artificially equal outcomes in hiring and personnel decisions, severely undermining U.S. diplomacy,” Simon Hankinson, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation’s Center on Border Security and Migration and an author of the report, told Fox News Digital.
“The world is on fire right now with conflicts in Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, yet the State Department is wasting limited resources on policies that do not advance American interests and are not supported by data,” said Hankinson, a former diplomat.
“My report shows how the State Department can implement a process that returns to core American values and prioritizes meritocratic principles. The American people deserve to be treated better.”
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U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken discusses Russia’s invasion of Ukraine during a press conference at the State Department in Washington, March 2, 2022. (REUTERS/Elisabeth Franz/Pool/File Photo)
The report focuses on the hiring practices of the Foreign Service, which staffs the U.S. diplomatic service and comprises more than 13,000 professionals, and argues that the service must select its staff based on “objective, meritocratic criteria” and be accountable to the president.
“We have not yet seen the report but welcome diverse perspectives,” a State Department spokesperson told Fox News Digital.
State Department spokesman Vedant Patel maintained at a press conference on Thursday that the department “welcomes diverse perspectives and believes it makes our department stronger and creates a stronger policymaking process.”
“The Secretary of State and State Department leadership will continue to seek a wide range of input, as we believe it will improve our policymaking process,” he said, following reports that a career State Department official had resigned after disagreeing with a recently released report that found Israel was not obstructing humanitarian aid in the Gaza Strip.
Vedant Patel, principal deputy spokesperson for the U.S. State Department, told reporters at a press conference in Washington on April 23, 2024. (Yassin Ozturk/Anadolu via Getty Images)
Hankinson outlines several misconceptions about State Department hiring and personnel, including that there is a lack of racial and gender diversity and that the State Department is resistant to this, that minorities cannot become diplomats due to “structural barriers,” that promotions are biased, and that the State Department has a “hostile” work environment for minorities, which leads to minorities leaving the State Department.
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Another career official who resigned over the conflict between Israel and the Gaza Strip said he felt the debate on the issue was unwelcome, but that it ran counter to the open discussion and welcome dissent on nearly every other issue during his 18 years at the State Department, according to The Washington Post.
The report argues that “the DEIA baseline appears intended to aid the Department’s efforts to achieve ‘equity’ through race- and sex-based preferences by dividing the Department’s 25,000 employees into various ‘intersectional’ components” (the “A” stands for Accessibility).
A view of the U.S. Department of State logo in Washington, DC, on January 9, 2023. (Celal Gunes/Anadolu Agency)
According to the report, the State Department’s full-time staff diversity data as of September 30, 2023, currently identifies 35% of the 26,000 civil servants and diplomats as “minorities.” The report further asserts that the percentage of race within the staff is “within 10% of the national level.”
The report cites former State Department recruiting director Woody Staben as arguing eight years ago that the number of white personnel among new hires had fallen by 30 percent, but that “because the average tenure of a diplomat is 27 years, it will take much longer for the overall numbers to change,” meaning that the problem of staff composition reflects a delayed response to previous composition.
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The most striking feature of the report is the State Department’s emphasis that its employees are accountable to the president, which stems from resistance within the State Department to former President Trump’s policies, such as cracking down on illegal immigration. The report also accuses the State Department of an increasingly left-leaning bias, which it claims originates in universities.
Demonstrators gather outside the entrance to Columbia University as students rally on campus at a protest camp in support of Palestinians, April 29, 2024, in New York City. (Reuters/David D. Delgado)
“The State Department has approximately 65 appointed officials (excluding ambassadors), but bureaucratic inertia, ignorance of how things work, and resistance from entrenched career bureaucrats often prevent them from changing policy in line with the president’s vision,” the report states. “This organizational paralysis represents a fundamental challenge to the principle that elections should lead to policy change.”
The most serious problem uncovered by the report is the lack of emphasis on the Foreign Service Officer Test (FSOT). Former Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer Gina Abercrombie Winstanley dismissed the FSOT as “completely irrelevant to what it means to be a successful diplomat,” saying that the more subjective oral test served to screen for “racists, sexists, homophobes, ableists” – things that “we need to screen for.”
Anti-Israel protesters rally outside the New York University campus in New York, May 3, 2024. (Rashid Umar Abbasi for Fox News Digital)
“The majority of senior positions [foreign service] “These positions are filled primarily by European American men. … You can’t fill 87 percent of a group that is not 87 percent of the population and be confident that the selection was made entirely on merit,” Abercrombie Winstanley said in 2023 testimony about the State Department’s diversity practices.
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The report emphasized that standardized tests such as the SAT for college admission, the MCAT for medical school admission, and the LSAT for law school admission are valuable as indicators of career-wide success in a particular field.
“Accepting applicants with low FSOT scores will inevitably result in employees performing worse as they advance in their careers, to the detriment of both themselves and the military,” the report states. “The Department’s testing committee reportedly did not conduct any empirical research to determine whether high FSOT scores correlated with career performance before deciding to downplay the test.”
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As a result, the report concluded, Congress should pass a new Foreign Service Act to reinstate the Foreign Service Exam as the required entrance test for diplomats, limit the number of people hired annually through fellowships and other routes that circumvent the exam, eliminate consideration of race, sex and other “immutable and irrelevant characteristics” in promotions, and require the State Department to provide comprehensive annual reports on written and oral exams.
The annual report would include demographics of all test-takers, educational background, pass rates, language proficiency, state of origin, number of times they have taken the exam, etc. Additionally, the State Department should work to eliminate “duplicative and valueless” positions and effectively dismantle the Office of Diversity and Inclusion.
