According to a report published by Simon Hankinson, senior research fellow at The Heritage Foundation’s Border Security and Immigration Center, the United States State Department has been thoroughly politicized.
Hankinson highlighted that the State Department’s embrace of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) hiring standards has made the hiring process more inefficient and has brought about new concerns about the performance of diplomats within the foreign service.
“Ideologically driven bureaucrats at the State Department are severely undermining U.S. diplomacy by artificially engineering equal outcomes in hiring and personnel decisions, through overriding objective criteria,” Hankinson said to Fox News.
“The world is on fire right now — as seen by the conflicts in Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. Yet, the State Department is wasting limited resources on an agenda that does not advance American interests and is not supported by data,” Hankinson stated. He has previous experience working as a foreign service officer.
“My report lays out how the State Department can return to core American values and implement processes that prioritize merit-based principles. The American people deserve better.”
The report concentrates on the hiring procedures of the Foreign Service, which offers US diplomatic services and is made up of over 13,000 professional workers, stressing that the service must hire its employees via “objective, meritocratic criteria and are accountable to the president.”
One of the most notable observations from this report is how the State Department’s agenda was largely shaped as a response to the presidency of Donald Trump. The State Department has ramped up its woke up policies in order to prevent the emergence of Trump, especially a competent Trump administration that is capable of passing immigration restriction measures.
Ultimately, Hankinson argues that the State Department’s woke turn is the product of a widespread left-wing bias in the media and universities.
He was particularly perturbed by how the Foreign Service Officer Test (FSOT) has been largely deemphasized. Moreover Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer Gina Abercrombie-Winstanley criticized the FSOT as having “zero correlation to being a successful diplomat.” Instead, she contended that subjective oral exams helped screen out”racists, or sexists, or homophobes or ableists.”
The report emphasized the value of standardized tests. For example, the report argued that the SAT for universities, the MCAT for medical school ,and the LSAT for law school are valid tests that measure prospective candidates’ proficiency working in the real world.
“It stands to reason that accepting applicants with lower FSOT scores will lead to lower performance as those officers move through their careers, both to their own and to the service’s detriment,” the report added. “The State Department’s Board of Examiners reportedly did not conduct any empirical research to determine whether higher FSOT scores correlated with career performance before deciding to de-emphasize the test.”
All in all, the reporte reached the conclusion that Congress must pass a new Foreign Service Act to bring back the FSOT as a mandatory entrance exam for the foreign service, restrict the total annual recruitment into the service through fellowship, and other mechanism that skip the test, ensure that promotion is not predicted on race, sex and other “immutable and irrelevant characteristics” and mandate comprehensive yearly reports from the State Department on the written and oral exams.
Woksim is a disease that spares no individual or institution. Once it consumes its host, all manner of dysfunction and chaos ensues. This process will result in gross levels of incompetence among our political leaders, reduced living standards, and a US government that is incapable of providing basic functions such as contract enforcement and national defense.
For the US to remain a prosperous and stable polity, wokism must be completely purged from all institutions.