Adam Kredo of the Washington Free Beacon reports more damaging news about the Biden administration’s State Department.
As the Biden administration grappled with internal unrest over its November 2023 decision to continue arming Israel, a group of State Department “diversity” fellows took the unusual step of authoring their own private “dissent memo” to then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken, informing him of how they were “actively engaging in resistance” to the policy.
Blinken’s staff, internal emails obtained by the Washington Free Beacon show, acknowledged that the disgruntled foreign service fellows did not have standing to submit a formal dissent cable but nonetheless elevated the letter through the State Department’s ranks, eliciting promises to grant the fellows a “sit down” so they could air their grievances, according to the emails.
The full-court blitz to pressure the Biden White House into publicly breaking with Israel is generating renewed scrutiny into the fellowship programs as the Trump administration works to root out so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion programs across the federal government. A senior State Department official told the Free Beacon the agency “is reviewing these and other fellowship programs to ensure they are consistent with the president’s EOs and the secretary’s American First foreign policy agenda.”
The fellowship programs in question are the Charles B. Rangel International Affairs Program and the Thomas R. Pickering Foreign Affairs Program. A group of foreign service officers hired under those programs authored the previously unreported Nov. 14 memo, obtained through a Center to Advance Security in America public records request.
Both fellowships court university students for a two-year stint in America’s diplomatic corps. The Blinken-led State Department advertised them as part of an effort to “genuinely enhance diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) in the federal workforce.” The programs, according to a November 2022 edition of the agency’s in-house magazine, “have increased the number of Foreign Service generalists from underrepresented groups by 33% and the number of women by 6%.”
