Let me tell you something I found out this week that made me want to put my head through the kitchen island.
While I was packing school lunches and arguing with the pediatrician’s billing department, the Biden State Department had our diplomats running around the globe doing something that has absolutely nothing to do with diplomacy. They were being graded on it. Actual promotion decisions at the State Department factored in how hard an employee pushed DEI on foreign governments. You couldn’t just be good at your job. You had to be good at lecturing the French about equity councils.
The Biden-era guideline documents, obtained by Fox News, asked Front Offices whether they “routinely raise social inclusion, racial/gender equity, disability, and LGBTQI+ issues with high-level host country interlocutors.” There’s a sentence that sounds like it was written by someone who has never negotiated anything harder than a brunch reservation. It also demanded employees practice “allyship,” support a “DEIA Council,” and learn DEI on their own time instead of “depending on others, particularly others from historically marginalized groups” to teach them. So our diplomats, representing the United States of America to the world, had a homework assignment about their feelings.
U.S. Department of State (Public domain) via Wikimedia CommonsState Department spokesperson Tommy Pigott put it plainly: “Under the Trump Administration, America’s diplomats are tasked with advocating for our national interests on the world stage, not demonstrating adherence to woke political dogmas.” That’s it. That’s the whole job. Advocate for America. Come home. Do not start a book club about bias with the trade minister of Malaysia.
Now here’s where it gets even better. The Trump State Department didn’t just scrap the Biden guidelines. They went further and issued new rules telling every embassy and consulate that countries enforcing DEI policies can now be flagged as human rights violators in the annual human rights report. The same report that used to document torture and political persecution now also looks at whether a government subsidizes abortion, facilitates mass migration, or chops up kids with gender-transition surgery. A senior official called the new rules “a tool to change the behaviour of governments.” Good. That’s what American leverage is for.
Naturally, the people who loved the old system are losing their minds. Uzra Zeya, a former senior State Department official who now runs the charity Human Rights First, called it “weaponising international human rights for domestic partisan ends” and said the new rules show “jaw-dropping animosity” toward LGBTQI+ people. She said the instructions exclude the rights of “women, LGBTQI+ persons, religious and ethnic minorities, and non-believers.” I read that three times. Protecting kids from surgical mutilation and telling governments that race-based hiring is discrimination is now “animosity.” In what group chat is that the consensus? Because it’s not in mine.
U.S. Department of State (Public domain) via Wikimedia CommonsThe BBC noted that the annual human rights report has been “the most comprehensive study of its kind by any government” and that its focus stayed “broadly similar across Republican and Democrat administrations” until now. So for decades, through presidents of both parties, nobody thought our diplomats needed a DEI rubric to get promoted. That was a Biden invention. And like a lot of Biden inventions, it sounded compassionate and cost the rest of us our common sense.
I have four kids. I do not need the State Department to model “allyship” for them. I need the State Department to keep this country safe and stop spending my tax dollars training foreign service officers to have feelings about their “foreign service cones.” The Trump administration threw that whole worksheet in the trash, and the only people upset about it are the ones who thought it was working in the first place.
It wasn’t. Nobody asked for it. And now it’s gone.