• Why the Ben Franklin Fellowship at State?

    May 19, 2026 // 7 Comments »

    The New York Times claims “a private conservative group’s involvement at the State Department has alarmed veteran diplomats and congressional Democrats who say it has established a worrisome degree of influence.” Eric Rubin, a retired diplomat of more than 40 years who recently led the mainstream State Department American Foreign Service Association (AFSA), wrote it “functions as the equivalent of a Communist Party cell in Soviet government ministries.” Some are even trying to out and doxx members who wish to remain anonymous. It’s the controversial Ben Franklin Fellowship (BFF).

    The Fellowship is a D.C.-based nonprofit founded by former U.S. diplomats that brings together active officials (including Fellow Christopher Landau, Deputy Secretary of State), academics, and legislators to force reform at the U.S. State Department. The group says it is nonpartisan in not supporting any political party, but its aims and think pieces promote support for Secretary of State Marco Rubio in dismantling policies that have undermined diplomacy and left the Department less influential than it should be in major national security decisions. State has failed to reform itself, so something like BFF is badly needed.

    That’s why I am a public member of Ben Franklin Fellows.

    I speak only for myself about BFF. I have long believed (well before my whistleblower book about Iraq and subsequent forced retirement from State) that the 18th century institution was structurally resistant to change. The Trump administration changes have been sharp and quick, but I wonder if any less Draconian process would have produced any results at all — over my own 24-year-career at State I watched blue ribbon panels come and go alongside outside studies and white papers, all full of ideas that were ignored. To me, BFF is a public way of supporting change, even when it hurts and even when it sometimes hurts good people. It is a lot of weight to throw on to BFF. But you have to start somewhere.
    Since the end of WWII, when the task of nation-building across Europe and Japan was largely handed to the military even after it was first proposed by the Secretary of State, reform efforts at the Department have focused less on grand strategy and more on tweaks to the internal personnel systems and bureaucratic culture. Critics from Congress, presidential administrations, and diplomats themselves have long argued State is too hierarchical, slow-moving, insular, and constrained by outdated personnel practices. Despite repeated reform initiatives, many of the same complaints of rigid promotion systems, weak leadership accountability, poor technological modernization, and resistance to change, have persisted.

    One of the first major internal reform efforts to fail near completely followed the frustrations of the Vietnam War, which exposed weaknesses not only in policymaking but also in how diplomats were recruited, managed, used in the field (the CORDS program), and promoted. Yet the 1975 Murphy Commission ended up recommending only minor changes. The most significant reform came with the Foreign Service Act of 1980, some 200 years after the Department’s founding and the last big change in the past 46 years. The Act modernized hiring and promotion procedures, solidified the “up-or-out” promotion model, and attempted to make assignments more equitable. Yet critics argued it reinforced excessive careerism and encouraged risk-averse behavior among officers seeking promotion.

    The post-Cold War period saw Secretary of State Madeleine Albright attempt and fail at management reforms focused on improving workplace efficiency and modernizing outdated information systems. It wasn’t until even later Secretary of State Colin Powell decreed desktop Internet for State based on his experience in the Army, replacing spotty stand-alone dial-up service, as the rest of the world experienced an information revolution.

    After the September 11 attacks, failed internal reforms centered on Secretary Condoleezza Rice’s “transformational diplomacy,” which required large-scale diplomatic deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan at the expense of literally every other embassy and issue in the world, all despite the earlier failure of the similar CORDS program in Vietnam. The moves decimated State Department personnel and promotional systems for years afterwards. Secretary Hillary Clinton emphasized without effect workplace modernization through her “Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review,” which sought improved talent management. She also unsuccessfully pushed for greater recruitment of specialists in tech and economics to keep pace with the modern world.

    Over nearly five decades, State Department reform played at modernizing personnel systems and bureaucracy, while institutional inertia and passive disruption limited any lasting change. The organization and systems in place when I was sworn in were more or less the same ones there when the door hit me on the way out 24 years later.

    I was witness, and participant. I spent most of my career in the Consular field, for many years issuing visas to foreigners and later managing new-hire Foreign Service Officers to do the same. I spent years of Prozac-tinged cognitive dissonance blithely being told to ignore or overlook the clear letter of immigration law and issue, issue, issue visas no matter what the obvious truth about illegal stays was. There are whole ethnic neighborhoods in California and New York that should have a statue of me as one of their founders because I issued thousands of visas under policies that prioritized volume over enforcement credibility. I was a good soldier and did what I was told to do about visas, and helped many young officers make their professional peace with the hypocrisy. BFF has since helped several people who feel much this same way as I did into new positions of authority over the visa process, and championed many changes to an immigration system that ran steadily in contrast to the law for decades. I am glad someone has surfaced some of it all and maybe even will do some more things to change it all.
    I also grew weary of State’s 19th century model of country “desks” and stove-piped embassies organized more or less the same way in every nation no matter the on-the-ground truth and with basically the same personnel wire diagram since the American Civil war. It was worse at the Mothership in Washington, where every decision, however minor, had to pass through layers of “clearances,” basically negotiated agreements through the layers of bureaucracy above and around you. For awhile I wrote the first drafts of State’s “travel advice” for multiple countries and then would spend weeks cajoling signs-off from dozens of offices who claimed a bureaucratic stake in the bland copy I churned out.
    Even AFSA, the Foreign Service’s professional association (full-disclosure, I was a dues-paying member for most of my career and benefited from their legal advice) wrote “As much as members of the Foreign Service in the Department of State embrace calls for reform of broken and ineffective systems, most of them have figured out how to navigate those systems and are concerned that changes would negatively affect their ability to advance. Changes were met with resistance. Within the Foreign Service, I found a strong culture of ‘putting in the time.’ At State risk intolerance extends beyond concerns for physical danger. While policy successes are celebrated, failures are feared to be career-ending; and this can lead to knee-jerk reactions that discourage innovative thinking.” And she was writing about State under Secretary Antony Blinken, in the Biden era, way before Trump II.
    The Red versus Blue controversy around BFF misses the larger, more important story: the State Department has resisted meaningful reform for decades, through administrations of both parties. If internal reform repeatedly fails, outside pressure becomes inevitable. The real last change, the Foreign Service Act, put some 20th century makeup on an 18th century organization best positioned to conduct diplomacy with the Ottoman Empire. What is left to do is a dirty job, long ignored, that now someone has to do if America is to have a diplomatic service capable of working across multiple administrations instead of just trying to wait out leaders it does not like while championing those it does. It is now necessary for an organization like Ben Franklin Fellows to step in and take on the fight.

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    Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

    Posted in Democracy, Embassy/State, Iraq

    The Trump Doctrine

    May 23, 2025 // 7 Comments »

    The deranged left claims Donald Trump’s foreign policy is chaotic, that it has no broad goal. So it is good to see Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in a little-noticed statement, lay out the broad outlines of Trump’s foreign policy, and thus his State Department’s own marching orders. Rubio managed to work in some “inside baseball” points as well, leaving clues as to how the State reorganization is proceeding with like-minded individuals seeded into key positions in the bureaucracy.

    Rubio began with the bottom line up front: American foreign policy is going to be about American goals, not some sort of global largess.

    This President inherited 30 years of foreign policy built around what was good for the world. The decisions we made as a government in trade and foreign policy were basically, is it good for the world and the global community? And under President Trump, we are making foreign policy based on is it good for America. What that means is foreign policy is about three things: Does it make America stronger? Does it make America safer? Does it make America richer? If something doesn’t do those three things—and hopefully all three things—we are not doing it.

    This explains Rubio’s gutting of a whole vertical stack of State Department offices on his revised organizational chart whose names begin with the word “global,” such as the office for Global Women’s Issues. The current foreign policy system was built primarily around two ideas: that is was America’s responsibility to right all wrongs world wide to its own liking, and competition with the Russians during the Cold War to gain leverage in the developing nations of Africa and Southeast Asia. The latter faded with the shifts of history (though the Cold Warriors lurking in government would love to revive the Cold War using China as the punching bag) and the former morphed under a succession of presidencies into things like the U.S. scolding the world about human rights (while ignoring the dark stains on our society at home) and pressing social justice programs empowering women, LGBT people, and minorities around the world in tune with the woke America those State Department officials wanted to believe was true. That was former SecState Hillary Clinton’s State Department.

    Well, one of the main tools for enacting that kind of foreign policy is now gone, USAID. Rubio reminded everyone:

    Foreign aid. We were funding some crazy stuff—crazy stuff! You tell me, how does a puppet show in some country around the world make us stronger, safer, more prosperous? So we got rid of the puppet shows and many other things. I’m sure they were very good puppet shows, and I’m sure some charity can go pay for it, but the American taxpayer should not.

    The crazy projects way of doing business reached its high point in the nation building fiascos in Iraq and Afghanistan. The social justice side of things may have found its pinnacle under the Biden administration, when Pride Flags and Black Lives Matter banners were displayed outside many American embassies. It is certainly true many countries treat their minorities poorly. It is less clear, Rubio seems to say, that fixing that as a foreign policy priority is America’s business.

    Rubio also made claim to his department’s role in Trump’s mass deportation plans.

    I say this unapologetically—we are actively searching for other countries to take people from third countries, not just El Salvador, but other countries, to say, “We want to send you the most despicable human beings to your countries. Will you do that as a favor to us?” The further away from America, the better, so they can’t come back across the border. I am not apologetic for that. The President was elected to keep America safe and get rid of a bunch of perverts and pedophiles and child rapists out of our country.

    He then turned to his department’s own reorganization to meet the demands of the new administration.

    We have stopped student visas for people who burn down our universities and take over libraries and harass people. Why are we giving student visas to people to create disruption? We have taken away student visas from people who came here to do that.

    ICE does the heavy lifting of actually arresting and physically deporting illegal aliens from the United States, it is the State Department, through its Visa Office in the Bureau of Consular Affairs, that actually issues the visas abroad in the first place. Rubio is calling for a new vision in those visa decisions, one that looks to the anticipated behavior of the applicant once in the U.S., not just his paper qualification for the visa itself. It is a change, if fully implemented, as drastic as those following 9/11 when visa officers were repurposed from basically tourism advocates to pseudo-law enforcement.

    It is simple—if you are coming to America to start riots, we will not give you, and we will take away, a student visa. By the way, every country I have traveled to, 14 countries in 14 weeks, and you know what they say to me? “Yes, that is what we would do too.” The only people that seem to disagree are a handful of federal judges and a bunch of crazy people who get paid to write a report. 

    While ICE makes the arrests in the U.S., it is the State Department that makes the actual legal revocations of the visas. In line with this, Rubio announced “his officials are evaluating whether any of the anti-Israel protesters who invaded a Columbia University building [recently] should see their temporary visas revoked.” Rubio said on X the State Department is “reviewing the visa status of the trespassers and vandals” after New York police made 80 arrests at the campus. A State Department spokesperson said “We are upholding the highest standards of national security and public safety through our visa process.” That is a new emphasis under Rubio. Trump critics claim this “America First” policy will collide with the upcoming World Cup matches scheduled this year in the United States. Not so, said Rubio, explaining “We have very talented consular affairs people, but technology, working with consultants, and millions of people coming into the country for this.”

    Finally, Rubio praised State’s most public facing office, the one that issues U.S. passports to the public.

    Some of us who served in Congress recognized a year and a half ago we had a meltdown under Biden. You couldn’t get a passport. We had people calling in on Friday, “My passport expires,” and in the month of March, 2.78 million Americans got their passports. That’s the largest single-month processing of passports ever.

    It is more than a coincidence that Rubio in his statement called out by name only two not-so-well-known offices at State, the Visa Office and the Passport Office. Both have new heads, and both men are members of the Ben Franklin Fellowship (BFF.) The BFF believes “U.S. international engagement should recognize the primacy of American sovereignty and the obligation to defend national borders… The central purpose of U.S. diplomacy is to serve the national interest. We endorse the careful husbanding of limited resources, both budget and staff, rather than engaging in perpetual, unfunded expansion.” In its own words, BFF is “a community of current and past State Department employees and foreign affairs practitioners who support traditional, Constitutional American values in international affairs.”

    Layoffs are not expected to hit passport and visa processing within the Bureau of Consular Affairs. That bureau has around 2,400 domestic employees, about half of whom process passports, removing a large swath of the workforce from the RIF pool.

    Rubio has seeded other BFF members at key nodes within State, most visibly as Deputy Secretary (Rubio’s Number 2) and as the acting head of the Director General’s office, the part of the State Department which sits atop a pyramid of offices controlling internal budgets, personnel assignments, discipline, and promotions. It grants Rubio a lot of control over the Department, and represents an understanding of the mechanics of the bureaucracy that his predecessors, former Secretaries of State Rex Tillerson and Mike Pompeo, never achieved.

    Rubio gave no hints whatsoever that he is done making changes at Foggy Bottom. Keep a close eye on his public statements for clues for which direction he intends to take his department.

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    Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

    Posted in Democracy, Embassy/State, Iraq