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New Values-Based Recruiting for State Department
Andrew Crapuchettes is a man with a mission. He wants to bring patriotic values to government employment recruiting, and, he wants to personally help implement Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s mandate to reform the Department of State to better represent those values abroad long past the end of the Trump/Vance/Rubio administrations. Can he do it?
Crapuchettes earlier this spring received an almost one million dollar contract to act as a recruiter for the Department of State for new Foreign Service Officers (FSOs). He intends to implement this contract for finding America’s next generation of diplomats via his existing employment search websites, RedBalloon and Military Hire. When he talks about values-based recruiting, Crapuchettes pulls no punches about what his intention for State is, saying a lot of State’s “recruiting was focused on DEI. It was focused on trying to get in the guy with a PhD in black dance, rather than people who can actually do a good job.” He promises future recruits that “all of a sudden you’re in a position where you can have a huge influence for the rest of your life on the U.S. government.” He even sat for an interview with podcast CrossPolitic titled “Could 1,000 Employees Change the State Department Forever?”
The promised changes are in line with broader directives from President Trump and Secretary Rubio. In March 2025 Trump signed a memorandum directing the Secretary of State to remove “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility” (DEIA) as a Core Precept that under Biden controlled Foreign Service promotions. Supervisors under Biden were required to list specific DEIA accomplishments for each diplomat on his yearly job evaluation. The Trump memo further directed State not base Foreign Service recruitment and hiring on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, nor embed discriminatory equity ideology within any element of the Foreign Service. Rubio was quick to act, firing some 1,300 State Department employees, including 246 Foreign Service Officers, and recalling many then-ambassadors seen as opposed to Trump’s foreign policy. Rubio wrote about the restructuring that “motivated and creative State Department employees see their ideas watered down by turf battles until they give up… While the talented and loyal are driven into indifference. Radical ideologues and bureaucratic infighters have learned to play on this exhaustion to push through their own agendas that are often at odds with those of the president and undermine the interests of the United States.”
Some of the first concrete steps to dismantle DEIA and chip away at State’s culture Rubio took after the initial firings already concerned recruitment; new officers offer a faster way to reshape institutional culture than attempting to change the outlook of an entrenched workforce. Rubio suspended the Charles Rangel and Thomas Pickering Fellowships. Both existed to provide an alternative pathway into the Foreign Service with benefits not available through the standard hiring process, with a focus on increasing representation of underrepresented groups. The programs were administered through Howard University, a historically black institution, and the recruited Fellows were estimated to be 80 percent black, multi-racial or Hispanic. Rubio also did away with diplomats in residence (DIR), a program designed to reach populations with lower percentages in the Foreign Service than their share of the general population. Many DIRs were based at Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Today, almost everyone who enters State as an FSO must now pass the same rigorous vetting, leveling the playing racial field.
A look at Crapuchettes’ current job employment websites at RedBalloon and Military Hire offers some clues to how State’s FSO recruitment may work in the near future. The sites advise all employers must pledge to honor free speech and medical privacy, something that may challenge State with its complex restrictions on FSOs appearing on TV and even in social media. RedBalloon itself states it seeks “motivated job seekers who value freedom, hard work, and merit-based recognition, and employers that respect their constitutional rights and provide a positive workplace where merit and achievement are honored.” MilitaryHire is much the same, but leans more heavily toward matching former military members with technical skills with businesses working alongside government. Crapuchettes is unabashedly Christian (this is of course what the MSM seized upon).
Browsing Crapuchettes’ employment sites shows they currently recruit for ICE and the Border Patrol. Some advertisements seek people who have or who will qualify for security clearances to work at Northern Virginia locations such as McLean, which may or may not be affiliated with the Intelligence Community or its network of contractors. One such ad is looking for people with proven lockpicking skills. Most other employers in the Washington, DC area appear to be well-known conservative or right-of-center groups and NGOs.
It is clear, in line with Rubio’s other changes, the change in recruiting venue is part of an all-out effort to radically change the culture of the State Department. Its last radical change, actually more of a lateral move, was during the Obama and Biden eras, especially under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Democrats expanded the traditional conception of diplomacy to include advocacy on LGBT rights, women’s rights, labor issues, and other social justice policy priorities. Critics argued recruitment favored applicants from elite universities and applicants who shared prevailing progressive assumptions within the foreign policy establishment. It is consistent with this former pseudo-ideological strategy that the new recruitment emphasis fits with the Trump administration’s own approach to foreign affairs.
Trump in his first term talked a good game about State Department reform, but he chose weak Secretaries of State who never understood they needed to affect change at all levels to alter State’s broader culture. The rank and file in an almost feral way understood this and stymied initiatives, slow-walked paper, and resisted initiatives until the changemakers ran out of time and likely interest. State successfully waited out its opponents in the first Trump administration because it did not believe it represents the Executive or even an America which it did not support politically. State instead had its own version of what the world really needs.
Things may be different now, as a growing cohort of conservative thinkers that will outlast Trump has come out of the closet inside State for the first time. Rubio’s changes reach into the hereto untouched recruitment, training, and promotion processes, the systems that shape institutional culture over the long run. Whether these reforms endure past the next Republican president is the central question. Personnel policies can be quickly reversed by future administrations. Rubio appears to be betting that changing who enters the Foreign Service will prove more durable than changing those already inside it.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
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