New Report Claims State Department DEI Practices have led to Inefficiencies in Hiring
The State Department’s diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) hiring practices have come under fire following a report by the Heritage Foundation, which claimed that these practices have led to inefficiencies in hiring and raised concerns about employee quality in the foreign service.
Simon Hankinson, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, argued that “ideologically driven bureaucrats” are undermining US diplomacy by prioritizing equal outcomes over merit-based criteria.
“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 told Fox News.
“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 by the Heritage Foundation delved into the hiring practices of the Foreign Service, recommending that employees be hired through “objective, meritocratic criteria.” It found that “by separating the department’s 25,000 employees into their various ‘intersectional’ components, the DEIA baseline seems intended to serve efforts by the department to achieve ‘equity’ through race and sex-based preferences.”
The report further pointed out that 35% of the current 26,000 civil service and Foreign Service employees are classified as a “minority.” It also found a lack of emphasis on the Foreign Service Officer Test (FSOT), which former Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer Gina Abercrombie-Winstanley disregarded as having “zero correlation to being a successful diplomat.” Abercrombie-Winstanley determined that oral exams that test for racists, or sexists, or homophobes or ableists,” are things that the department should be screening for.
A State Department spokesperson responded to the report, telling Fox News, “We haven’t seen the report, but we welcome a diversity of viewpoints.”
In a press conference on Thursday, State Department spokesperson Vedant Patel said the department welcomes “diverse points of view and believes it makes us a stronger department, and it makes and leads to a stronger policymaking process.”
“The secretary and department leadership will continue to seek out a wide range of views because we think it improves our policymaking process,” he said, following the news that a State Department official recently quit after disagreements internally regarding how the department had handled the Israel-Hamas conflict.
