Mar-a-Lago Raid Underscores Urgency of Civil Service Reform

AMAC Exclusive – By Daniel Berman

Perhaps more than any other event in recent years, the FBI’s raid on former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property has underscored the alarming degree to which federal law enforcement agencies and indeed the entirety of the federal bureaucracy have become in effect covert operatives for the Democrat Party. In another sign of this development, the same sort of radical racial and gender ideology which permeates HR briefings for new employees at McKinsey is now commonplace throughout the federal government. But while private companies still need to turn a profit, leading to the recruitment of at least a few employees who understand that the whole thing is nonsense, no such requirements restrain the tyranny of the woke mob inside federal agencies, vindicating Trump’s warnings about the rise of the “Deep State.”

Nowhere has the “wokeification” of the government been more evident than at the Department of State. Having already made the famed Foreign Service Officer Test a “pass-fail” component of hiring, where scores had little impact on decisions, the Department announced in April it was moving away from the test entirely. “The Foreign Service Officer Test served as a distorted barrier to entry to the foreign service and has never been a predictor of future job performance,” Gina Abercrombie-Winstanley, the State Department’s first “Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer” told the Senate, declaring that “This levels the playing field and allows the Department to examine more candidates from a wider variety of backgrounds.”

The Senate testimony of Abercrombie-Winstanely and Nenah Diallo, who became USAID’s first “Chief Diversity Officer” earlier this year, was both a horror show to anyone who cares about the effectiveness of the U.S. government or foreign policy and an educational experience in how we reached this point. Abercrombie-Winstanley explained how her first task was to create a diversity, equity, and inclusion working group, proudly telling the Senate that “Since its formation, we’ve compiled a demographic baseline of the entire Department of State by rank, job category, and bureau. With this established baseline we can evaluate the effectiveness of our initiatives and track our progress.”

Lest there be any doubt what is being tracked, it is not just the racial, gender, and social background of employees, but also their politics, namely their dedication to the religious ethos of “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility” (DEIA) principles. Abercrombie-Winstanley bragged how “Her office’s work has also led to the Department tying advancing DEIA to foreign service promotions and civil service performance evaluations.” In effect, she admits that promotions no longer depend on language skills, ability, or performance overseas, but how much one advances the goals of DEIA. Those goals include fighting “structural racism,” “gender binaries,” and other far-left buzz words. By definition, promotions will be awarded to those who pursue left-wing or Democrat goals, and denied to anyone who dissents, whether moderate 2000s-style Democrats or, God forbid, Republicans.

The results of this policy and others like it throughout the federal government will be predictable. Republicans, especially white or male ones, will be actively discriminated against in the hiring process. Conservatives of any background who make it through the screening, perhaps because they game the system, will be forced to either abandon their values or face open hostility from superiors. “To hold employees accountable for this, the Department has created a dedicated DEIA core precept for the Foreign Service and DEIA work elements for the Civil Service,” Abercrombie-Winstanley bragged. With advancement blocked, and their career reduced to a regularly scheduled series of meetings with Abercrombie-Winstanley’s team, the non-far left staff who sneak through the cracks will rapidly depart, leaving an ideologically homogenous civil service.

This hiring approach will undoubtedly create a bureaucracy which fails even left-wing governments. Biden, after all, probably would benefit from diplomats who could speak multiple languages or perform basic arithmetic. But any Republican administration, once elected, will face a Deep State entirely cleansed of even politically neutral voices.

Donald Trump’s presidency is one long illustration of the difficulties this dynamic presents, in which he faced a four-year long revolt against his authority from day one, with a vengeful Washington civil service pursuing him even after he left office and moved to Florida. While Trump took some action to remedy this problem when it came to hiring, it will take years of constant pressuring to change the inertia of the institutions this way. Real change would require empowering the administration to hold unelected bureaucrats accountable.

In the last days of the Trump administration, efforts were made in this direction. A new category of federal employee, Schedule F, was established under the principle that the President should have some say over the selection of at least those federal civil servants who are engaged in policy formation. Predictably, Trump’s move produced cries of outrage from a D.C. media closely linked to the civil service class, which suggested it was the prelude to a dictatorship, rather than an overdue effort to rein in a civil service which had been turned into a partisan weapon by Democrats.

Ultimately, there is value in a merit-based civil service including individuals of diverse backgrounds who can come together to advance the President’s agenda. But that does not exist, and maintaining the illusion that one does exist has already hampered one duly elected President and paved the way for an open campaign of terror to be waged against any civil servants who wish to simply perform their duties without paying tribute to the woke agenda.

The task of any future Republican administration is therefore two-fold. In the long-run, the goal should be to restore, rather than destroy the merit-based civil service, through hiring reforms such as those pioneered by the Trump administration and more recently in Florida under Governor Ron DeSantis. Ideally, any such reforms would also extend to higher education, perhaps through policies modeled on the United Kingdom’s proposed Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill, which would allow universities to be sued if they fire academics for expressing their political views.

In the short run, however, a Republican President must engage with the bureaucracy as it exists, not as they wish it did. That means recognizing it as a tool of the left, and therefore intrinsically hostile to their agenda. That is where a policy like Schedule F comes in. Presidents need the right to select a civil service which can fulfill their agenda, even if it means some rushed hires, while the process of reconstruction and de-wokeification proceeds. Anything less would be a betrayal of the voters who elected them.

Daniel Berman is a frequent commentator and lecturer on foreign policy and political affairs, both nationally and internationally. He holds a Ph.D. in International Relations from the London School of Economics. He also writes as Daniel Roman.