A Strong Foreign Service Needs the Ben Franklin Fellowship

Jeremy Carl
May 17, 2026

I read with interest the op-eds in the Foreign Service Journal in March/April by former President of the American Foreign Service Association Eric Rubin and current President of the American Academy of Diplomacy Ronald Neumann, both strongly criticizing the Ben Franklin Fellowship (BFF) amid a more general critique of the Foreign Service under Trump.

Because of the distinguished pedigree of the authors and because the substance of these critiques has recently been amplified and further legitimized by the New York Times, it is worth dissecting them in detail. These critiques represent, in many ways, the wrongheaded groupthink on BFF and the Trump administration more generally that is representative of many members of the Foreign and Civil Service foreign-affairs community.

I had the privilege of working very closely on a daily basis for almost a decade at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution with the late Secretary of State George P. Shultz, whose name adorns the National Foreign Affairs Training Center. From my close association with Secretary Shultz over many years, I was able to learn a great deal about Foreign Service culture and history.

As someone who attempted—ultimately unsuccessfully—to navigate the increasingly politicized personnel process as President Trump’s nominee for Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs, and as someone who was subject to a brutal and highly partisan confirmation hearing in which my own record, views, and experiences were distorted beyond all recognition, I am sympathetic to the concerns Mr. Rubin and Mr. Neumann lay out about hyper-politicization of the Foreign Service from wherever it might appear. But I cannot agree with their diagnoses of the problem or their recommendations for solutions.

Let me begin with a point of agreement. As Secretary Shultz frequently said to me in what amounted to his personal motto of diplomacy:

“When there is trust in the room, good things happen. And when there was no trust in the room, good things do not happen.”

Right now, I think it is fair to say that there is little trust in the room between the Trump administration and a significant number of Foreign Service and Civil Service officers. While Secretary Rubio and his team are human and will make mistakes, like all people do, I would attribute no small part of the absence of trust to the attitudes that Rubin and Neumann display in their articles.

Ambassadors Neumann and Rubin express a desire to have a nonpartisan Foreign Service and, in theory, that is certainly admirable. In my many years of working closely with him, Secretary Shultz regaled me on many occasions with tales of Foreign Service officers who worked diligently on his behalf in the Reagan administration. But, of course, the Foreign Service of the 1980s, while certainly liberal, was substantially more politically diverse than the Foreign Service today.

Personally, as I prepared for my possible role and looked at the senior personnel within the division, I was particularly looking forward to working with a senior FSO in the department who had earlier in his career been a staffer for a congressional Democrat. I had consistently gotten good feedback on this staffer from other political and career appointees as someone who did his job diligently, with a high degree of integrity, and in a nonpartisan way.

Other senior Trump administration State Department officials I know feel similarly about the career FSOs working for them. They don’t care what the politics of their subordinates are as long as they do their jobs diligently and carry out the policies of the administration. Many do just that.

But alas, such personnel are, if not the exception, certainly not the rule. To be a Republican in a senior political position in a GOP administration is, by definition, to accept—far too readily, in my view—that a meaningful percentage of the career staff will actively attempt to sabotage your efforts, while another not-insignificant group will act with less than full enthusiasm to help you.

This was certainly my own experience working at the Department of the Interior in the first Trump administration. It is not how government should ever work. And that is certainly not the fault of BFF.

By contrast, let me review how some of the supposedly “nonpartisan” language of Mr. Rubin’s article suggests a profile that would understandably make a Trump State Department official nervous about hiring him or someone who thought similarly.

At one point, he refers to “[The] Heritage [Foundation’s] billionaire donors” possibly supporting BFF. Yes, the Heritage Foundation does have wealthy donors, as do virtually all liberal organizations of any significance in D.C. and elsewhere. But singling out Heritage implicitly ignores the fact that progressive foundations have similar donors and baselessly suggests that there is something particularly nefarious going on with Heritage donors that makes them illegitimate participants in the political and policy arena.

Rubin decries the “perception that only political supporters of the President will receive nominations to high-level positions.” This is certainly not true universally, but more broadly, it is not necessarily undesirable.

No NGO or business would say that considering whether an employee actually supports the goals and policies of organizational leadership is an irrelevant consideration when deciding whether that candidate will be promoted. Top performers at any organization should and will be promoted regardless, but mission alignment is certainly relevant.

As part of my preparation process during my own nomination, I was able to be briefed candidly by BFF members with both deep experience in the area I would have been going into and a high degree of viewpoint congruity. This led to discussions in which I was able to take advantage of the BFF members’ deep subject-matter expertise in a way that would have made me more effective in my role.

Rubin is concerned that the State Department and BFF have held joint recruitment efforts, but we have a serious ideological imbalance in the diplomatic corps—the viewpoints of half of America are barely represented among our diplomats.

What percentage of our diplomats voted for Trump? I would be surprised if it were 10 percent. This lack of viewpoint diversity is a fundamental weakness of the current State Department.

Meanwhile, just this week, a conservative acquaintance who is an elected official in local office reached out to me, impressed by the new branding and outreach at State, and is taking the Foreign Service Officer Test because he wants to be an FSO. This is just the sort of actual intellectual diversity we should welcome in the department.

Rubin claims the BFF “functions as the equivalent of a Communist Party cell in Soviet government ministries.” This is an outrageous and hyperbolic statement—directly comparing an organization staffed with his fellow FSOs and actively supported by the current administration to the core political organization of our sworn historic enemy.

Meanwhile, I am evidently not allowed to be concerned that a State Department staffed by the likes of Rubin at the most senior levels might not be fully invested in supporting the agenda of a non-Democratic administration.

Continuing with his invective, Rubin says that “BFF membership is overwhelmingly white and male. It is expected for critics to reach for the race and gender card to allege that the BFF’s focus on ‘meritocracy’ is really about returning white men to exclusive leadership roles.”

To put it mildly, this is undiplomatic. It is correct that conservatives in America are more likely to be white and male, but the notion that conservatives in general—including our Hispanic Secretary of State and the many nonwhite male and female BFF members—would take whiteness as a litmus test for employment is risible.

In fact, one of the senior personnel I was looking to bring in had I been hired was an African American woman, not because I was striving for “diversity,” but because she had come highly recommended to me by people I trusted and I had subsequently had good conversations with her about how she would fit in on my team.

As I was writing this, a Filipino American friend currently serving in a critical political appointment in the State Department was the subject of a critical profile in the New York Times, which was not happy with his aggressive assertion of the administration’s priorities abroad.

It was clear from the profile that several supposedly “professional nonpartisan career officials” Rubin refers to had leaked against him—not because he had done anything illegal, but because the policies he advocated, supported by the President he served, broke from “longstanding precedent” or, as the New York Times put it, “he has repeatedly advocated an approach that overturns three generations of American diplomatic orthodoxy”—as if the status quo cannot be questioned or as if this appointee was somehow freelancing rather than working under the guidance of the Secretary and other senior State Department officials.

Let me give another example of where this ideological myopia of orthodoxy causes real damage.

When I was a graduate student at Stanford and serving as a teaching assistant, we were able to get the class I was teaching a meeting with then-Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi during a class trip to India. This was in the midst of a decade in which our State Department totally froze any contact with Modi as a matter of policy across multiple administrations.

But I knew that Modi would be worth talking to because I had previously lived in India and could see that he was a possible future Prime Minister—and because I was one of the only Americans in India with sympathy toward his BJP party. Certainly, there were almost none in our resident diplomatic corps.

Meanwhile, our relationship with Modi, who has been Prime Minister for the last 12 years, was greatly harmed by an orthodoxy that kept us from communicating with him—or even offering him a visa—for a decade.

Similarly now, orthodoxy promulgated by our supposedly nonpartisan Foreign Service for decades, as outlined in the Times article, has ensured that we do not have a strong relationship with the likely next prime minister of France, the head of the leading polling party in the U.K.—and likely next prime minister—and the head of the highest-polling party in Germany.

While I understand that sometimes unofficial contacts happen behind the scenes, these are no substitute for official recognition, and they are not likely to be seen as such by the groups in question.

This sort of massive failure suggests that perhaps it’s our orthodoxy—and the ideological makeup of our personnel—that needs changing. The Ben Franklin Fellowship addresses this problem head-on by removing the ideological blinders that have left us with attenuated, at best, relationships with some of the most important rising politicians in Europe. For that alone, it is extraordinarily valuable.

Rubin complains that “the overall tone and viewpoints of members of the BFF are rife with hostility toward the Foreign Service and its members.” Yet he seems oblivious to the fact that many of these FSOs have faced marginalization for their political views by colleagues who have sidelined them in their careers because of insufficient commitment to the progressive principles that have been dominant in the Foreign Service for decades. Perhaps they might have reason to be angry.

Rubin argues that the State Department must stand up for diversity and inclusion. This is a valid view, and he is welcome to have it and advocate for it, but it is not a value-free assertion.

I—and, I would suspect, most members of BFF—believe we should stand for excellence in everything, which means choosing people based solely on their performance, not whether they bring skin-deep “diversity” or “inclusion” to the department.

In summary, Rubin’s entire argument, laced with its own partisan invective and carrying the implicit imprimatur of the American Foreign Service Association, of which he was until fairly recently president, is in fact a perfect illustration of why the Ben Franklin Fellowship is so needed. Two former AFSA presidents are BFF Fellows, proving that Rubin’s point of view is not shared by all AFSA members.

Neumann, meanwhile, begins his article by announcing that “The professional, nonpartisan Foreign Service is in danger”—a claim that will ring hollow to conservatives. While most FSOs try their best to serve every administration, the notion that most can leave their partisan views entirely behind is not realistic.

Neumann is upset that fewer ambassadorial appointments are going to career diplomats under Trump. But this is likely a simple reflection of a highly ideological Foreign Service that gives the Trump administration few choices.

Again, the Ben Franklin Fellowship is an ideal solution to this problem, allowing conservative leaders in the department to identify talented and aligned FSOs to promote who share their vision of statecraft.

Neumann is concerned “whether oral examinations for the Service will be politicized by adding examiners who will ensure that new entrants have the ‘correct’ ideological and social orientation.” But we already have that, from the Left, not the Right.

He is upset about State Department recruiting outreach to Christian universities, but such outreach is a way to balance viewpoints in the Foreign Service. He mentions rumors that these Christian schools “are receiving special information or even that the new tests have been leaked to them,” but acknowledges these are unsubstantiated and offers no evidence to support his very serious charges, which seems like a less-than-fully-diplomatic approach.

Neumann uses the framing of the Trump administration dismissing “senior minority and female officers” as if their being women and minorities is the reason for their dismissal rather than the fact that, in a progressive institution, members of these groups are statistically most likely to be at odds with the administration.

Contrary to the claims of Rubin and Neumann, a network like BFF makes it easier for GOP administrations to identify aligned career FSOs to—if their performance is worthy—promote to senior roles with confidence that they will faithfully execute the plans of the elected President.

Probably nothing would do more to bring career FSOs into the senior ranks of a future GOP administration than this.

Ironically, to get us closer to a truly nonpartisan Foreign Service, the administration should do just the opposite of what Rubin and Neumann want and continue to attempt to bring much-needed ideological diversity to the Foreign Service. This will improve both its performance and representativeness in the ways I have outlined above.

The Ben Franklin Fellowship is an essential part of that effort, and if Rubin and Neumann are truly interested in a Foreign Service that represents America—and that can serve Presidents of both parties without fear or favor—they should welcome, not attack, it.

Jeremy Carl is a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute and former U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Interior. He was President Trump’s nominee for Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs in 2025 and 2026.