A pair of State Department fellowship programs championed by former secretary of state Antony Blinken aimed to “enhance diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) in the federal workforce.” They also sparked an internal “resistance” against U.S. support for Israel, emails obtained by the Free Beacon‘s Adam Kredo show.
The programs in question, the Charles B. Rangel International Affairs Program and the Thomas R. Pickering Foreign Affairs Program, “increased the number of Foreign Service generalists from underrepresented groups by 33% and the number of women by 6%,” according to a November 2022 edition of the State Department’s in-house magazine. But those budding diplomats didn’t work to execute the Biden administration’s marginal support for Israel. Instead, they worked to end that support altogether.
A year after Blinken touted those programs, a group of fellows sent his top staffers a “dissent memo” that expressed “profound disappointment and anguish” over continued U.S. arms sales to the Jewish state. The fellows alleged that Blinken used their “diverse backgrounds as shields to deflect criticism away from the State Department,” adding that they launched a “resistance” against “an immoral course of action.”
Blinken’s team acknowledged that the disgruntled staffers were “not eligible to submit formal dissents” but passed the memo to Blinken and offered the fellows a meeting with him anyway, according to the emails.
The Trump administration is taking a different approach. “The full-court blitz to pressure the Biden White House into publicly breaking with Israel is generating renewed scrutiny into the fellowship programs as the Trump administration works to root out so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion programs across the federal government,” writes Kredo. “A senior State Department official told the Free Beacon the agency ‘is reviewing these and other fellowship programs to ensure they are consistent with the president’s EOs and the secretary’s American First foreign policy agenda.'” […]
— Read More: freebeacon.com
