With Marco Rubio in charge, Representative Brian Mast will be an important partner in a campaign to excise left-wing identitarianism from American diplomacy.
When Marco Rubio arrives at Foggy Bottom next year, he’ll know where to find left-wing identitarian social programs — and have a key partner on Capitol Hill with whom to work on dismantling them.
As the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee’s oversight subcommittee, Representative Brian Mast, a combat veteran who received a Purple Heart after he lost his legs in an IED explosion, has been an aggressive interrogator of department officials who defended the indefensible, including, for example, the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Mast homed in on tricky issues that resemble inside baseball but in fact have significant real-world ramifications, such as Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s team’s disbanding of a State Department cell that could have assisted in the exfiltration of Americans from Kabul. One of his most significant priorities was to investigate the considerable bureaucracy around left-wing concepts, including DEI, that Blinken’s team constructed at State.
The House steering committee selected Mast earlier this month to serve as chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee in the next Congress. This means that there will almost certainly be a noteworthy degree of alignment between the State Department’s seventh floor and the congressional committee tasked with conducting oversight of it on confronting Blinken’s DEI program.
State’s adoption of equity concepts was a radical departure from the past. A 2022 report from the Government Accountability Office explained that while equity has been cited before within the executive branch, “distinguishing it from equality” is a new concept. Among other things, Blinken’s team created posts focused on those priorities, required that department officials “advance” DEI as a requirement for promotion, and implemented an “equity action plan,” pursuant to an executive order that Biden signed early in his term. In May of 2021, I reported that the department urged staffers to “consider a shift in language to avoid making assumptions that can be offensive to transgender and gender nonconforming employees.” They were warned: “Persistent misuse of any employee’s name, pronoun, and/or honorific may be considered harassment.”
The Florida Republican lawmakers led a campaign against that equity agenda. Mast worked with Rubio on a report that scrutinized “How Wokeness Is Weakening the U.S. State Department.” The June 2023 paper argued that the State Department’s embrace of DEIA principles had wasted precious resources and undermined the effectiveness of American diplomacy. It catalogued a series of department actions imbued with left-wing identitarian ideology. One example from the report: Biden’s ambassador to France had “removed paintings of American Founding-era figures and replaced them with pictures of a transgender activist, a violent protester, socialist leaders, and communists in the name of diversity.”
The two lawmakers also each engaged in a contentious back-and-forth with Gina Abercrombie-Winstanley, who served as the department’s first-ever chief diversity and inclusion officer (a post created by the Biden administration), when she testified before Congress last year. Rubio grilled her on a State Department grant for a film festival in Portugal that depicted drag queens, incest, and pedophilia; Mast panned the department’s rejection of merit as the most important factor in hiring. They subsequently introduced the Stop Wasteful, Odious, and Kooky Exercises (WOKE) at State Act — which created a statutory mandate to reverse the Biden-era equity initiatives. “State continually fails to see the negative consequences of these policies globally, so Congress needs to act,” Mast told me at the time.
Now they are well-positioned to make the dismantlement of State’s embrace of left-wing social ideologies an early priority of the incoming Trump administration. In fact, days before his selection as the next Foreign Affairs chairman, Mast indicated he would do precisely that.
On December 5, he wrote to Blinken to “point out a legal step you tried to take surreptitiously during your final months in office and emphasize that in no way shall it bind the Trump administration — indeed, incoming State Department appointees must decisively and immediately reject it.” Mast, in that letter, which I obtained, warned Blinken about his reinterpretation of an international treaty on civil and political rights in such a way as to consider “sexual orientation and gender identity as covered by this treaty.”
Mast contends that in fact “all individuals possess the same rights and are already covered by the treaty. . . . Yours is an effort not to ensure equality but rather to reduce and/or enlarge the scope of certain rights — namely free expression and free exercise of religion — in order to further a culture war agenda that played a role in your political party losing the 2024 presidential election.”
He added that incoming Trump-appointed officials at the department should “publicly correct the record” and rescind Blinken’s interpretation of the treaty.
That’s just the start. With Rubio in charge at State, Mast’s role will shift from that of an overseer to that of an important partner in a broader campaign to excise left-wing identitarianism from American diplomacy.