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In the early 1980s, the Federalist Society was established to intellectually counter the judicial activism agenda that had captured America’s legal profession. To many conservatives it seemed a hopeless endeavor, but FedSoc founders were determined to win back the country’s court system, law schools, and legal associations that had largely been abandoned to the liberal-left and radical legal activists. With time, they made great progress.
In the same spirit, foreign policy conservatives have created an organization called the Ben Franklin Fellowship (BFF), which is engaged in challenging the mindset that dominates among career officers at the State Department. Fed up with the globalist and woke ideologies that pervade State, a group of retired foreign service officers (FSOs) launched BFF in early 2024. BFF took the iconic name of Dr. Franklin, America’s first envoy, as a symbolic call to return to foreign policy common-sense: U.S. national interests, sovereignty, secure borders, and meritocracy—not DEI and wokeism—in diplomatic service.
The ambitious plan was to reassert venerable but long-ignored traditional American ideas and values within the foreign affairs bureaucracy. BFF organizers undertook this daunting effort by quietly networking like-minded career officers. The concept was simple enough, and the new group was (and still is) a distinct minority of career officers, but it is a growing enterprise. None of this is to suggest that State’s Goliath mindset is about to be toppled. The old crushing orthodoxies still rule inside Foggy Bottom, despite the arrival of the second Donald Trump presidency.
BFF founders launched their initiative by proclaiming eight guiding foreign policy principles. The principles are a framework for a big-tent community that can accommodate different right-of-center U.S. foreign policy schools, but anchored in hard-headed international realism and a conservative view of the world. BFF’s broad principles cannot spell out all the specific answers for Washington’s current thorny international challenges, like those in Ukraine, China, and the Middle East, but as a declaration of convictions, they set an important new foundation for a new career culture inside Foggy Bottom.
The principles are a rejection of Wilsonianism and the foolhardiness of past U.S. foreign adventurism that unwisely carried the State Department into fruitless missions of nation-building, forever wars, and global social work. The principles call for federal government thrift in our age of massive public debt; they call for secure borders and policies that discourage mass migration, so that we can take care of our own ailing society and economy while others look to theirs.
Perhaps most importantly, the principles also make a clarion call for meritocracy: rejecting DEI favoritism, treating employees as individuals, and aligning State with the Constitution and civil rights law on employment practices. All of these concepts offer a roadmap that can help guide the much-needed reforms inside the State Department and shape a more nimble and effective organization.
It is BFF’s campaign for meritocracy and rejection of DEI favoritism that particularly riles State’s career old guard. During the Biden administration, senior careerists enthusiastically joined with former Secretary of State Antony Blinken to forcefully inject DEI into all aspects of U.S. diplomacy. Blinken’s DEI indoctrination, like all radical ideological campaigns, predictably punished skeptical and noncompliant employees. Two mid-ranked FSOs recounted:
This ideology metastasized into every aspect of the department’s operations, forcing employees to demonstrate the DEIA precept to the satisfaction of the Foreign Service promotion boards by endorsing, promoting, and implementing policies that violate their personal beliefs, professional ethics, and that are at odds with the views of the majority of Americans.
Blinken’s DEI overreach made a significant number of State employees ripe for BFF recruiting. Starting early in 2024, BFF’s personal networks inside Foggy Bottom linked at first a handful of like-minded employees, then dozens, and later hundreds of State’s active-duty and retired career officials. Despite the department’s dominant liberal tendencies, conservatives emerged and were often joined by moderates, who realized how alienating and extreme Blinken’s policies actually were; many observed that only a right-of-center approach had the intellectual courage and moral firepower to actually fight the scourge of wokeism.
It was the experience of the first Trump administration that underscored for the BFF founders the dire need to have a network of conservative career officers inside Foggy Bottom. For decades, progressive-liberals who dominate academia, the media, and nearly every other national institution maintained robust professional alliances, connecting senior and mid-ranked State career personnel with Washington’s left-of-center foreign policy institutes, large universities, congressional staff, and diplomatic associations. Although Washington has powerful conservative public policy foundations, they have been largely inept in this kind of networking. They thought there was nobody to find, but they did not search hard enough.
Consider how badly things went upon Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s arrival in Foggy Bottom in 2017. He had virtually no known senior State career officials to help him run the railroad, much less to implement his aggressive reform agenda. Predictably, Tillerson floundered because of it, and the experience exposed the myth, again, that the senior career bureaucracy at State was composed of officials dedicated to making the secretary successful. In fact, they wanted him to fail. When Mike Pompeo next assumed the helm, he also tried to nurture allies among senior professionals, but as the former secretary’s memoir makes clear, a hostile career bureaucracy also thwarted him.
This failure, premised on the good faith of career bureaucrats, was a mistake not repeated in 2025. BFF was a going concern before the arrival of the second Trump administration and was ready to play a supportive role. BFF’s cadre of mid-level and senior diplomats included many prepared to work enthusiastically with Secretary of State Marco Rubio on his first day. Legal tools such as the Federal Vacancies Reform Act of 1998 authorized the president to select his own “acting” officials from the career ranks, instead of relying on those Blinken left in place, and BFF’s expanding network presented a pool of many highly qualified career officials for the Seventh Floor to consider.
Many BFF members were elevated into senior and influential positions to immediately assist Secretary Marco Rubio. Career officials provided the secretary valuable insights on how State’s offices and bureaus actually did business, and how to implement his reorganization project. Not surprisingly, Rubio’s critics charge that BFF has helped “politicize” the career ranks, conveniently ignoring the history of the liberal establishment, with its long-established networks and nepotism.
The Ben Franklin Fellowship is a non-partisan educational and membership foundation. It does not “engage in politics,” and its members were not motivated by “partisanship” in assisting the Trump administration. However, BFF members saw in Secretary Rubio and his leadership team, such as Deputy Secretary Chris Landau and Counselor Mike Needham, officials deeply committed to first principles and enduring American values.
BFF supports the constitutional order that unequivocally requires career State employees to carry out the policies of the sitting president, whoever that may be. Professional diplomats, like military officers, are sworn to uphold the Constitution and must support their commander in chief in carrying out his mission or resign. They should not leak documents to a hostile media, drag their feet in implementing policy, or deliberately undermine a sitting chief executive—but everyone knows it happens.
The “resistance” State exhibited during both Trump administrations makes it abundantly clear that the globalist-woke bureaucracy has its own agenda. The public disapproval expressed by some 1,000 State employees to Trump’s legal bans on certain categories of migrants in the first administration and the reaction to Rubio’s recent layoffs inside Foggy Bottom speak volumes. By comparison, there was no significant public expression of protest inside State to Blinken’s woke policies or Biden’s open borders, although many career officers bitterly opposed them.
Typically, the old-guard State Department hiring machinery seeks new diplomats who are in step with the ingrained orthodoxies. Just as the Federalist Society understood that the battle of ideas begins at America’s law schools, BFF recognizes that reshaping State’s culture requires a new approach to the recruitment of diplomats that doesn’t concentrate on woke universities and similar “elite” foreign policy schools. These institutions send many graduates (not all) into the foreign policy profession deeply imbued with a worldview that is woke, anti-capitalist, and globalist—and often hostile to the U.S. national interest.
In response, BFF is finding ways to bring new blood into the foreign policy profession. The BFF recruiting project is reaching out to bright young Americans from overlooked communities across our country, who are often thriving in another universe of higher learning centers, ignored or scorned by the Washington establishment. These are universities where the focus is still on American exceptionalism, service, and optimism—and their graduates are drastically underrepresented inside State.
BFF organizers and members are prepared to play the long game in challenging State’s self-perpetuating old order. It is still a hard slog, but BFF draws inspiration from the example of Ben Franklin’s consequential life: Very modest beginnings carried forward with principle, honor, and goodwill—and a passion for America—can end in great success.