Is DEI Still Entrenched at the State Department?
The programs engineering a “diverse” Foreign Service are in limbo.
Despite President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio working to do away with Obama and Biden-era diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI; the State Department added an “A” for accessibility under Biden, so DEIA) programs and their enforcement bureaucracy, Democrats in the Senate are pushing to revive two programs, the Charles Rangel and Thomas Pickering Fellowships. Both exist to provide an alternative pathway into the Foreign Service with benefits not available through the standard hiring process, with a focus on increasing representation of underrepresented groups. Both programs are currently suspended, unless the Democrats get their way.
Sen. Chris Van Hollen, (D-MD) joined by 21 other Senate Democrats, recently sent a letter to Rubio urging him to hire the more than 50 fellows now in the pipeline, claiming that “taxpayers have invested millions of dollars in these diplomats” and diplomatic readiness has been affected. Van Hollen also wants State to “clarify the situation for future cohorts” in reviving the fellowships as the two programs are no longer accepting applicants “pending updates from the U.S. Department of State.”
What are the two programs the Democrats are stumping for, and what have they done for the State Department?
Since the Rogers Act of 1924, State has used some sort of written test (similar to the SAT with more history and less math) as a gateway into its elite diplomatic corps. While the test was revised with the times to be more like the LSAT, the emphasis was on a merit-based entry mechanism to replace the way of choosing diplomats in place since Thomas Jefferson, i.e., selecting applicants who were “male, pale, and Yale” and usually wealthy and well-connected. Despite many accusations that the written test was being progressively “dumb-downed” over the years, State’s incoming classes were stubbornly still mostly white men. Various solutions were tried in the intake process, to include a famously difficult all-day oral assessment, several different flavors of essays and self-assessments, and open-ended “suitability checks.” The winners stayed very white and male, even as State lost lawsuits charging discrimination brought by women and blacks.
State believed, alongside most of society’s liberal institutions and universities of the time, that the test and assessment process must be inherently biased against people of color and women; that’s why they failed. The answer was a significant effort to attract more diverse applicants and to increase their odds. The department created positions for 16 new senior diplomats-in-residence (DIR; State did have one lone DIR in the field since 1965) posted throughout the country. The program flourished in the 2000s. Since the DIRs were designed to reach populations with lower percentages in the Foreign Service than their share of the general population, many DIRs were based at historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs). The DIRs in the southern U.S. and Washington, DC, were based at Morehouse College and Howard University, both HBCUs. Other DIRs operated out of the University of New Mexico and the University of California, Los Angeles, both of which have high Hispanic enrollment. The DIR program did not result in State’s intended representation of the most desired minorities and was shut down in 2025 under the Trump administration.
Congress also started a new, independent track into a Foreign Service job especially for underrepresented groups. In 1992, they established the Pickering Foreign Affairs Fellowship, followed in 2002 by the Charles B. Rangel International Affairs Fellowship. Both these programs were designed from the ground up to focus on ethnic minorities, although a few fellows represent other “underserved” groups, such as those from poor backgrounds or who were the first in their family to attend college. The Rangel and Pickering programs are administered by Howard University, which has less than 2 percent percent white students. Technically the fellowships were open to all applicants, regardless of race.
Both fellowships offer a very good deal unavailable to those who apply to the Foreign Service via the traditional test. The fellowships offer a graduate scholarship, a paid summer internship at a U.S. embassy abroad, a second summer internship either in Congress or at State Department headquarters, and significant mentoring. After all this on-the-job experience, a graduate degree, and mentoring, Fellows are required to eventually pass the standard written test and oral assessment before being offered a five-year appointment to the Foreign Service. While fellows must technically pass the same assessments, their prior training, mentorship, and institutional visibility may create implicit pressure on evaluators. Fellows are identified as such to those administering the required oral exam. In my own experience administering the exam, failing a fellow required justification up the chain. I do not recall a fellow who did not pass.
But did the fellowships actually work to increase the diversity of the Foreign Service? It is almost impossible to know, because neither the fellowships nor the State Department publicly release comprehensive demographic data, making independent evaluation of the programs difficult.
Van Hollen thinks the programs have succeeded, citing in his letter to Rubio that “as of 2022, these… fellowships have increased the number of Foreign Service generalists from underrepresented groups by 33 percent and the number of women by six percent.” His citation for the statistics was an article written in 2022 in State’s own internal house magazine by Kenya James, who actually sits on the Pickering and Rangel Fellow Association board. The article provides none of the individual racial statistics necessary to understand whether the fellowships seek to solve apparent discrimination by discrimination among their own applicants. The Pickering Fellows website removed its group photo of the 2024 fellows, limiting even informal public visibility into cohort composition. According to one report, pre-Trump, Pickering and Rangel accounted for around 20 percent of Foreign Service recruitment, and a majority of the black officer intake. There remains no public dataset on the Fellows racial make-up.
In the absence of official data, artificial intelligence was used to examine dozens of publicly listed fellows across years of cohorts, program descriptions emphasizing underrepresented recruitment, academic research noting perceived racial composition, the composition of known pipeline effects into Foreign Service hiring, and sampling of publicly listed Fellows to create a non-scientific estimate of the racial composition of the Pickering and Rangel cohort. The results suggest a heavy skew toward underrepresented minority groups, with relatively few white participants. AI suggested that the fellows were roughly 80 percent black, multiracial, or Hispanic, and less than 20 percent white. The actual Foreign Service, brought in via the traditional testing process, remains approximately 80 percent percent white.
Why does State not release these numbers itself? The reason is likely to avoid legal action, as State continues to factor race into its decisions long after the Supreme Court struck down its use in academic admissions.
In Students for Fair Admissions Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College and its companion case, Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. University of North Carolina, the Court sharply limited the use of race in admissions, particularly where it shapes outcomes or substitutes for race-neutral alternatives. The court has simply realigned itself and college admissions with American thought; a survey found 73 percent percent of Americans said colleges and universities should not consider race when making decisions about student admissions. The logic of Students for Fair Admissions raises unresolved questions about whether explicitly diversity-targeted federal hiring pipelines can survive similar scrutiny.
America has changed since the Obama-Biden years. The real question is no longer whether these programs increase diversity. It is whether a government hiring pipeline explicitly designed to shape demographic outcomes by replacing “bad” discrimination with “good” discrimination can be justified under current law, and whether it should be.
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