Fidelity, Dissent, and Hypocrisy

State VP Voice

BY ROHIT NEPAL

Like many of you, I spent much of April and May trying to make sense of the new EER format. I won’t complain about writing less, but the rushed, poorly organized rollout of such sweeping changes to our performance system raised immediate questions.

It’s also worth remembering that the department made these changes unilaterally, without negotiating with AFSA. At a minimum, EER season would have gone far more smoothly if leadership had taken the time to consult the workforce before overhauling the system.

One of the biggest questions, and there are many, including the egregious pressure campaign on the numerical scores, is the meaning of the new “fidelity” precept. In my conversations across the department, fidelity has quickly become shorthand for something larger: a shift away from trusting the career Foreign Service and toward treating us with suspicion.

Fidelity is defined as “the quality or state of being faithful.” But every one of us already swore an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution when we joined the Foreign Service. So why elevate something so obvious into a core promotion precept? What problem is this actually trying to solve?

To many of us, the answer feels obvious. The fidelity precept reads less like a call to professionalism and more like an attempt to enforce ideological conformity by discouraging views that diverge from the administration’s line.

If you’re serving today, you probably know the feeling: the sense that every email, comment in a meeting, or Teams message is being quietly evaluated to determine whether you’re “with the program.”

That is a dangerous instinct in foreign policy. Good policymaking depends on informed, internal dissent, especially on matters of national security. Strategic mistakes carry enormous consequences. Yet the message many officers hear now is that the department wants a Foreign Service that is seen but not heard—one that snaps to attention rather than raises uncomfortable truths.

This is not normal.

Throughout my career, under both Democratic and Republican presidents, I’ve disagreed with aspects of U.S. foreign policy. That’s not insubordination; it’s the natural result of being a member and a representative of a pluralistic democracy.

Those views were not universally welcomed, but no one suggested dissent itself made me disloyal or unfit for promotion, or that it would jeopardize my future assignment prospects. In fact, I continued to receive strong evaluations and support from colleagues and supervisors.

The fidelity precept points in a different direction. Its instruction that officers should resolve “uncertainty on the side of fidelity to one’s chain of command” sends a clear message: Suppress your expertise and fall in line, even when your judgment and experience tell you otherwise.

Then there’s the hypocrisy.

Department leadership now emphasizes obedience to the chain of command while simultaneously sidelining employees who faithfully implemented the previous administration’s priorities. Many of us know colleagues who have faced professional consequences over the past 18 months—including losing their jobs—because they worked on DEIA (diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility) initiatives that were official policy priorities of the previous administration.

The department took the extraordinary step of retroactively promoting employees it believed had been disadvantaged by the DEIA precept. Yet the names of those who received those retroactive promotions have not been released.

Meanwhile, the rest of us are left wondering whether the DEIA work we documented in prior EER cycles, exactly as we were instructed to do, may now hurt our promotion prospects.

In other words, officers demonstrated fidelity to one administration’s priorities and are now being penalized for it by another, all while being lectured about the importance of fidelity to the chain of command. The contradiction would be laughable if it weren’t so consequential.

Finally, forgive a former lawyer for briefly venturing into constitutional law. The fidelity precept reflects an unusually expansive view of executive power. It directs employees to “achieve results for the Constitution of the United States by protecting and promoting executive power under Article II.” This language echoes the highly contested, and some might say fringe, “unitary executive” theory and minimizes the role of checks and balances.

That may sound abstract, but it has real implications. Embedding this language in the promotion precepts effectively asks FS members to endorse a contested constitutional philosophy as part of their official duties. And in practice, a supervisor could rely on this precept to penalize an employee who refuses to withhold documents in response to a congressional inquiry or a court order.

Maybe that sounds far-fetched. A year ago, a lot of things happening today would have sounded far-fetched too.