This Is Not Normal

State VP Voice

BY ROHIT NEPAL

By the time you read this column, I will no longer be an active-duty Foreign Service officer, though I will remain AFSA State VP. Retiring at the peak of my career had not been my plan.

The Foreign Service gave me the privilege of serving our country for more than two decades in a career I cherish. As the child of Indian immigrants, I’ve had a chance to give back to my country, one that had given me so much opportunity.

But after more than 24 years, I reluctantly realized that the State Department no longer had a place for me and my family.

I did my part: serving in hardship posts, loyally advancing multiple presidents’ agendas (including during the first Trump administration), taking care of my teams, and doing my best to build the institution.

Leading Embassy Amman as deputy chief of mission (DCM) and chargé d’affaires, through the war in Gaza and the 2025 Israel-Iran war, was the privilege of a lifetime. The department recognized my efforts, including with senior performance pay three years in a row.

Yet, after the department canceled my detail assignment as AFSA State vice president in July 2025, I found myself, like so many colleagues, unable to find a job for the first time in my career.

If you are in a similar position in today’s department, you are not alone. Many of us are out here, struggling to understand what happened.

Being sidelined and pushed out is not our fault. It’s about what the department has become since January 2025. To paraphrase Ronald Reagan: I didn’t leave the State Department; the State Department left me.

I’ll be the first to admit that the Foreign Service has never been perfect. Far from it. We all know there is much to improve if we are to truly harness the extraordinary talent of our people.

But what we’ve seen over the past year and a half, despite leadership’s platitudes, isn’t reform. It is the demolition of the nonpartisan, meritocratic Foreign Service we knew, and its replacement is something much darker.

Meritocracy and nonpartisanship came under attack on day one. Career ambassadors who had served with distinction were recalled without explanation. Outgoing DCMs selected through the rigorous DCM/Principal Officer process in the previous administration had their assignments pulled on the eve of departure.

Entry-level employees were elevated into significant senior roles for which they were not prepared, apparently because of their closeness to senior political appointees.

And in the coup de grâce to any semblance of meritocracy, the department fired more than 1,300 Foreign Service and Civil Service employees based on the positions they happened to encumber on a given date.

These RIFs targeted bureaus and offices whose work the new leadership disliked while ignoring employee performance entirely, making a mockery of the Foreign Service’s long tradition of merit.

The 2025 promotion boards underscored the absurdity when they recommended at least 10 of our RIFed colleagues for promotion, judging them ready to serve at the next level at precisely the moment the department was casting them out.

Then there is the pervasive partisanship. We have all, unfortunately, grown accustomed to government shutdowns. But until 2025, I had never seen official department communications blame one political party. In the past, we received neutral messages explaining the mechanics of a lapse in appropriations.

In 2025 the State Department website carried a banner blaming the “Democrat-led shutdown,” and emails to the workforce echoed the same partisan tone. Leadership’s embrace of partisanship has predictably filtered throughout the institution. Previously unheard-of levels of political vetting in the bidding and hiring process, including inquiries into employee party affiliation, are now all too common.

Colleagues wonder whether past political donations or assignments will count against them in bidding. Political minders at the Foreign Service Institute edit course curricula and screen outside experts’ presentations to ensure ideological alignment.

For those new to State, I can assure you: This is not normal. I went more than 20 years in the Foreign Service without once thinking about my political donation history or whether to scrub my experience as a civil rights attorney from my résumé.

Despite the protestations of the relatively few but empowered defenders in the building that this is all simply an effort to correct past ideological imbalances, I think most of us can see this for what it is: the systematic politicization of a once nonpartisan bureaucracy—the same thing we’ve seen in compromised political systems around the world. I shudder to think what things will look like if this trajectory continues unchecked.

Finally, though it may be uncomfortable to hear, it has become impossible to ignore the white nationalism that has taken hold. The department has embraced rhetoric about the primacy of “Western civilization” and Christianity, decrying non-white immigration as “civilizational decline.” This profoundly narrows the idea of what it means to be an American—and this isn’t just rhetoric.

In one of the crueler turns, colleagues who devoted much of their careers to resettling refugees of every race, ethnicity, and religion now find themselves allowed to help, in practice, only one community: white Afrikaners.

What message does the department send to its many first- and second-generation American employees when it establishes an “Office of Remigration”? Are we included in the call to go back to where we’ve come from?

What does that say to the thousands of locally employed staff who serve alongside us around the world, some of whom hope one day to immigrate to the United States?

When you couple the white nationalist rhetoric with the elimination of DEIA and the end of employee affinity groups, it feels an awful lot like we’ve gone back decades, in less than two years, from a State Department that welcomed all its employees to one that values white people only.

While I, like many others lately, have left the department, I recognize that most of you reading this will stay, for a variety of reasons. Some of you must. Some of you want to continue nobly serving the American people. And some of you welcome the department’s new direction. Whatever your reasons, one thing I’ve observed over the past year is that many of us, myself included, have become compartmentalized.

When things are this chaotic, it’s natural to keep your head down and focus on what’s within your own orbit. As we move forward as a Foreign Service community, I encourage everyone to step back and see the full picture of the department and the Foreign Service as they are now—the bad and the good.

Without a complete record of where we’ve landed, it will be difficult to restore and reimagine the department when the opportunity comes. In the meantime, I will take heart knowing the seriousness with which each of you honors your oath—an oath to the U.S. Constitution rather than to any one president.

As for me, I will keep working from the outside (and through AFSA) to protect and defend the nonpartisan, meritocratic Foreign Service that all Americans deserve.