20 MAY-JUNE 2026 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL LETTERS-PLUS RESPONSE TO THE MARCH-APRIL SPEAKING OUT “WHAT’S WRONG WITH THE BFF?” What’s Right with the Ben Franklin Fellowship BY SIMON HANKINSON The Ben Franklin Fellowship (BFF) is a nonprofit, nonpartisan association of current and former foreign affairs professionals. We aim to add depth to the debate about how the United States should interact with other nations as we begin our next 250 years. We have little interest in Washington-bubble spats. We seek to engage those who disagree with us in the hope of finding common ground and policies in the national interest. The press coverage we have received ranges from merely critical to outright conspiratorial. Individuals supportive of the old Washington consensus have attacked us in the media, attributing to us a phantom influence reminiscent of conspiracy theories involving the Masons or the Elders of Zion. So, who are we really? In 2024 three retired FSOs started the BFF with a common point of view, summed up in our eight basic principles. We wanted as wide a tent of opinion as possible consistent with loving our country and wishing it prosperity and strength. I encourage readers to decide for themselves what the principles represent. I’d summarize them as conservative and resistant to recent “woke” ideologies. Our membership grew quickly, from among those who found the “progressive” turn of U.S. foreign policy and the bureaucracy that enacts it to be increasingly unrepresentative of Americans and Simon Hankinson served as an FSO from 1999 to 2022 in Africa, Asia, Europe, and Washington, D.C. He is now a senior research fellow at the Center for Border Security and Immigration at the Heritage Foundation. Hankinson is a co-founder of the Ben Franklin Fellowship and author of The Ten Woke Commandments (You Must Not Obey) (Academica Press, 2025). America’s core interests. The Washington establishment has long been left of center, but under the umbrella of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI), the State Department began by the 2000s actively to discriminate in favor of supposedly “marginalized” identity groups. Meanwhile, State and USAID exported contentious social theories as if they were core American beliefs crucial to the building of prosperous democracies, rather than fringe ideas likely to disappear in time. The recent attacks on BFF go beyond ideological disagreement and seem highly personal. In separate Speaking Out articles in AFSA’s Foreign Service Journal, Ambassador Ronald Neumann, president of the American Academy of Diplomacy, wrote that “Our Professional Foreign Service Is in Danger,” while Ambassador Eric Rubin, a former president of AFSA, asked, “What’s Wrong with the Ben Franklin Fellowship?” On social media, Rubin posted the BFF logo with the caption “Know thy enemy.” Does Rubin genuinely believe that our roster of fellows, with collective centuries of public service, are enemies of this country? Does he seriously think that our members, many of whom are military veterans, are acting out of hostility to the United States? The Myth of Nonpartisanship The theme of those articles is that the BFF has taken a nonpartisan State Department and suddenly politicized it. That is willful ignorance of Washington’s interlocking academic and foreign policy sphere, which uniformly cherishes “progressive” globalism. Critics of BFF note that some of our members are in political positions at State, and they theorize that membership is required for success. They ignore that some BFF members were separated from the Service last year, nor accept that the great majority of political appointments at State are the fruit of relationships that predate or supersede our organization. The paucity of conservatives inside State would suggest that most jobs are still filled by career officers who voted for Harris/Walz. Equity vs. Equality of Opportunity One core belief of BFF is that hiring, promotion, and assignments should be based on merit. We lament any discrimination in America’s past as much as we reject it as “restorative justice” in the future. Unfortunately, the State Department went all-in on “equity” (which I define as equal outcomes regardless of variables in inputs) and attempted to balance past injustice by steering hiring, promotion, and assignments toward favored groups. The Biden administration added a DEIA precept to the Foreign Service rating metrics, which clearly favored groups with “intersectional” cards to play. Under Trump, the department is trying to return to objective metrics by replacing the DEIA precept with a “Fidelity” precept. For much of the past century, State Department hiring was meritocratic. The Civil Service had a competitive exam. For the Foreign Service, those who passed the written test went on to take the oral test.
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