Washington, D.C. – Today, America First Legal (AFL) Senior Counsel James Rogers is testifying before the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s Subcommittee on Oversight & Intelligence regarding “Deficient, Enfeebled, and Ineffective: The Consequences of The Biden Administration’s Far-Left Priorities on U.S. Foreign Policy.”
In his testimony, Mr. Rogers will discuss his experiences as a foreign service officer at the U.S. Department of State and the Department’s prioritization of harmful diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies during the Biden Administration.
Watch the hearing live here at 3:40 p.m. ET.
Read the written testimony here.
Remarks as prepared for delivery are below:
Chairman Mills, Ranking Member Moskowitz, and Members of the Subcommittee, thank you for the invitation to testify. I will be summarizing my written testimony. First, to acknowledge the positive, my testimony is about the Department of State’s failures under prior Secretaries. Things have already markedly improved under Secretary Rubio. I am confident the problems I outline can and will be addressed under his leadership.
I served as a State Department Foreign Service Officer for six years. My experience during President Trump’s first term showed that the Department has an entrenched culture focused on opposing him and punishing anyone who exposes this.
Shortly before my consular tour in Brazil in 2017, President Trump rescinded Obama-era requirements focused on fast visa interview speeds. Instead, he ordered the Department to focus on thoroughly vetting visa applicants. However, the Minister- Counselor for Consular Affairs for Brazil, Doug Koneff, ignored these orders and imposed an even more aggressive standard than what President Trump had rescinded.
My direct supervisors, Consular Chief David Franz and Deputy Chief Kelly Kopcial, also directly disobeyed Department directives about slowing down the interview process to give officers enough time to vet applicants. I blew the whistle about this. The Department investigated and confirmed I was right. Soon after, apparently in retaliation, Franz filled my employee evaluation with false negative statements that led the Department to deny me job tenure and schedule me for separation.
While preparing a grievance against this, I discovered the same problems were happening worldwide and that more thorough interviewing would likely decrease visa overstay rates by 50 to 75 percent. This means that, out of about 1.8 million visa overstays during President Trump’s first term, malfeasance likely caused 900,000 to 1.4 million of them. Ten U.S. states have populations less than 1.4 million. Thus, consular managers subverting President Trump’s policies managed to add an entire state population’s worth of illegal aliens in just four years.
The Department’s Office of the Inspector General (IG) ignored my complaint about this. The Office of Special Counsel (OSC) also rejected my complaint, incorrectly claiming that it was secondhand information. Yet, at the same time, the Intelligence Community IG was investigating secondhand allegations from Alexander Vindman that formed the sole basis for the impeachment of President Trump. I also submitted a complaint to the OSC for whistleblower retaliation, but seven months later, when my grievance was nearing resolution, the attorney assigned to investigate my case had never even started investigating.
Eventually, I won my grievance, but the Department made the process as painful and drawn out as possible and hobbled my career in ways I would never recover from. It became clear I had no future there, so I left.
This experience shows that: First, career Department employees believe they can disobey the President’s lawful orders, and they often get away with it. Second, the mechanisms designed to stop wrongdoing and protect whistleblowers do not work.
In my current role as Senior Counsel at America First Legal, we have discovered more problems. The Department started assigning Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (DEIA) scores to employees in 2022 and using them to make tenure and promotion decisions. Anecdotal evidence suggests these scores were used not just as an Orwellian way of enforcing ideological conformity but also as a pretext for discriminating against White males.
One Department employee was reprimanded by his supervisor and penalized in his DEIA score because he declined to volunteer his free time to help at an LGBT pride festival outside of work hours. But the DEIA hysteria did not stop there. When he applied for onward assignments, he was almost always required to describe his efforts to promote DEIA. Only the two posts that did not seek this information accepted his application. Thankfully, the new Administration has eliminated these DEIA scores.
However, the bureaucracy continues to discriminate against employees in other ways. For example, a Diplomatic Security Special Agent has been the target of a nearly five-year-long witch hunt because he posted traditional Christian symbols and prayers to his personal social media. Department officials reacted to these innocuous posts with baseless allegations that he was a white nationalist and “right-wing Christian” associated with violent extremism. This agent has been selected for promotion three times over the last five years, but the Department refuses to promote him because of the pending investigation.
This sort of pretextual attack driven by ideological extremists within the Department must stop. Those involved in this weaponization of government must be held accountable.
These specific cases are emblematic of a more widespread problem in the Department’s culture that festered during the Biden years. Through Freedom of Information Act requests, AFL has uncovered diplomatic cables that detail the extreme ideological bias in Blinken-era Department programs that sought to indoctrinate citizens of other countries into supporting divisive left-wing causes.
These Biden-era DEIA programs spread unwanted, divisive leftist ideology to foreigners, driving resentment against our country and making it harder to achieve legitimate foreign policy goals that actually would improve Americans’ lives.
President Trump’s order removing DEIA from the government is already having a positive effect. However, the Department should also retroactively reevaluate everyone denied promotions from 2022 to 2025 without using DEIA scores and then give promotions with backpay to those found worthy.
More generally, because there appears to be a persistent pattern of bias in tenure and promotion decisions, employee evaluations should exclude anything that might allow a reader to infer an employee’s race, sex, religion, or other protected characteristics.
Additionally, to better protect whistleblowers, there must be reforms to the Department’s grievance system, and how IGs and the OSC handle complaints, which I have detailed in my written testimony.
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Photo Credits Adobe Stock Images: Rafal Rutkowski
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