EXCLUSIVE: Trump State Dept Set To Overhaul Foreign Service

WASHINGTON— The State Department is overhauling how it evaluates potential Foreign Service Officers, ending a process that administration officials say was “outdated” and widely known in the foreign diplomat community to be flawed.

State Department officials who spoke exclusively to The Daily Wire about the changes say they are being made to identify the “truly exceptional officers,” and fast-track them into the highly selective group of American diplomats.

The move is a significant shift aimed at modernizing the State Department under Secretary of State Marco Rubio. The new evaluation is a data-driven matrix system that will allow the State Department to properly assess Foreign Service Officers, designed to cut around favoritism and subjective narratives and properly assess personnel.

“Having been involved in supervising and evaluating personnel for many years in different contexts, I believe this change will restore accountability and ensure that evaluations reflect actual performance rather than inflated ratings designed to evade difficult conversations,” Deputy Secretary Chris Landau told The Daily Wire.

“For too long, our system rewarded consensus and score inflation instead of distinguishing between officers who consistently deliver results and those who do not, which undermined morale and weakened confidence in the promotion process,” he said. “This reform is consistent with the Trump administration’s emphasis on accountability in government, and many career Foreign Service Officers inside the building have quietly been calling for a more honest and rigorous evaluation system for years.”

The new approach will make it easier for State to assess performance accurately and recognize substantive contributions, one active foreign service officer shared with The Daily Wire on Friday, describing it as a “significant improvement over the previous system.”

“The revised framework provides clearer standards and more meaningful feedback, which will help ensure officers are evaluated fairly and matched with assignments that best align with our skills and experience in service to the Department’s mission,” the officer explained. “The new system clarifies to both supervisors and rated employees how well we are performing and, when appropriate, where we can improve.”

The department’s old process for evaluating its personnel has long been criticized by insiders as an agonizing, drawn-out bureaucratic exercise.

“We competed to see who could write the most effusive self-praise, all while smugly pretending to be modest,” another foreign service officer shared with The Daily Wire. “Because of the length of the essays, many supervisors had their employees ghost-write their own evaluations. Predictably, every employee was ‘one of the best officers I’ve met in my twenty-year career,’ rendering the exercise largely meaningless.”

The process had become so bad that the department was swirling with rumors about secret codes that supervisors would insert into the evaluations to tip off the review boards about which officers were actually good performers. One foreign service officer insisted those rumors weren’t true, but pointed to their existence as proof that nobody trusted the current process.

“The rumors weren’t true but their existence alone was a scathing acknowledgment from employees that the reviews were meaningless,” the officer noted. “On top of all that, the process was so lengthy that the entire department essentially shut down for a month, postponing business while employees obsessed over their [Employee Evaluation Reports] and supervisors wrote lengthy statements for dozens of employees.”

“The current effort to simplify this process and connect it directly to achieving results for the American people is 100% welcome.”

State Department spokesman Tommy Pigott said the new evaluation process was both developed and led by career Foreign Service Officers who understand the situation and are fixing problems that many other administrations should have dealt with prior.

“The updated system is data-driven, leverages best practices from across the government, and was designed thoughtfully to better assess the workforce and align employees with roles that best match their skills and experience,” he added. “It reflects a broader focus by the Trump administration and Secretary Rubio to pursue institutional reforms aimed at improving accountability and performance across the federal workforce.”