The Conservative Group Trying To Remake The Deep State One Bureaucrat At A Time

The Ben Franklin Fellowship is not unlike hundreds of other organizations in Washington, D.C.

At its core, it’s a group of like-minded individuals involved in foreign policy in some capacity, united around the goal of bringing their vision to the federal agencies that oversee America’s relationships around the world, particularly the State Department. These kinds of groups, whether in the form of social clubs, think tanks, advocacy groups, or other organizations, exist for virtually every major government institution and policy area in America.

The BFF, however, has drawn outsized scrutiny. Media outlets like the New York Times, Politico, and Reuters have published critical reports on the group, chock-full of complaints from the Foreign Service establishment.

As far as I can tell, the underlying complaint about BFF is that it is conservative. The throughline of the criticism from the media and groups like the American Foreign Service Association seems to be that BFF wants to “Trumpify” the State Department by injecting it with loyalists to the president. Upon further investigation, I found little evidence that’s the case.

“We’re not about electing President Trump or any of the MAGA Republicans; that’s not what we’re doing. We’re about organizing the federal bureaucracy around a value set,” Phil Linderman, co-founder of the BFF, told me. “Change DEI. Change the way that USAID has done business for years and years. Change the concept that the Foreign Service has a value set separate from whatever the President wants. We try to change that, then they denounce us as being partisan.”

Linderman is a retired foreign service officer who served in the State Department for three decades. He explained to me how, a few years ago, he and some like-minded veterans of the foreign service space decided they needed a formal group to organize around the principles they believe in, which run counter to the establishment assumptions of most career bureaucrats.

“There is a school of thought which is made by the left, the organizations like the American Foreign Service Association, that you have one non-partisan professional who runs the embassy as the ambassador or whatever, and that’s the guy you go to, and that’s what we’ve always done in America in the State Department,” Linderman explained. “And if these conservatives come along, they’re just taking us back to Tammany Hall and politization of the career ranks. That is a very unrealistic framework for how these institutions work.”

“What happens is because there’s a liberal-left quiet orthodoxy that dominates in the Foreign Service and the Civil Service in the State Department — and across the government, really — these people that rise to the highest ranks in the career organization are usually liberal-left, and they will say to a Republican conservative president, ‘I’ll do your bidding,’ etc. And for the most part, conservatives have to live with that because they have no other choice.”

He also said there wasn’t some grand conspiracy between his team and the Trump administration to staff up departments with loyalists. Yes, some BFF members have ended up in the administration, but that came about by a normal process of networking and lobbying, not via some sinister MAGA plot hatched years ago.

The Fellowship lists eight principles on its website, which include “The central purpose of U.S. diplomacy is to serve the national interest. We endorse the careful husbanding of limited resources, both budget and staff, rather than engaging in perpetual, unfunded expansion” and “We believe in strong, sovereign nations. To the extent that cooperation between nations in international fora contributes to the prosperity and security of participating states, and serves national interests, we endorse multinational organizations [sic].”

The principles generally align with what one might call an “America First” worldview, but they are vague enough to allow for big-tent coalition-building. Contrary to the claims of the critics, there’s nothing there about Donald Trump or MAGA, though I find it hard to imagine many of the group’s members (Linderman told me there are a few hundred members and around 100 fellows) aren’t supporters of the president.

But it seems like the group will outlast the Trump movement as well. Even if the 2028 Republican presidential nominee isn’t JD Vance, it’s hard to imagine the GOP going back to a classic neoconservative foreign policy. I believe that’s why the slings and arrows have come out for the BFF; it’s establishing the proverbial beachhead for the Right in a place they haven’t done so before, and the establishment feels threatened.

“The biggest advantage to me is being able to get to know other similarly minded individuals within the foreign affairs community,” Marcus Thornton, a politically-connected Foreign Service Officer and BFF fellow, told me. “The foreign affairs community is already so skewed ideologically that it’s hard to find people who differ from that worldview.”

“The Ben Franklin Fellowship has given us an opportunity to get to know others who may be more willing to challenge that worldview, and to be bold about ensuring that American values have a voice when it comes to foreign affairs.”

That community building is what threatens the old guard. Conservatives have made a critical error in how they talk about the federal bureaucracy. By demonizing all bureaucrats and pushing young talent toward other career paths, the right doesn’t have the personnel on hand to properly staff up federal agencies when the winds of change sweep them into power. That’s the problem that groups like BFF are uniquely suited to solve.

Thornton is unique in his willingness to speak openly and frankly about his time in the Fellowship. There are blogs dedicated to doxxing the members of the group in addition to the legacy media attacks on them. Linderman told me that run-of-the-mill members often prefer to remain anonymous for fear of professional retribution within the State Department.

I did push back on Linderman about some of the group’s higher-profile names, who don’t have much of a track record in foreign policy and, in some cases, appear to be just Trump loyalists who ended up at State by happenstance.

Linderman acknowledged that part of the battle in building a new organization like this is balancing between making a name for yourself and sticking strictly to the mission. But he argued that the core goal of the Fellowship is still to bring together like-minded foreign policy professionals and develop new ones, not to serve as a holding ground for political operatives.

In that, I wish them the best. Right-wing institution-building has been a major casualty of the Trump era, and it’s about time we got back into the business of training good bureaucrats to serve as a counterweight to the bad ones.