Political Consciousness and The State Department Purge

Can a downsized “lanyard class” learn to see US foreign policy differently?

State Department bathroom, July 2025

The long-predicted purge of the State Department was just announced:

The State Department is firing more than 1,300 employees…sending layoff notices to more than 1,100 civil servants and 240 Foreign Service employees…Secretary of State Marco Rubio [has] accused certain bureaus within the department of pursuing a “radical political ideology.”

This is not the end of the purge. Rubio had outlined in May that the plan would include cutting 2,000 staff; the Supreme Court just lifted a previous court order that was forbidding the Trump administration from conducting mass firings; and the foreign service officer corps is newly going to be required to commit to a loyalty oath to the president and MAGA, which, as it gets implemented, will entail new rounds of firing.

For the workers going through this, I’m sure that their inner world is in utter turmoil right now. I was them, and we always assumed history and politics is simply something that happens to other people, not the lanyard class. Imagine how jarring it would be, then, to realize otherwise the hard way. I’ve gone through my own versions of having my world turned upside down and it sucks.

And so I have sympathy for the fact that some of those who remain at State would buoy the spirits of those who are being forced out with messages like the following:

State Department, July 2025

I’m not mad at that.

But while I don’t begrudge the sentiment behind this message board, clinging to the idea that government workers “left an impact” cannot be the beginning of a lifelong nostalgia trip. Pining for a past that was not as Washingtonians would remember it gets us nowhere.

This is a moment where those who are purged can go down one of two paths. They can allow “thank you for your service” to end the conversation and blunt critical thinking, or they can tap into the righteous anger of being made into surplus labor to grope for a political consciousness. If professional Washington cannot confront the fact that the unipolar moment and every moment since has been at best inglorious, then they have no positive role to play in making a world beyond despotism.

I’m trying to balance being both delicate and critical here and I might not succeed. I know that some people do good work. The Biden administration quietly did a reverse-Monroe doctrine in Brazil when its fascist president, Jair Bolsonaro, tried to throw a coup. The staffer who was working on PEPFAR during the Bush administration was definitely doing good. Situations arise where individual officers or policies help save lives, direct funds to those who need it, or change a world event for the better.

But that’s not the end of the story. The Biden administration exacerbated the problem of the imperial presidency, setup the military for a trillion dollar budget, increased funding for the ICE agents now marauding American streets, and underwrote a genocide. PEPFAR—the single most successful foreign policy program of the 21st century—was the cherry gloss on liberal empire under Bush. It was happening as part of the same apparatus imposing fascism on Muslims in America, worsening global inequality, deferring action on climate change, running torture black-sites, and waging a self-branded Global War on Terror, the apotheosis of which was Trump as president.

What I’m trying to say is that practitioners of US foreign policy have always been inadequately self-reflective about the project they’re promoting. And I include myself in that—I accepted narratives of our greatness and goodness even in the face of evidence to the contrary until I was able to get critical distance from Washington.¹

What I know now and what Washington’s lanyard class is yet to learn is that there are profound political consequences for a creedal obsession with American primacy. The failure to face them extends their life and reach. American exceptionalism is bound up with the creation of MAGA as a political force. And whatever nobility resides in their service, the government workers being purged this week were nonetheless working for a fascist Trump regime—a national security state so heinous that some have found the courage to resign in protest the last couple years despite the personal and professional costs.

For what it’s worth, I spend a good deal of time speaking with people in public service positions who are overcome with angst. While I have not exactly urged them to exit government, I haven’t encouraged their service either.

How much good work can you do subordinating yourself to a fascist project? How much good are the remaining State Department staff going to do under these conditions? In earlier times, the question of when you withdraw your labor from a machinery of death was a personal one. But there comes a point at which your service to a fascist regime makes you a fascist no matter what you tell yourself.

So I really hope all the foreign policy talent being purged allows the scales to fall from their eyes—they were being used for decades to prop up narratives of American greatness that justified violence and power-hoarding abroad, at the expense of so many at home. These are the conditions that put wind in MAGA’s sails in the first place.

What’s happening is as terrible as it is predictable. But it can also be a moment for learning, self-reflection, and reconciling with Trump as a symptom rather than Trump as a ruptural anomaly. We need to be turning technocratic skills toward analyzing and advocating on behalf of addressing the root causes of insecurity—not a return to “global leadership” or primacy or consolidating power in the state form at the expense of others.

Incidentally, the Center for International Policy, where I’m a senior fellow, issued the following statement, which does a good job condemning Trump’s State Department purge in a way that directs our energy toward the sources that brought us to this situation:

1. There’s a way in which Pacific Power Paradox was my reckoning between narrative and reality.