Andrew Crapuchettes is a man with a mission. He wants to bring patriotic values to government employment recruiting, and he wants to personally help implement Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s mandate to reform the Department of State to better represent those values abroad long past the end of the Trump administration. Can he do it?
Crapuchettes earlier this spring received an almost $1 million contract to act as a recruiter for the Department of State for new Foreign Service officers (FSOs). He intends to implement this contract for finding America’s next generation of diplomats via his existing employment search websites, RedBalloon and Military Hire. When he talks about values-based recruiting, Crapuchettes pulls no punches about what his intention for State is, saying that a lot of State’s “recruiting was focused on DEI. It was focused on trying to get in the guy with a PhD in black dance, rather than people who can actually do a good job.” He promises future recruits that “all of a sudden you’re in a position where you can have a huge influence for the rest of your life on the U.S. government.” He even sat for an interview with the podcast CrossPolitic titled “Could 1,000 Employees Change the State Department Forever?”
The promised changes are in line with broader directives from President Donald Trump and Rubio. In March 2025. Trump signed a memorandum directing the Secretary of State to remove “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility” (DEIA) as a “Core Precept” that, under Biden, controlled Foreign Service promotions. Supervisors under Biden were required to list specific DEIA accomplishments for each diplomat on his yearly job evaluation. The Trump memo further directed State not to base Foreign Service recruitment and hiring on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, nor to embed discriminatory equity ideology within any element of the Foreign Service.
Rubio was quick to act, firing some 1,300 State Department employees, including 246 FSOs, and recalling many then-ambassadors seen as opposed to Trump’s foreign policy. Rubio wrote about the restructuring that “motivated and creative State Department employees see their ideas watered down by turf battles until they give up… while the talented and loyal are driven into indifference. Radical ideologues and bureaucratic infighters have learned to play on this exhaustion to push through their own agendas that are often at odds with those of the president and undermine the interests of the United States.”
Some of Rubio’s first concrete steps to dismantle DEIA and chip away at State’s culture after the initial firings already concerned recruitment; new officers offer a faster way to reshape institutional culture than attempting to change the outlook of an entrenched workforce. Rubio suspended the Charles Rangel and Thomas Pickering Fellowships. Both existed to provide an alternative pathway into the Foreign Service with benefits not available through the standard hiring process, focusing on increasing representation of underrepresented groups. The programs were administered through Howard University, a historically black institution, and roughly 80 percent of the recruited fellows were estimated to be black, multi-racial or Hispanic. Rubio also did away with diplomats in residence (DIR), a program designed to reach populations with lower percentages in the Foreign Service than their share of the general population. Many DIRs were based at historically black colleges and universities. Today, almost everyone who enters State as an FSO must now pass the same rigorous vetting, leveling the racial playing field.
A look at Crapuchettes’s current job employment websites at RedBalloon and Military Hire offers some clues to how State’s FSO recruitment may work in the near future. RedBalloon states that all employers must pledge to honor their employee’s constitutional rights, including their right to free speech. The site pitches itself as a place for “motivated job seekers who value freedom, hard work, and merit-based recognition, and employers that respect their constitutional rights and provide a positive workplace where merit and achievement are honored.” MilitaryHire is a partner company that leans more heavily toward matching former military members with technical skills with businesses working in government. And Crapuchettes is unabashedly Christian. (This is, of course, what the MSM seized upon.)
Browsing Crapuchettes’s employment sites shows they currently recruit for ICE and the Border Patrol. Some advertisements seek people who have or who will qualify for security clearances to work at Northern Virginia locations such as McLean, which may or may not be affiliated with the intelligence community or its network of contractors. One such ad is looking for people with proven lockpicking skills. Most other employers in the Washington, DC area appear to be well-known conservative or right-of-center groups and NGOs.
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It is clear, in line with Rubio’s other changes, the change in recruiting venue is part of an all-out effort to radically change the culture of the State Department. Its last radical change, actually more of a lateral move, was during the Obama and Biden eras, especially under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Democrats expanded the traditional conception of diplomacy to include advocacy for LGBT rights, women’s rights, labor issues, and other social justice policy priorities. Critics argued recruitment favored applicants from elite universities and those who shared prevailing progressive assumptions within the foreign policy establishment. It is consistent, then, that the new recruitment emphasis fits with the Trump administration’s own approach to foreign affairs.
In his first term, Trump talked a good game about State Department reform, but he chose weak secretaries who never understood they needed to effect change at all levels to alter State’s broader culture. The rank-and-file understood this; they stymied initiatives and slow-walked paper until the changemakers ran out of time or interest. State successfully waited out its opponents in the first Trump administration because it did not believe itself to represent the executive, or even an American public which it did not support politically. Insiders at State instead had their own ideas about what the world really needs, and were determined to put them into practice—regardless of who occupied the White House.
Things may be different now, as a growing cohort of conservatives that will outlast Trump has made itself known inside State for the first time. Rubio’s changes reach into the hereto untouched recruitment, training, and promotion processes, the systems that shape institutional culture over the long run. Whether these reforms endure past the next Republican president is the central question. Personnel policies can be quickly reversed by future administrations. Rubio appears to be betting that changing who enters the Foreign Service will prove more durable than changing those already inside it.
