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Foreign Service Officers play a pivotal role in the US Department of State—and in the world. According to the agency’s website, these high-ranking officials “engage with foreign governments, advocate for American interests, and help shape global policy across political, economic, and humanitarian priorities.” Because of the importance of their duties, the vetting process for Foreign Service Officers is famously intense and includes both a rigorous screening process and a difficult multi-hour exam.
Last year, the Trump administration announced sweeping changes to the program, vowing to end hiring practices that it said relied too heavily on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. The Secretary of State was to “remove any reference to the Core Precept entitled ‘Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility,’” Trump ordered in a March 2025 memo. “The Secretaries shall promptly direct all employees of their Departments not to give this Core Precept any force or effect.”
Later that year, Secretary of State Marco Rubio abruptly recalled 29 ambassadors and fired 246 Foreign Service Officers. The moves were part of a restructuring that, Rubio wrote in a Substack post, aimed to rid the State Department of a culture where “radical ideologues and bureaucratic infighters have learned to…push through their own agendas that are often at odds with those of the President and undermine the interests of the United States.”
Now, the US Department of State is looking to hire a new generation of Foreign Service Officers. To recruit applicants for these coveted and vital positions, the agency just signed a contract with a company called Military Hire, a subsidiary of the employment firm RedBalloon, which describes itself as “America’s non-woke job board.” At $978,750, the amount of the contract is not particularly high, but the company nevertheless has lofty ambitions. It aims to give the Foreign Service an anti-woke makeover by attracting ideologically “aligned” candidates—hopefully Christians.
Earlier this week, RedBalloon CEO Andrew Crapuchettes appeared on CrossPolitic, a podcast that says it is “helping Christians apply God’s law to politics.” CrossPolitic is a project of CanonPress, the publishing house connected to Christian nationalist Idaho pastor Doug Wilson’s Church. Perhaps not coincidentally, Crapuchettes is an elder at Wilson’s Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, and Wilson has robust connections to the Trump administration through defense secretary Pete Hegseth.
“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.”
In the CrossPolitic episode–called “Could 1,000 Employees Change the State Department Forever?”—Crapuchettes says that before the current administration, “a lot of the 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.”
Those DEI hires, Craphuchettes charges, were often reluctant to follow directives that aligned with the administration’s “America First” ethic. “What they’re finding is all these Foreign Service Officers are like, ‘Yeah, I don’t really want to. Yeah, that sounds really hard, so I’m not going to,’ because they’re, more than not, leftists, and they don’t want to do President Trump’s agenda,” he says. “They want him to look bad, and they want to drag their feet.”
Because of this mismatch of values, Crapuchettes says, the State Department “got rid of the entire recruiting department…like 50 people,” and now is in the process of “cleaning house.” That means “removing a lot of people who are not aligned with the current administration’s agenda, and they want to get people who are more aligned.”
Crapuchettes then invites Christians to apply for jobs in the foreign service. “I would love to see a lot of Christians applying, taking the test, doing the hard work, becoming a foreign service officer, going to Germany for two years, or Botswana, or Thailand,” he says. “You’re working for the ambassador; you’re going to build connections and relationships that you can’t get any other way, and all of a sudden you’re in a position where you can have a huge influence for the rest of your life on the US government.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Crapuchettes explains that RedBalloon is working on developing similar recruiting contracts with the Department of War and the Department of the Interior. He also claims that the company “just got another contract” with the Department of Veterans Affairs to perform “political appointee level recruitment for them.” Neither the State Department nor the VA responded to our questions; a spokesperson from the Department of War declined to comment.
Crapuchettes founded RedBalloon in 2021. At first, the company attracted applicants who were seeking jobs without Covid vaccine mandates. But as the pandemic faded into the background, the company’s remit expanded. A 2023 Wired profile noted that Donald Trump, Jr. called RedBalloon “a HUGE advance in the culture war.” Today, it boasts a network of “tens of thousands” of job seekers “who value freedom, hard work, and merit-based recognition.” The employers hiring through it include Turning Point USA, the Christian cell phone service Patriot Mobile, and the conservative media company The Daily Wire.
In the podcast, Crapuchettes boasts that RedBalloon has developed a reputation for working with government agencies unpopular with the political left. “We’re already doing stuff for like Border Patrol, which gets us in trouble—ICE, Border Patrol, we do hiring for them,” he tells Wilson. He suggests that Military Hire is a less controversial brand. “RedBalloon’s a little hotter to handle than Militaryhire.com, and so on a PR front, Militaryhire.com’s got the contract, not Red Balloon,” he says, “which is fine with me.” (A Border Patrol spokesperson clarified in an email to Mother Jones that the agency “has worked with Military Hire since 2022 and was under contract with them when they were acquired by RedBalloon.” Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)
Doug Wilson, who heads the Idaho church where Crapuchettes is an elder and also oversees a small fiefdom of businesses and schools connected to his church, is increasingly influential in national politics. A spiritual adviser to US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, he delivered a sermon on manly, godly warriors at the Pentagon earlier this year. A self-proclaimed Christian nationalist, Wilson is a firebrand online. In previous interviews, he has told me that women’s suffrage was “a mistake” and that in his ideal version of the United States, public flogging would largely replace prisons. In a 2024 address at the National Conservatism conference, he described a society under siege by identity politics and anti-Christian bias. “It used to be that the sexually troubled had to keep their kinks hidden away in the closet,” he said. “Now it is the conservative Christian who needs to keep his virtues hidden in the recesses of the closet.”
On matters of woke-ism, Wilson appears to be firmly aligned with the Red Balloon ethos. In a post on his blog last year, he thundered against DEI initiatives. “It is not enough for us to be against woke, or DEI, or social justice, or whatever new term our lizard overlords have decided to foist upon us,” he wrote. “We must be hostile to all such verbal iterations.”
Job seekers don’t pay to use RedBalloon and Military Hire; rather, employers pay to recruit through these companies—hence the State Department’s contract. Crapuchettes says in the podcast that his platform will offer opportunities to take practice tests—an important feature because applicants are only allowed to take the test once a year. In an emailed statement, RedBalloon spokesperson Isaac Lopez said that the company does not “screen, filter, or evaluate any applicant based on political affiliation, religion, or ideology, and we have no policy, written or unwritten, that does so, consistent with federal hiring law.” Lopez added that Crapuchettes’ comments on the podcast “reflected a personal hope that more public-service-minded people of faith consider federal careers. His sentiment was not a company screening criterion.”
Update July 2: After this story was published, a State Department spokesperson wrote in an emailed statement to Mother Jones, “The State Department is committed to recruiting the best and brightest from all across America to the Foreign Service, without regard for political or religious background and in accordance with all law. Under the Trump Administration, interest in joining the Foreign Service has skyrocketed.”
