What "Deep State" Looks Like From the Inside

A few years into my Foreign Service career, a colleague leaked something to the press. The thing they leaked wasn’t true. I couldn’t figure out why they’d done it.

A more experienced colleague explained it to me: the leaker was trying to break into partisan Washington. Saying what powerful people want to hear opens doors.

That colleague was competing in a world with entirely different rules.

I’d never operated in that world. I was deep inside what some people call the “deep state,” the long-tenure career civil servants who outlast administrations.

From our hiring process to the way our analysis is tested, we build a deeply apolitical culture that probably seems just as foreign to others as the partisan world seemed to me.

This culture is a core structure of good policymaking and is constantly under attack. I want to start by explaining how this culture happens.

The exam nobody can game

The Foreign Service selects people through a long exam process that ends with an eight-hour simulation of embassy work. Most people fail. If you pass, you go on a ranked list by score and get called in order. You cannot get in by knowing the right people or donating to the right party.

My colleagues came from all fifty states and a variety of careers. Some were former school teachers, software engineers, lawyers, and journalists. The process doesn’t strongly reward growing up on the coasts, majoring in global affairs, or reading the right publications.

This system was designed to replace the “political spoils” system where jobs went to loyal partisans. Reforms seemed urgent because a sitting U.S. president was assassinated by a man who felt he’d been denied a spoils appointment.

The culture it produces

A near-random, deeply meritocratic hiring process, combined with constant feedback loops on whether your work is accurate, help make a culture that took me years to fully understand. I’m still learning what that culture is, mostly by leaving it and observing the contrast.

Here’s what it actually looked like in practice.

We rotate so we can’t get entrenched. Diplomatic assignments change every two to three years. You might spend two years covering migration issues in Southeast Asia, then move to human rights in Latin America. You can’t build a career by becoming the champion of one cause. You master understanding complex issues quickly, learning which experts or practitioners to seek out.

We treated headlines as a starting point, not ground truth. We had newspaper subscriptions from across the world. I noticed that mainstream headlines were a tool for understanding what those media circles believed, not what was actually happening. Almost every time I dug into a story, a lot of context was missing. You have to build trust with people on the ground to get the full context.

We were almost entirely disconnected from online political discourse. For ten years, I wasn’t following debates about what progressives or conservatives should believe. I struggled to find political Twitter useful or addicting. The things I needed to know I got by talking to people in the field, reading reports, and coordinating with analysts across the government. Online discourse told me what highly online populations were feeling. It wasn’t an efficient way to learn about reality.

Good analysts could represent every stakeholder in the room. If you were preparing an ambassador on a major IMF loan, your analysis had to ring true for labor groups and bankers since both might be in the room. If you were drafting trade policy recommendations, you had to understand the business community, labor groups, and the political constraints on every actor involved. Analysis that read like advocacy was looked down on. It meant you didn't understand the other side. The government interacts with every side.

An agency can lean left and still be nonpartisan

The State Department leans left, primarily because the professional class of degree-holders leans left. This creates blind spots, but it isn’t the same as being partisan as an institution.

Partisan means operating inside a coalition: you produce outputs that serve a partisan group’s goals and get rewarded. The career civil service doesn’t work that way. There is little reward for telling a new administration what it wants to hear.

When a new administration arrives, career officials brief them on every country, every negotiation, and every relationship, often with years of inconvenient history attached. That context sometimes conflicts directly with what the administration wants to do.

From the outside, an obstruction and someone accurately describing reality look identical.

Replacing career hires with loyalists doesn’t fix the ideological imbalance. It makes the next cycle worse. When a new administration arrives and finds the executive branch stacked with the previous party’s loyalists, they’ll purge more aggressively than they otherwise would have. Each administration leaves the next one with more justification to do the same. The career civil service shrinks a little more each time. Both parties have claimed the deep state was working against them, so both will find reasons to hollow it out gradually.

Like much of the national security world and the military, the Foreign Service comes from every state and every background. We are not a coordinated group. The only thing we had in common at the start was wanting to serve and passing the same exams. What developed over slowly, through rotations, peer review, and getting things wrong in front of stakeholders, was a culture of telling the truth, especially when no one wanted to hear it.

Some rewards do exist like higher-profile assignments or consideration for White House appointments. But the higher-profile assignments last only as long as the political appointee's tenure. White House appointments, while prestigious, don't help much inside the federal career promotion system. Career civil servants are planning 30-year trajectories within their promotion system managed by teams of other career civil servants.