“… Then, on September 5, the State Department
announced that it had scrapped the old foreign service test in favor of a new, Trumpier alternative. An unnamed State official
told The Daily Caller that the exam was updated to ensure that hiring was “merit-based.” The old one, they contended, was “riddled with D.E.I. principles,” such as asking applicants whether they were drawn to other cultures or people whose first language wasn’t English. To some, those questions might have been meant to reveal the kind of curiosity required of a diplomat. For the Trump administration, however, the queries were “designed to exclude some ordinary Americans from the Foreign Service based on their upbringing.”
…
Gone too was the section on situational judgment, which asked applicants to choose the best and worst approaches to a thorny scenario. Instead, the test was mostly multiple choice, including questions about the American political system and a “logical reasoning” section, heavily inflected with statistics. (A website that sells its test-prep services for the foreign service exam
says the new FSOT is “part
Jeopardy, part SAT, and part LSAT.”)
There were also new kinds of questions about the current president’s policies. “It was a series of questions like,
Trump, in April 2025, instituted this executive order. Do you agree or disagree with this E.O.?” one source with knowledge of the test told me. “It was testing your knowledge of this administration, but it’s also kind of a loyalty test.”…”
There was also a Trump admin commissar at training …