“None of that has any measurable, quantifiable outputs that I can write and not look like an idiotic fake.”
Washington, February 27 – A mid-level employee in the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs voiced his frustration today at failing, so far, to come up with enough items to satisfy the new US government efficiency czar’s order to compose a list of accomplishments, because none of the activities in which he engaged over the last week lend themselves to a compelling list beyond a general sense of working to weaken the Jewish State and strengthen its adversaries, he admitted today.
US Department of State employee Grant Atwood, 30, confessed his struggles to coworkers this morning after several days of wracking his brains to come up with multiple ways to describe his sole activity: coordinating ways to screw Israel on the international stage, a key function of State Department activities since the 1950’s. Department of Government Efficiency chief Elon Musk, however, has directed all federal employees to submit weekly five-bullet-point summaries of their accomplishments – which Atwood cannot do unless he resorts to blatant mischaracterization of minor technical moves as important attainments.
“What am I supposed to write other than, ‘Furthered the established course of pro-Arab power dynamics by curtailing imagined Israeli hegemonic ambitions?'” he wondered. “I made a bunch of phone calls that were inconclusive. I read two position papers by some colleagues and a European academic moonlighting as the head of some NGO. I sat and tried to think of ways to get around restrictions on funding Palestinian terrorists. I made – and drank! – gallons of coffee. But none of that has any measurable, quantifiable outputs that I can write and not look like an idiotic fake.”
President Donald Trump’s staunchly pro-Israel administration faces a problem familiar to generations of senior officials: legacy career bureaucrats not chosen for their commitment to the policies of the administration in power, but to the institution that, at least in theory, is charged with carrying out that administration’s policies – but in fact often runs on inertia and the same, often-failed, assumptions and axioms that have guided decision-makers and analysts in the organization for generations.
In Atwood’s case, the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs has long attracted career staff from academic programs and demographic cohorts institutionally biased toward Arab narratives and against Jewish sovereignty. As a rule, in their International Studies and Diplomacy programs, university programs give far greater weight to the views of hundreds of millions of Arabs and Muslims surrounding Israel than to those few million in Israel – a phenomenon that left-leaning academia exacerbates by favoring faculty who espouse pro-Arab and anti-Israel assumptions.
Atwood’s problem plagues entire sections within his bureau. He and several coworkers have spent hours over the last two days commiserating and agonizing over the bullet point task, a development that has prevented them from continuing to hamstring Secretary of State Marco Rubio and President Trump’s shift from the Obama-Biden policies, which frustrates the career pro-Arab bureaucrats even further.
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