State Department Taps RedBalloon to Find Workers Loyal to Trump Goals - Bloomberg
The High-School Dropout Hiring Diplomats for Trump’s State Department
RedBalloon hopes to help the administration find better cultural fits, but critics warn of politicizing the foreign service
Photo Illustration: 731; Getty Images (2)
By Jeff Green
July 29, 2026 at 7:58 AM EDT
Andrew Crapuchettes, the founder of a boutique Idaho firm that specializes in headhunting conservative employees, was surfing LinkedIn when an unsolicited message appeared from an unlikely employer: the US State Department.
The department official liked his posts about values-based hiring, Crapuchettes said, and encouraged him to bid for an upcoming contract to help the department identify some 600 people who could replenish the ranks of the foreign service after a round of mass firings.
Crapuchettes prepared a bid, and won. Now, MilitaryHire — a subsidiary of RedBalloon, the company that grew from a website he coded with his brother in 2021 — is working to help President Donald Trump’s efforts to remake the nation’s bureaucracy.
“We’re focused on merit, hard work, patriotism, and not the latest political correctness, whatever that is, because that shifts,” Crapuchettes says.
President Donald Trump's allies have painted the project as part of a much-needed upheaval of a diplomatic deep state they see as entrenched and unaccountable. Opponents describe an unprecedented attack on civil servants with decades of experience, resulting in brain drain that will hollow out American statecraft.
But whether the gambit works will depend, in part, on RedBalloon’s success with its nearly $1 million hiring contract.
The company, which counts Donald Trump Jr. among its investors, is almost five years old. MilitaryHire is now working to identify hundreds of candidates who not only meet the demanding requirements for the foreign service, but also satisfy what RedBalloon describes as the cultural fit its clients seek.
The push comes as Secretary of State Marco Rubio has ordered an overhaul of the notoriously daunting entrance exam, removing questions related to diversity and inclusion and emphasizing history. A rigorous on-boarding process is also being modified to refocus training on what the administration calls “America First” foreign policy. One State Department recruiting video challenges applicants to become the “Face of America.” A second asks them to join in the tradition of the US founding fathers and first diplomatic corps: Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and Benjamin Franklin.
Crapuchettes believes it’s a challenge ready-made for his firm.
He launched the company after losing his previous CEO job, in what he described as a dispute over his conservative and Christian views. The site initially connected workers opposed to vaccine mandates and progressive workplace policies with like-minded employers. A “Fox & Friends” appearance, he says, brought 40,000 job seekers and 1,000 companies to the tiny site, pushing the project into a business. The name, intended as an allegory, was inspired by the story of a family who used a patchwork hot air balloon to escape from East Germany to the West. The Red is a not-so-subtle nod to escaping from Blue state business cultures.
The 49-year-old self-described high school dropout lives in a large home on 60 acres outside of Moscow, Idaho with his wife, five kids, a dog and a parrot. He jokes that he has a gun room, because a gun safe is too small for his collection. His start-up career, which he says includes launching and selling eight companies, gives him financial flexibility.
Crapuchettes readily admits the job board portion of RedBalloon — with about 100,000 visitors a month compared to 600 million at a mainstream competitor — is fast becoming a side project. The main focus now is headhunting to help employers find workers that match the values and culture of their company - or in this case, a government agency.
The RedBalloon team has a lawyer on staff to ensure they don’t violate labor laws with their questions or processes for corporate hires, says Dave Williams, the company’s head of recruitment. They don’t use artificial intelligence to screen candidates and rely on direct discussions to pick up clues. They typically work with companies with fewer than 300 employees, he says, filling 200 to 300 roles a year.
“If you let somebody in who doesn’t share your values, you can’t be surprised when they try to take things a different direction because people ultimately live out their values,” Williams says. “You need to be very careful and be specific as to who you let into the four walls of your business.”
Critics say that while such an approach might work for a family business, it doesn’t translate to a foreign service designed to represent a wide swath of America, and where expertise can prove the difference in high-stakes diplomacy.
Explicitly politicizing the diplomatic corps risks a whipsaw effect as priorities shift with each new administration, according to John Dinkelman, president of the American Foreign Service Association.
Dinkelman, whose job was eliminated in May, previously served in a State Department program where foreign service officers were stationed at universities to advise students on careers and fellowships. He said AFSA membership has fallen to about 12,400 members, from about 17,500 shortly before Trump took office.
A State Department official said the administration had centralized hiring to attract candidates with the expertise needed to advance its priorities, and that MilitaryHire was brought aboard to assist in outreach to veterans. The changes to the exam and on-boarding process are intended to place greater emphasis on American history, sound judgment and negotiation skills, the official said.
More broadly, the administration hopes to streamline the process and bring in non-traditional federal employees, like tech workers for the Pentagon and dealmakers to advise on the national security supply pipeline, who are better positioned to advance US interests, the official said.
“They are disassembling a profession,” says Dinkelman, who worked almost four decades at the State Department. “We will not be able to easily rebuild a workforce that is confident that leadership has its back. If they come from simply a politicized elite who are chosen every four years, then I submit that won’t be in our nation’s best interest.”
The State Department official said that hiring of entry-level foreign service personnel continues and applications reached a ten-year high in October 2025. Claims regarding attrition made by the union do not reflect the department’s workforce data, the official said.
Demonstrators during a rally for US State Department employees outside the agency’s headquarters in Washington, DC, US, on Friday, July 11, 2025.Photographer: Al Drago/Bloomberg
‘OK With Loving America’
RedBalloon disputes the idea that it is facilitating some sort of loyalty test. It says MilitaryHire, formed more than a quarter century ago by military veterans, has plenty of experience recruiting qualified candidates for the US Border Patrol, Department of Veterans Affairs and defense contractors including General Dynamics Corp.
Bryan Stone, the company’s head of government programs and partnerships, says by focusing on merit — and candidates with different experiences, rather than Washington mainstays — they’ve established a record of successfully surfacing qualified candidates.
“We’re trying to work with people and understand who they are, where there’s a cultural fit, what are they really about, what wisdom do they really have,” Stone says.
RedBalloon’s private-sector clients offer a glimpse of the kind of cultural screening the firm says it brings to hiring. Aqueous Technologies makes sophisticated machines to sterilize circuit boards destined for jet fighters, missiles and spacecraft. John Hall, the firm’s president, says he’s open to people having differing views, but that doesn’t always make for a good workplace. RedBalloon has found him three employees so far, with each wanting to leave more progressive workplaces for a more conservative, faith-friendly environment, Hall said.
“If you’re going to build a machine for the military, you probably got to be OK with the military and you probably have to be OK with loving America,” Hall says, highlighting a 50-foot American flag that hangs in the company lobby.
RedBalloon’s advocates also argue that aligned culture produces results. In a report released in mid July, the public relations and consultancy firm Edelman found that 42 percent of employed respondents say that they would rather switch departments than work for a supervisor with different political opinions. One third say they would put in less effort if they disagreed with the boss on political beliefs.
‘Yes Men?’
Dinkelman, the AFSA union president, concedes that there are plenty of valid criticisms of what the State Department workforce looked like — male, pale and Yale — but doubts the Trump-era changes would usher in a better future.
“How many individuals who are interested in international affairs are going to want to join a profession where they are simply yes men?” he says.
For RedBalloon’s Crapuchettes, it’s equally bad if the ideology of the State Department’s ranks is out of step with the country it represents.
Marco Rubio, US Secretary of State, left, and President Donald Trump during a cabinet meeting at the White House in Washington, DC, on Wednesday, May 27, 2026.Photographer: Samuel Corum/Sipa
“In an ideal world, you would want at least the Department of State to be closer to mirroring the American people at some level because they’re representing America to the rest of the world,” he says, noting the delta between how State Department employees and the broader population voted in the last presidential election.
The stakes are high. The State Department’s recruiting video underscores the importance of getting it right: “People abroad will think better or worse of the United States because of what you are and what you do.”