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On April 7, Lew Olowski, the freshly appointed head of the Bureau of Global Talent Management, the State Department’s H.R. department, got up to address the new foreign service specialists he was about to swear in. Assembled there at the Foreign Service Institute in Arlington were people who would be doing much of the grunt work of running America’s overseas presence: the I.T. specialists, security guards, people doing payroll and building maintenance, the nurses and the diplomatic couriers. Turning to them, Olowski proceeded to deliver a speech that has quickly become legendary among America’s diplomats.

After administering the oath, he said: “The words we said together are an oath, but oaths and words are different. Words are for talking. Dolphins can talk. Oaths are covenants; animals do not covenant. Only God and man can make covenants.” The Constitution, he clarified, is “called the Constitution because it constitutes our government: the United States of America.”

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Olowski, an evangelical Christian, then quoted from Psalms, and told the gathered that they could, for religious reasons, opt out of the “so help me God” clause in the oath—and out of vaccine mandates. He referred to Donald Trump as “the living avatar of the executive power of the United States” and talked about praying for him and for Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

Before wrapping up with a religious quote from Abraham Lincoln, he exhorted the State Department’s new specialists: “This is America. Your face is marred by dust from mudslingers, but don’t carry a chip on your shoulder: Get that ‘dirt off your shoulder.’ To the critics that never swore our oath, sing the song sung in the arena just one month ago for the Kansas City Chiefs and the Philadelphia Eagles: They not like us. They not like us. Don’t hate the diplomat, hate the Great Game.”

Instantly, word of the bizarre and disjointed speech spread through Foggy Bottom. They mocked Olowski’s speech—God? Talking dolphins?!—but they were also furious. Olowski was an untenured, second-tour foreign service officer who had been plucked from obscurity and given a job reserved for the department’s most seasoned, experienced, and tenured officers: running a department that manages over 70,000 people in 180 countries. He was clearly and completely out of his depth. How the hell did he get this job?

Wild rumors began to circulate: That he was best friends with Stephen Miller. That he was addicted to Monster energy drinks. That he had taken the foreign service exam a dozen times. That he told a woman who worked with him that he wanted to turn her into “a beautiful MAGA butterfly.” In the meantime, Olowski became the face—bulging eyes, widely spaced teeth, shaved head, and close-cropped beard—of the Trump directive to gut the department, via “reorganization,” and to remake it in his image. Which was exactly why Olowski so horrified State Department veterans: He was the walking antithesis of everything they were. And he was just plain weird.

Olowski joined the foreign service during Trump’s first term in office. Before that, he was a lawyer, trained at Georgetown Law School, who took up a variety of conservative causes. He was general counsel at The Daily Caller, where he overlapped with Kaitlan Collins. He was also general counsel at the Gabriel Network, a Christian anti-abortion group. He worked for the Immigration Reform Law Institute, a right-wing anti-immigration think tank in Washington, D.C. And he penned a number of op-eds in various publications, excoriating liberal judges for being soft on “illegal aliens” and praising Trump as “an unapologetic nationalist.”

More notably, Olowski proudly advertised that he was a clerk on the team that defended Radovan Karadžić, the Serbian president who was ultimately convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. He’d worked under Karadžić’s lawyer, Peter Robinson, who defended people accused of war crimes in Liberia and of perpetrating the genocide in Rwanda. (“Everyone is entitled to a defense,” one State Department official noted, “but this was a questionable choice.”)

Olowski’s first foreign service posting was in Beijing, where he, like all first-tour foreign service officers, had to work the visa line. But, according to sources who served with him there, he didn’t seem satisfied with that entry-level job, and started trying to network with others at the embassy, including some of the senior-most officials, by adding unsolicited meetings to their calendars. When Christmas rolled around, Olowski dressed up as Santa and went around giving gifts—including coal. According to one of the people who served with him, the coal was for those grinches who had refused or ignored his invites.

There are, I should note, many versions of the coal-for-Christmas story circulating among Staties—each more fantastical than the next. This one comes from someone with direct knowledge of the event. (“Candy was distributed to children and coal was given to adults as part of a light-hearted joke,” a State Department spokesperson said. “The fact anyone took offense with this is absurd.”)

Olowski also allegedly went to a different area of the embassy at strange hours, regularly, to log on to a system where he could read classified materials about issues unrelated to his job. According to two sources with knowledge of these events, he was counseled in writing for this—State Department–speak for disciplined. After a year in Beijing, he was transferred to Guangzhou.

A State Department official responded to questions for this story with a lengthy statement praising Olowski as an “upstanding employee who has been at the State Department since 2021” and appointed to a senior position “because of his dedication to his country.” It goes on: “As an employee of the executive branch, it is his duty to implement the president’s agenda, which he has done faithfully in many ways, including by removing D.E.I. in the foreign service and replacing it with fidelity. Mr. Olowski has worked to ensure that State Department employees are serving America, not ideological agendas, and is restoring fairness to federal hiring.”

In January 2025, Olowski was in the middle of his second tour, in Abu Dhabi, when he was called back to main State to serve in the office of the counselor to Rubio, Mike Needham. He quickly made a name for himself at Foggy Bottom by marching into the office of the ombuds and telling everyone that they were being put on administrative leave, and that their office was being dissolved. The office’s employees later discovered that they had been transferred to the Office of Civil Rights, whose chief counsel was Heather Olowski, Lew’s wife, and the minister of a church that the couple runs.

By April, Olowski was running G.T.M. (which has since been renamed PERT), thanks to a special process that allowed him to work around the job requirement that he be a tenured officer, which he wasn’t. A special tenure panel was convened, but, according to two sources with knowledge of the matter, everyone on it recused themselves, fearing retribution. Once his name was redacted, a second panel was able to get Olowski over the line.

This infuriated career foreign service officers, especially since Olowski was a prominent member of the Ben Franklin Fellowship, which claims to be all about eliminating D.E.I. and restoring meritocracy to the foreign service. (His wife is also a member.) Meanwhile, Olowski was a second-tour officer in what State Department veterans describe as a 10th-tour position.

And it showed. “The most shocking thing for me is how little he knows about the State Department,” one State Department official who worked with Olowski told me. “He has to be briefed to get a basic understanding. Everything has to be a very laid-out process with him. And you have to be very careful about what you say in case you trigger him.” A former State Department official who also worked with Olowski agreed, adding that his lack of experience wasn’t an indictment. “The questions he asks are very typical of a second-tour officer,” this person said. “It is an indictment that he was put in this position.”

That didn’t stop Olowski from slashing and burning at Foggy Bottom. His first target was anything that smelled of D.E.I.—which, as he told several people, he believed was illegal. When he was presented with a list of 120 career foreign service officers selected to serve on promotion boards, he flipped out, and alleged they’d been chosen on D.E.I. grounds—even though all he knew about them was their names. In fact, according to a source with knowledge of this process, they had been picked using a number of criteria, including seniority and skill set, and to reflect the composition of the foreign service.

Olowski demanded that the panels be scrapped, and that their participants—some of whom were already in transit from overseas—be told to stand down. He also requested that everyone’s promotions be frozen while new boards were chosen using A.I. tools. He asked whether the model could consider religious affiliation when selecting the panels, but backed off when he was told that the State Department doesn’t track this information.

Olowski also alarmed career diplomats by changing the way the State Department recruits and promotes people, including by introducing the concept of “fidelity” as an attribute that diplomats should be graded on. This, career Staties worry, is just a euphemism for political loyalty. “The word itself is kind of loaded,” said a senior State Department official. “Fidelity to whom? And how would you even demonstrate it? I said this to Lew, that we don’t need anyone telling us that we need to faithfully execute directives of the president. We learn that on day one.”

Earlier this year, Olowski decided to bring the disciplinary process under his direct control, demanding to have final say on every case in a department of 70,000 people. His other unorthodox ideas included a taxpayer lottery that would return the savings from rooting out “waste, fraud, and abuse”; an “anti-loafing” policy to prevent people sleeping at their desks on the seventh floor, where people are known to work around the clock; and a unilateral amendment to the foreign service H.R. manual concerning the concept of “bullying,” which he said, in a section he added in May, could reasonably be considered “ordinary tribulations of the workplace.”

All the while, he has grown even more famous for his odd public speaking style, first demonstrated at F.S.I. back in April—long stem-winders that veer into prayer and tears, passionate confessions, and bizarre imagery. In a meeting this summer with deputy chiefs of missions (the second-in-command at U.S. embassies abroad) and principal officers, he said it wasn’t illegal “to break bogus foreign laws,” railed about the Chicago Teachers Union, dipped into allusions to Chinese government anal probes and his own hoarding tendencies, then wrapped it all up with metaphors about wishing on monkey paws and fish jumping into boats. “My impression is that, if he’s speaking to large groups, he has a manic quality,” said the State Department official who worked with him. “It’s kind of fucked up, to be quite honest with you,” said a senior State Department official who was in several meetings with him. “Where does he get this shit? Does he have a weird quote dictionary or something?”

He’s also become known for sending emails at all hours of the day and night, and for really, really loving Monster energy drinks. “He crushed four energy drinks in an hour,” said one former subordinate, adding that, by the end of the meeting, “he looked like a coked-out raccoon. He was literally washing his hands and twitching.” Another recalled a meeting at 9 a.m. in which Olowski chugged three cans of Monster in 30 minutes. Said the senior State Department official, “He just does weird things.”

Olowski’s detractors acknowledge that “he’s not vicious.” He’s chipper and strange, and not a great fit for a workplace that, in Washington, is often mocked as bureaucracy and inaction personified. “He’s bringing a lot of resentments, which is very typical of the [Ben Franklin Fellow] crowd,” said Eric Rubin, a storied diplomat and former president of A.F.S.A., the foreign service union. “They’re angry that somehow they’ve been mistreated by the liberal deep state or whatever.” I imagine the fact that people refer to him as “MAGA Toddler” and “Loony Lew” doesn’t help either.

But he is also exactly what the Trump administration was looking for: a true believer who will do their bidding, no questions asked. He often wears a White House lanyard, and refers to himself in meetings as “an empty pipe to transmit ideas from the president” to the foreign service. People who were in meetings with him recalled him rushing out to run up to the seventh floor to consult on something and rush back. Others told me he deferred to colleagues who were technically more junior than him, but were political appointees from the seventh floor. “I don’t think he has any real influence,” said the senior State Department official. “He was put there to do the bidding of the seventh floor, and he does that. He doesn’t have any wasta.”

That’s all for me, friends. I’ll see you back here next week. In the meantime, good night. Tomorrow will be worse.

Julia

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