Not Americia's First Purge

What Happened the Last Time a President Purged the Bureaucracy

By Clay Risen

02/06/2025

Flowers were placed outside
of the USAID headquarters in Washington.

My Note: Please Read to understand that this is not the first purge.

On Jan. 22, 1953, his first day as secretary of state, John Foster Dulles addressed a group of diplomats at his department’s still-new headquarters in Washington’s Foggy Bottom neighborhood. For years, the State Department had come under fire from Republicans and conservative activists as a haven for Communist spies and sympathizers — and not without reason, since one of its rising stars, Alger Hiss, had been convicted of perjury in January 1950 for lying about giving secret government documents to a Soviet spy.

The failure to find more Hisses, and the fact that Hiss’ actions had taken place over a decade in the past, did nothing to appease men like Sen. Joseph McCarthy, who shot to national prominence just weeks after Hiss’ conviction with his claim to have a list of hundreds of spies within the State Department. By the time Dulles arrived that morning, public faith in the department, and morale within it, had cratered.

With his opening speech to his new employees, Dulles made clear that while he was their boss, he was not on their side. “Dulles’s words were as cold and raw as the weather” that day, wrote the diplomat Charles Bohlen. Dulles announced that starting that day, he expected not just loyalty but “positive loyalty” from his charges, making clear that he would fire anyone whose commitment to anti-communism was less than zealous. “It was a declaration by the Secretary of State that the department was indeed suspect,” Bohlen wrote. “The remark disgusted some Foreign Service officers, infuriated others, and displeased even those who were looking forward to the new administration.”

So began what — until now — was the largest purge of “disloyal” government workers in U.S. history.

Similar scenes soon played out across the federal government under the new administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower, the first Republican elected president in two decades. Though the State Department was ground zero for the anti-communist purges, FBI agents scoured the files of thousands of employees across the federal government. In April 1953, Eisenhower issued Executive Order 10450, which opened an energetic campaign to investigate thousands of potential security threats throughout the government.

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The widespread political purges of the early 1950s echo clearly today. Seventy years ago, the reasonable pretext of hunting Soviet agents opened the way to a yearslong, paranoid campaign, motivated by outlandish conspiracy theories, that destroyed countless careers but did nothing to improve America’s security.

Today, a stated desire to check the excesses of diversity, equity and inclusion programs has already been used to justify whirlwind firings and closures of entire federal offices. So it may be wise to consider the consequences of that previous era of purges, part of what came to be known as the “Red Scare.”

At a time of intense geopolitical competition, the United States kneecapped itself, removing thousands of valuable employees and forcing those who remained into unhappy conformity. It is hard not to see the same mistake being repeated today