Does anyone at Joe Biden's State Department actually work?

Not based on this report from the Washington Free Beacon:

The State Department outsourced the authorship of a congressionally mandated report on the threat posed by Communist China to six undergraduate college students, drawing accusations that the Biden administration is not taking the matter seriously.

As part of the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the State Department was tasked with producing a report on the Chinese Communist Party's efforts to censor and intimidate Americans. The issue has fueled bipartisan concerns in Congress as China's government orchestrates propaganda campaigns inside the United States and works to silence its critics.

The final nonpublic report was transmitted to Congress earlier this month and obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. It was authored by six undergraduate students from James Madison University and "does not represent the views of the Executive Branch," according to a cover letter included on the document.

The Beacon notes that the Chicoms spend billions on propaganda efforts in the U.S., so the report to Congress is important, and it's a requirement of legislation that has already passed in both Houses.

That the State Department decided to outsource the report to a "qualified" institution, which in this case turned out to be undergraduates still completing their college degrees, involved in program called Diplomacy Lab, makes one wonder just what the value of the report is and whether Congress should be taking this as their benchmark in order to make laws. The State Department distanced itself from the report by saying they said they didn't endorse it.

They most certainly did endorse it, whether they believe that or not, in outsourcing the report in their own name to an institution that has the State Department listed as a sponsor of the Diplomacy Lab itself.

Who is the Diplomacy Lab?

Here is what their website says:

Launched in 2013, Diplomacy Lab enables the Department of State to “course-source” research related to foreign policy by harnessing the efforts of students and faculty at universities across the country.

Diplomacy Lab is designed to address two priorities:
1) The Department of State’s determination to engage the American people in the work of diplomacy
2) the imperative to broaden the State Department’s research base in response to a proliferation of complex global challenges.

Students participating in Diplomacy Lab explore real-world challenges identified by the Department and work under the guidance of faculty members who are authorities in their fields. This initiative allows students to contribute directly to the policymaking process while helping the State Department tap into an underutilized reservoir of intellectual capital.

Yeah, but they're ... sophomores, and maybe freshmen, juniors and seniors, writing congressional reports upon which laws are to be made.

Would such college undergraduates have sufficient knowledge from public information sources, well outside intelligence-gathered information to even be able to write a report suitable for congressional lawmakers?

That's just the raw data, the analysis of the threat is even less likely to have been done credibly, given the lack of experience of the writers of the report.

I have my doubts. The site says the program is to allow "participation" and "citizen diplomacy" but having sophomores make policy makes one wonder how many foreign policy errors -- think Venezuela -- are the result of this program. We hire U.S. foreign service officers sworn to allegiance of the U.S, for this job, not ad hoc college kids working on their degrees with no commitment to the U.S. and no serious expertise of any kind, given their ages and their lack of degrees which is why they are in college in the first place. Would they have sufficient loyalty to the U.S. to write such a report? Are they all U.S. citizens who can pass a background check?

The other thing we know is that China, through its Confucius Institute, spends more than a billion each year influencing universities. I cannot tell at this juncture whether James Madison or its students ever accepted any cash from them -- the fancy colleges like Harvard and the University of Southern California have been known to take large amounts. Whether James Madison did too is unknown but it seems possible.

I don't know a lot about James Madison University, a state school located in Harrisburg, Virginia, but based on what I've found, its ranking suggest that it is a good, but not elite or highly competitive school. It could be a repository of all the kids who wanted to get into Georgetown but couldn't, and even that doesn't tell us much, given that they may have been top students who weren't admitted due to not checking the right affirmative-action boxes, or else they may have been 'B' and 'C' students who couldn't get in on merit.

Values-wise, that the contract went to kids at James Madison may have been a bad thing given the wokeness factor of college students in general too, but just as likely it may have be a good thing, in that the kids doing the research may not be as 'woke' as the State Department itself, which as the report says, didn't put an endorsement on their report. On the other hand, they may be 'woker' which sometimes happens, as well as reading comprehension-challenged, loyal to China, or have a full of other issues associated with undergraduate students today, too. 

There's no way of knowing without the report, which somehow was so important it couldn't be made public, yet has this many unknowns.

Bottom line, the writers of the report were unknown and the content of the report was unknown, so how valuble could such a report be to Congress? The potential for bad or substandard information from naive sophomores seems pretty significant. 

Whether the State Department should be outsourcing such an important report to Congress based on the thinking of college sophomores is pretty questionable. Why are they getting away with this?

Image: Screen shot from YouTube video