A career bureaucrat who celebrated how the State Department would “empower” “LGBTI activists” in other countries remains in a senior leadership role at State under President Donald Trump.
At a 2016 Atlantic Council event, State bureaucrat Kerri Hannan celebrated “all of the people-to-people engagement that the State Department has taken on in order to reach out to civil society and LGBTI activists on the front lines.”
“LGBTI” refers to people who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex.
Hannan, now deputy assistant secretary for public diplomacy, policy, planning, and foreign assistance at State, then added, “I have seen such an enormous amount of work done to find those activists and to empower them through alumni, through networking, to find ways so that they can be stronger and give them the tools and the connections that they need.”
According to the Washington Blade, she served as president of the group Gays and Lesbians in Foreign Affairs Agencies in 2016. At the time, she pledged to work with Trump’s team in his first term.
“We do not yet know to what degree LGBT rights abroad will be a priority under President-elect Trump’s administration but are ready to work with his transition team and the new administration to address important issues that impact LGBT employees of foreign affairs agencies,” she said at the time.
A person with knowledge of the situation confirmed to The Daily Signal Friday that Hannan is currently at State.
Trump has taken steps to prioritize merit over the culture of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” and to reframe U.S. foreign policy to stop advocating gender ideology (the idea that a man can become a woman, or vice versa, just by saying so).
The Daily Signal does not have any evidence that Hannan has acted to oppose Trump’s policies from within, but her past support for “LGBTI activists” may raise red flags.
“The State Department leadership is following [President Trump’s] order and expects every employee to do the same – they are public servants implementing the president’s agenda, not their own,” a State Department spokesperson told The Daily Signal in a statement Monday. “We will continue to hold every employee to that standard.”
Under the leadership of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the State Department has embarked on significant reforms to root out leftist ideology and prevent foreign aid funding from propping up transgender causes. Rubio famously merged the functions of the U.S. Agency for International Development into the main State Department.
While State has engaged in reductions in force to encourage potential deep state actors to resign, civil service protections can frustrate these efforts.
An April poll found that 75% of Washington, D.C.-based federal employees making $75,000 or more per year who voted for Democrat presidential nominee Kamala Harris in November said they would not follow a lawful Trump order if they considered it bad policy.
Furthermore, a February Foundation for Government Accountability study found that Democrat employees outnumber Republican employees by a 2-to-1 margin across federal agencies and that 84% of federal employees’ political contributions went to Harris in the 2024 election.
The Daily Signal reached out to Gays and Lesbians in Foreign Affairs Agencies, and to Hannan’s verified LinkedIn account for comment, but did not receive a response by publication time.
