A dozen former U.S. officials who resigned from the Biden administration over its Israel policy are demanding 2028 presidential candidates sign a pledge to not hire the officials who oversaw that policy. They are, in effect, calling for the Democratic Party to oust the kinds of premier foreign policy personnel that tend to stick around Washington, shape left-of-center party foreign policy debates, make weighty staff recommendations and continually re-enter new Democratic administrations through appointments.

It’s a sharply antagonistic new 2028 litmus test that would cause drama in Washington — and it’s a great idea.

The officials who signed the pledge letter, which The Washington Sun first reported on Wednesday, resigned in 2023 and 2024 from the White House and several different agencies, including the State Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Navy and the Defense Intelligence Agency. In the letter, they express concern that senior Biden administration officials who oversaw Gaza policy “are now actively white-washing their own roles in enabling genocide” — and they want to put a stop to it by barring them from future administrations.

“The senior officials who turned a blind eye to the facts, lied to the American public, actively repressed internal dissent, and enabled America’s material support for Israel’s genocide have no business holding positions of influence in any future administration,” they write. The letter also goes one step further, seeming to suggest that they should also be blacklisted from think tanks, academia and other foreign policy organizations: “They should not be welcomed in any institution from which they may exert influence over the formulation of foreign policy, or the education of America’s next generation of leaders.”

The letter does not name specific Biden officials, but says candidates who take the pledge should acknowledge U.S. complicity in Isael’s genocide and refrain from hiring anyone who “as a past or present political appointee was an architect, leader, defender, or key enabler, of the U.S. policies of unconditional support to Israel that constitute complicity in a genocide.”This letter comes after a coalition of progressive organizations, including the Democratic Socialists of America, Just Foreign Policy and the Palestinian Youth Movement, launched its own similar pledge in September called #DroptheGenocide20.

That pledge identifies 20 top Biden officials who had key roles in Israel policy, including former Secretary of State Antony Blinken, former national security adviser Jake Sullivan, former White House coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa Brett McGurk, and former White House national security communications adviser John Kirby. All of these officials currently hold prestigious gigs and have the status and connections to make them serious contenders for roles in a future center-left presidential administration.

It’s unclear if these pledge movements will gain traction, but I hope they do. There is no realistic hope for legal accountability for the Biden — or Trump — administration’s roles in enabling Israel’s genocide and ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip. But at least them can serve as a tool for accountability. The Biden administration’s support of Israel as it targeted civilians and active participation in the revolting scheme to starve the enclave should not be shrugged off as a casual policy error. It was a moral atrocity and should be treated as such. It was also a strategic mistake because it undermined America’s international standing and credibility when advocating for human rights.

Some Biden partisans may counter that this is a backward-looking form of activism at a time when we must focus on the future. But nothing could be further from the truth. If top Biden officials who made terrible decisions were iced out of future presidential administrations, it would have a concrete effect on the future. It would block personnel with poor judgment from entering the government. And it would in the process telegraph the more humane values those administrations want in appointees who will formulate and execute policy.

Ultimately, U.S. policy would be improved morally, spiritually and strategically by removing from its ranks people who think enabling genocide is defensible. And if this project of stigmatism included leading think tanks and cushy academic gigs, then our intellectual climate would be enriched as well.

This goes well beyond Israel policy. These kinds of pledges would also act as a deterrent against future scenarios in which foreign policy officials face major moral dilemmas. Currently, a culture of impunity pervades Washington — key figures who architected the war in Iraq, for example, paid no price for their roles in enabling one of the biggest U.S. foreign policy blunders of all time, yet remained influential in the think tank, academic and media worlds.

Their continued presence in foreign policy discourse permitted a noxious ideological tendency, neoconservatism, to continue influencing how Republicans and, to a lesser extent, Democrats discussed the future direction of U.S. foreign policy.

In a sane world, similar pledges would arise on the right to pressure future Republican administrations to view the architects of Trump’s war on Iran as unacceptable. Unfortunately, there’s little reason to believe that any such standards of moral or strategic judgment will ever be upheld by a political movement that has demonstrated cultish tendencies.

Democratic presidential candidates don’t necessarily need to officially sign these pledges to observe their spirit. They can at least say that those Biden officials would not be a fit for their administration and explain why.

As The Washington Sun pointed out, Sen. Chris Van Hollen, a Maryland Democrat and a potential 2028 contender, was recently asked by Zeteo about future administrations hiring officials like Blinken, McGurk and Sullivan. He replied, “People can change, but they have to be able to demonstrate that they fully understand exactly what went wrong and their role. … I have not seen the kind of introspection and change that I think would be required.”Exactly. These pledges are one way to force that badly needed reflection. And impose consequences.