One of the first acts of the second Trump administration was its summary firing of 25,000 probationary employees from all across the federal government. This effectively removed the youngest workers from federal agencies en masse.
Now, the Trump brain-trust sees a need to reopen the spigots of federal hiring. But they do not want to hire on the basis of merit. Instead, the focus is on whether new hires are compatible with the Trump priorities, which is why they keep insisting on posing questions to applicants about their support for Trump policies even though such queries are illegal.
In a recent interview, Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor disclosed that he wants to hire people like Edward Coristine – a former Department of Government Efficiency staffer known as “Big Balls,” a teenage Elon Musk recruit who led the wrecking crew who terrorized federal service.
“I wanna see people like ‘Big Balls,’ or Ed, as we call him colloquially… We need people like that,” Kupor said. “He dropped out of college. He never had substantive work experience before coming to DOGE.” In short, they are looking for their idea of “a few good men” – no women or Ivy Leaguers need apply.
Alarmingly, the idea of institutionalizing DOGE is of particular concern. Arguably, DOGE was one of the most destructive government initiatives in the past half-century. Not only did the Musk gang fail to produce promised savings, but they also executed poorly thought-out and disruptive federal workforce cuts, canceled or restructured more than 10,000 federal contracts to often disastrous effect, and dismantled USAID leading to an estimated 600,000 global deaths. It is fair to say that DOGE was the bureaucratic equivalent of a measles epidemic.
To implement this dark vision, Kupor is now on a college tour of unaccredited institutions and trolling right-wing influencers to lure young, otherwise unqualified workers of a conservative bent into federal service. To underline the thinking behind this effort, Kupor created a taxpayer-financed video featuring 90’s idol Kid Rock, fresh off his disastrous Freedom Fest fiasco. What a great plan!
What will happen three years from now is less clear, when/if a new administration with a far different philosophy comes to town. What will it do with a cadre of marginally qualified Trump “freedom fighters” newly embedded throughout government? Will civil service protections be so eroded by that time that, as before, a new administration could fire wholesale thousands of federal employees for purely ideological reasons?
More than 150 years ago, the poet Sam Walter Foss wrote in “The Coming American,” “Bring me men to match my mountains,” and of “Men whose moral currents sweep.” Today, our federal Office of Personnel Management offers no such vision of a quest for accomplishment in its misguided search for men whose principal qualification is an outsized ego.
Perhaps the lesson of this current politicized journey will be to highlight the enduring value of a federal merit system in which competence and integrity are valued above political loyalty.
Jeff Ruch is the former Executive Director and Pacific Director of PEER. He now serves as Senior Counsel.