The White House Office of Personnel Management is like the HR for the federal government. Apparently, Unelected President Elon Musk has taken on the task of staffing it. He has definitely not hired the best people to run the department. They seem like the worst. “Stable genius” Donald Trump seems just fine with it. One recent hire, whom Musk may or may not have picked, has written, "Slaves owe us reparations."
Wired has the scoop:
Sources within the federal government tell WIRED that the highest ranks of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM)—essentially the human resources function for the entire federal government—are now controlled by people with connections to Musk and to the tech industry. Among them is a person who, according to an online résumé, was set to start college last fall.
Wired runs through a number of higher-ups who are connected to one or more Musk businesses or other tech bros. Including these too-young-to-name staffers:
According to the same sources, other people at the top of the new OPM food chain include two people with apparent software engineering backgrounds, whom WIRED is not naming because of their ages. One, a senior adviser to the director, is a 21-year-old whose online résumé touts his work for Palantir, the government contractor and analytics firm cofounded by billionaire Peter Thiel, who is its chair. (The former CEO of PayPal and a longtime Musk associate, Thiel is a Trump supporter who helped bankroll the 2022 Senate campaign of his protégé, Vice President JD Vance.) The other, who reports directly to [OPM chief of staff Amanda] Scales, graduated from high school in 2024, according to a mirrored copy of an online résumé and his high school’s student magazine; he lists jobs as a camp counselor and a bicycle mechanic among his professional experiences, as well as a summer role at Neuralink, Musk’s brain-computer interface company.
But wait, it gets much, much worse.
The Project On Government Oversight (POGO) has the terrifying details on the OPM’s top lawyer, Andrew Kloster. It’s not clear if he was appointed by Musk but they’re obviously soul mates.
Kloster, who is now responsible for advising the government’s H.R. department, has a long history of racist and sexist online comments and social media posts. In a response to a post on The Volokh Conspiracy legal blog, as reported by The Daily Beast, Kloster wrote, “Consent is probably modern society’s most pernicious fetish.” He also has written online that “Slaves owe us reparations.” In 2023, roughly six months after being served a temporary restraining order, he tweeted, “I need a woman who looks like she got punched.” POGO’s queries sent to OPM and Kloster sought comment on these and other statements; neither addressed these questions.
…
Kloster is a fierce partisan. While he was working as deputy general counsel at OPM in 2020, the Associated Press reported that “Kloster worked as an observer for the Wisconsin Republican Party on election night and was accused of yelling at election workers and police in Green Bay, a claim he disputes.” He was directly involved in efforts to legally challenge the results of the 2020 presidential election by working for a controversial, taxpayer-funded effort in Wisconsin that ultimately found no widespread fraud. Days after the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, he responded to a tweet raising a scenario that could spark a “civil war” with hand clap emojis between the words “Do it.”
Dear Trump voters: None of these folks seem focused on reducing the costs of eggs.
