For Some Federal Workers, Trump and Musk Offer a Career Springboard

The Washington Post

15:46 JST, March 9, 2025

Before Donald Trump returned to the White House, Charles Ezell had a mid-level IT job for a Macon, Georgia, field office of the federal government’s human resources agency, the Office of Personnel Management. He visited OPM’s Washington headquarters only a handful of times last year, two people familiar with the agency’s inner workings said, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals.

When he got a call from a Trump adviser after the November election, Ezell told a Presbyterian church publication, he initially assumed it was a headhunter trying to recruit him back to the private sector. He told at least one colleague that he was being considered for a new job but was unsure which one.

On Inauguration Day, the White House announced Ezell would be the acting director of the personnel agency, which has emerged as a driving force in billionaire Elon Musk’s efforts to remake the federal workforce.

“It was a bit of shock and awe internally,” said one former OPM employee, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations with colleagues, adding that Ezell was a kind manager and competent at his prior job – if unqualified for such a dramatic promotion. “Overnight, Chuck went from being a colonel to being a three-star general.”

Ezell is among dozens of career officials for whom Trump and Musk’s push to slash spending and wrest power from the civil service presents not a threat, but an opportunity. Around the government, some longtime staffers have emerged as crucial allies for the administration, willing to say or do what their colleagues were not – and earning a promotion in the process.

To Musk, whose rhetoric about federal workers is overwhelmingly negative, these newfound allies are bright spots who confirm his belief in the dysfunction of the overall government. Musk, who oversees the U.S. DOGE Service, has said that the Trump administration promotes “hundreds” of civil servants every day when “we encounter excellence.” That number could not be immediately verified, and a White House spokesman declined to provide examples. DOGE stands for Department of Government Efficiency, though it is not a Cabinet-level agency.

“There are plenty of Trump supporters among the bureaucracy, and they are interested in helping them accomplish what they want to accomplish,” said Robert Shea, a Republican who served in senior political roles at the White House budget office. “There are officials who are excited to work with them, and they could make a big difference.”

Other experts and federal employees say many of these Trump-supporting civil servants are little more than opportunists or figureheads, sacrificing long-standing norms for their own advancement and enabling the administration’s attempts to stretch the law.

“From what I can tell, most civil servants are trying hard to uphold the law while honoring the legitimate directions from the administration,” said David Super, an administrative law professor at Georgetown. “But a few of them seem entirely focused on serving the administration – and those few have the capacity to do a great deal of damage.”

A ‘shortcut to a compliant workforce’

At more than a dozen agencies, clashes with DOGE or its allies over key government functions have led to the ouster of senior career officials with decades of experience and loyal followings among their colleagues – creating vacancies in the highest echelons of the government. Musk’s group has then scoured the federal bureaucracy for people willing to implement DOGE’s vision, sometimes finding those people in surprising places.

At the Social Security Administration, Leland Dudek was a mid-level career official in the anti-fraud office. When DOGE staffers sought access to sensitive data, Dudek said in a since-deleted LinkedIn post, he went around his bosses to hand it over – and was quickly put on leave. The Trump administration canceled Dudek’s suspension and put him in charge instead.

Dudek had few traditional qualifications for the job. After his promotion, some Social Security staff members spent hours looking up organizational charts and discovered that the White House had skipped over four levels of managers to elevate Dudek, a “management analyst” with no direct reports. Normally, employees said, someone at his level would have to enter a “leadership development track” and be accepted into senior executive service training, which often requires relocation to other parts of the country. Under ordinary circumstances, it would have taken him decades to reach the top. A spokesperson for SSA declined to comment.

At the National Institutes of Health, Matthew J. Memoli was best known as a flu researcher who battled early in the coronavirus pandemic with Anthony S. Fauci and other agency leaders over their push to mandate vaccines even though the shots didn’t completely stop the spread of the virus.

Memoli also told colleagues the agency’s approach to the pandemic clashed with its stated principles on diversity and inclusion. “The rhetoric from NIH and [the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] has led to what can only be described as hate and bigotry against the unvaccinated,” he wrote in an October 2021 email to a colleague, saying he was “devastated” by the Biden administration’s strategy.

When Memoli’s complaints went public, he became a pariah to NIH leadership but a hero to conservatives such as Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin) and Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford researcher whom Trump recently tapped to lead NIH. Until Bhattacharya is confirmed, the administration has put Memoli in charge of the nearly $50 billion agency, bypassing Lawrence Tabak, NIH’s longtime deputy, who had previously served as its acting leader, and dozens of more-senior officials. Tabak has since resigned.

Those new appointees replaced career officials who had long served in both Democratic and Republican administrations and were accustomed to shifts in policy after elections. Typically, civil servants spend transition periods reading about the incoming president’s priorities so they can help carry them out, said Kathy Stack, who worked for various presidents over several decades at the White House budget office.

Under Trump, however, many faced demands they saw as unusual, illegal or dangerous, current and former officials said. Their removal and replacement with Trump loyalists helped signal to the rest of the workforce that certain choices would be punished – or rewarded.

“You get rid of the person who represents the most respected, the leader amongst the career folks, and that is a shortcut to getting a compliant workforce,” said Max Stier, president and chief executive of the Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan group that advocates for a stronger federal government. “You don’t actually have to fire everybody to beat down anyone’s willingness to speak truth to power. You fire the head.”

New agency leaders move to enact Trump, Musk agenda

Many civil servants who have received big promotions under Trump have paved the way for large-scale changes to their agencies.

Under Ezell’s leadership, Musk’s allies have turned OPM into a driving force for overhauling government. Once regarded as a sleepy human resources agency, OPM has been central to Musk’s efforts to cull the federal workforce, implementing mass firings of recently hired probationary workers, sending emailed offers of deferred resignation and issuing emailed demands for updates on what workers did the previous week. Many of these moves have been challenged as illegal.

The acting IRS commissioner, Melanie Krause, has pushed career staffers to turn taxpayer data over to the Department of Homeland Security, a move many officials believe would violate federal privacy laws and mark a major retreat from decades of safeguards on tax return information. IRS has so far resisted.

As acting NIH director, Memoli has helped implement a DOGE-driven slowdown of new funding for research, agonizing colleagues, who say the policy threatens U.S. biomedical research. “The last few weeks have been difficult for many of us, but we must prepare for further changes ahead,” Memoli wrote to staff last month in an email obtained by The Washington Post.

At SSA, Dudek has moved to fire the entire civil rights office, told staff to prepare for 50 percent cuts and kicked off a mass reorganization of field operations. Last Saturday, he said in an internal memo that “elections have consequences” and that SSA now has “the opportunity to select and empower the best leaders – individuals who will drive innovation, cut waste, and restore public confidence in Social Security.”

In those moves, Dudek found favor at the White House.

“Amazingly, Leland was fired by Social Security upper management for helping @DOGE find taxpayer savings. Can you believe that??,” Musk wrote on X, his social media platform. “Thanks to President Trump, Leland was brought back right away and now HE is upper management.”

In some cases, these promotions have moved so fast that some employees argue they may not be legal. Memoli’s abrupt installation as acting NIH director raised internal questions about whether the move complied with the agency’s order of succession, according to two people with knowledge of those conversations, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. An NIH official said Memoli was designated the agency’s “first assistant” so he could legally assume the acting director role.

Similarly, Trump chose a retired three-star general, Dan Caine, as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Caine has had an unusual career that includes time as a National Guard fighter pilot, Special Operations commander in Iraq and the top U.S. military officer in the CIA. But he does not meet the legal criteria to be the Joint Chiefs chairman, the highest-ranking military adviser to the president. The president may appoint someone “only if” they have served as the Joint Chiefs vice chairman, as the top officer of a branch of service or as the four-star leader of a combatant command, such as U.S. Central Command.

The president may bypass those requirements if he deems it “necessary in the national interest.” But the administration hasn’t offered much explanation for why it dismissed Caine’s predecessor or chose Caine, whom Trump had praised before he tapped him.

The abrupt promotions improve Trump’s odds of having people in position to help implement his agenda – however unorthodox, said Richard Pierce, an administrative law professor at George Washington University.

In “a lot of senior civil service positions,” Pierce said, “it’s handy to have someone you know will do whatever you tell them to do.”