Elon Musk’s Henchmen Have Taken Over OPM—and It’s Not Looking Good

The federal government’s most important hiring office is now overrun with Elon Musk’s underqualified stooges.

Wired reported on Tuesday that the highest positions at the Office of Personnel Management are now held by people close to Musk. And some of them have a woeful lack of experience.

Two people in OPM leadership are so young that Wired refused to name them. One is a 21-year-old who worked at Peter Thiel’s Palantir firm, and the other is a 2024 high school graduate whose résumé consists of a summer job at Musk’s Neuralink company, as well as previous experience as a camp counselor and bike mechanic. They were set to start college last fall.

There’s also OPM’s new chief of staff, Amanda Scales, who has worked for Musk’s AI-company xAI, the startup founded by Musk himself. Before that, she worked at other tech companies like venture firm Human Capital, defense technology company Anduril, and Uber. Her hire is seen as a key move in the further politicization of the federal hiring process.

Musk’s henchmen taking over OPM may explain much of the concerning news coming out of the agency in the last week. That includes a mass test email sent to every single federal employee, reports that OPM is funneling employee info to Musk himself, and most recently, an ultimatum to federal employees who don’t want to return to the office. That so-called “buyout” sounded eerily similar to an email Musk sent to Twitter employees in 2023.

The takeover comes as the world’s richest man begins his work with DOGE, hoping to continue Trump’s efforts in drastically culling the federal government.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was thoroughly and categorically torched by Democrats during his Senate Finance hearing on Wednesday.

Colorado Senator Michael Bennet held Kennedy to the flame on his own language around disease and vaccines, which included claiming that Covid-19 was a “genetically engineered bioweapon that targets Black and White people but spared Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people” and that Lyme disease was constructed by the military.

“I didn’t say it was deliberately targeted, I just quoted an NIH-funded and NIH-published study–” Kennedy rattled out about Covid.

“Did you say that Lyme disease is highly likely a militarily engineered bioweapon?” Bennet said, changing the topic. “Did you say Lyme disease is a highly likely militarily engineered bioweapon?”

“I probably did say that,” Kennedy responded.

“OK, I want all of our colleagues to hear it, Mr. Kennedy. I want them to hear it. You said yes,” Bennet pressed, raising his voice. “Did you say that exposure to pesticides causes children to become transgender?”

Kennedy denied having said that, to which Bennet replied, “I have the record.”

“Did you write in your book that ‘it’s undeniable that African AIDS is an entirely different disease from Western AIDS’?” Bennet continued.

“I don’t know,” Kennedy shrugged back, to which Bennet once again informed the committee chairman that he would hand over records of Kennedy’s past remarks on the topic.

“This matters,” Bennet said, again raising his voice. “Because unlike other jobs we’re confirming around this place, this is a job where it is life and death.

“It’s too important for the games that you’re playing, Mr. Kennedy.”

“What is so disturbing to me is that out of 330 million Americans, we’re being asked to put somebody in this job who has spent 50 years of his life not honoring the tradition that he talked about at the beginning of this conversation, but peddling in half-truths, peddling in false statements, peddling in theories that, you know, create doubt about whether or not things that we know are safe are unsafe,” Bennet said.

Kennedy is slated for two confirmation hearings this week in his quest to become Donald Trump’s secretary of health and human services. He is appearing before the Senate Finance Committee on Wednesday morning and will face further questioning from the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pension, or HELP, Committee on Thursday.

Kennedy’s history in public health is questionable at best. His stances, which include unscientific beliefs that AIDS is not caused by HIV and that a large number of vaccines should be stripped from the market, could have major impacts on the agency designed to protect America’s health, especially as bird flu outbreaks dot the country.

In December, Trump announced that Kennedy would spend his time at the top of HHS researching an already thoroughly debunked conspiracy that ties vaccine usage to autism rates.

And Kennedy’s vaccine conspiracies aren’t just easily refutable, anti-vax hogwash—they’ve caused legitimate, real-world harm. Preceding a deadly measles outbreak on the Pacific islands of Samoa in 2019, Kennedy’s anti-vax nonprofit Children’s Health Defense spread rampant misinformation about the efficacy of vaccines, sending the nation’s vaccination rate plummeting from the 60–70 percent range to just 31 percent, according to Mother Jones. That year, the country reported 5,707 cases of measles—an illness that was declared eliminated by the U.S. in 2000 thanks to advancements in modern medicine (read: vaccines)—as well as 83 measles-related deaths, the majority of which were children under the age of five.

Further still, the 71-year-old’s private life has given pause to a number of lawmakers responsible for confirming him. Kennedy has publicly admitted to dumping a dead bear cub in Central Park, was accused of (and sort of apologized for) groping his children’s babysitter in the late 1990s, and last week was described by his cousin Caroline Kennedy as a “predator” who is “addicted to attention and power.”

To the surprise of absolutely no one, it turns out that Trump press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s outlandish claim that the U.S. government was about to spend $50 million on condoms for Gazans was a lie.

During a White House press briefing Tuesday, Leavitt appeared defensive and struggled to answer questions about Donald Trump’s freeze on federal grants and loans that caused widespread chaos. The freeze immediately affected essential government services such as Medicaid and Head Start. (A brief administrative stay has paused this until next Monday.)

Leavitt ended up offering an excuse for the sweeping order that didn’t make much sense at all.

“DOGE and OMB also found that there was about to be 50 million taxpayer dollars that went out the door to fund condoms in Gaza,” Leavitt claimed. “That is a preposterous waste of taxpayer money. So that’s what this pause is focused on: being good stewards of tax dollars.”

If that doesn’t sound true, it’s probably because it’s not, according to The Guardian.

A September report from USAID for the fiscal year 2023 (the most recent year for which there is available data) found that USAID spent $60.8 million on contraceptives and condoms, with only $7 million of that going toward condoms specifically.

None of those condoms went to Gaza, and in fact, USAID didn’t distribute condoms anywhere in the Middle East. Just one small shipment of oral and injectable contraceptives was sent to Jordan.

So it would be unlikely—no, impossible, for Leavitt’s outlandish claim to be true.

It seems that as one of Trump’s lead propagandists, Leavitt has already taken up one of his favorite tactics: making stuff up on the spot when backed into the corner. The problem is that people actually believe it. Especially when people such as Elon Musk and Jesse Watters boost the obvious lies.

Musk posted a video of Leavitt on X Tuesday, saying her baseless claim was the “tip of iceberg.” On Fox News that night, Watters claimed that Hamas was making “condom bombs.”

“Look it up! It’s a dual-use technology!” Watters cried.

After Donald Trump froze nearly all U.S. foreign aid last week, international projects on health, education, food, and all other humanitarian areas were placed in jeopardy. 

On Tuesday night, newly confirmed Secretary of State Marco Rubio tried to undo some of the confusion by issuing a memo waiving the aid freeze for “livesaving humanitarian assistance.” The memo defines this assistance as “core lifesaving medicine, medical services, food, shelter, and subsistence assistance, as well as supplies and reasonable administrative costs as necessary to deliver such assistance,” according to The Washington Post.

Programs still subject to the aid freeze include anything involving diversity programs, gender, abortion, family planning,  and “transgender surgeries, or other nonlife saving assistance,” the memo states. 

The memo says that “implementers of existing lifesaving humanitarian assistance programs should continue or resume work if they have stopped” but added that “this resumption is temporary in nature, and except by separate waiver or as required to carry out this waiver, no new contracts shall be entered into.”

But this language hasn’t cleared up any of the confusion, as organizations and agencies are now scrambling to figure out what exactly is considered “lifesaving” under the new memo. For example, one of the programs halted last week is the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, which funds clinics, hospitals, and other organizations around the world combating HIV and AIDS. It’s unclear if that work can now resume.

Plus, USAID, contractors, and nongovernmental aid organizations experiencing “stop-work” orders and a sudden halt in funds have already fired many employees. The memo also said that any assistance to migrants and refugees could only continue for livesaving activities “and for repatriation of third country nationals to their country of origin or safe-third-country.”

Neither Friday’s order nor Tuesday’s memo offered any way to request or seek a waiver from the aid freeze, except to contact the “Director of Foreign Assistance at the Department of State.” This position has yet to be filled by Rubio or the Trump administration. 

The decisions coming from the Trump administration since last week’s inauguration have resulted in chaos throughout the federal government and cruelty against the people who depend on it, whether they are federal workers, international aid recipients, or even struggling Americans on Medicaid. The administration is now facing a number of lawsuits and a public outcry. But will that change anything?

Robert F. Kennedy’s first confirmation hearing Wednesday to become secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services was quickly interrupted by protesters over the Trump nominee’s vaccine positions.

During his opening remarks, Kennedy said under oath that he is “not anti-vaccine”—but people standing in the back of the room weren’t convinced.

“News reports have claimed that I am anti-vaccine or anti-industry. I am neither,” Kennedy said.

“You are!” one person shouted out before she was dragged out by security. “Yes, you are!”

When the room returned to order, the 71-year-old continued that he considered himself “pro-safety” and mentioned that he had vaccinated all of his children and believed that “vaccines have a critical role in health care.”

As he continued speaking, another protester disrupted his speech for a second time and was removed.

Kennedy’s “pro-safety” claim, however, flies in the face of his outspoken stances on the jab. During the hearing, Senator Ron Wyden torched Kennedy for claiming in a 2020 podcast that he would “do anything, pay anything, to go back in time and not vaccinate” his children. And in a July 2023 interview with podcaster Lex Fridman, Kennedy baselessly connected essential vaccines—such as the polio jab, which has practically eradicated the paralyzing disease from the planet—to lethal diseases such as cancer.

“You’ve talked about that the media slanders you by calling you an anti-vaxxer, and you’ve said that you’re not anti-vaccine, you’re pro–safe vaccine,” Fridman prompted the former independent presidential candidate. “Difficult question: Can you name any vaccines that you think are good?”

“I think some of the live virus vaccines are probably averting more problems than they’re causing. There’s no vaccine that is, you know, safe and effective,” Kennedy said at the time. This is false.

Kennedy claimed during a heated back and forth with Wyden that quoting him was “dishonest” and that Fridman had, at the time, interrupted a response that was supposed to extend to a philosophy that every medicine—including vaccines—have individuals who are sensitive to them. Unfortunately, Kennedy didn’t find a way to squeeze that seemingly retroactive detail into his more than two-hour interview with the podcaster.

Political campaign donors are getting more brazen about what they expect to buy with their dollar.

Nicole Shanahan, a Silicon Valley lawyer and investor, impressed upon a handful of lawmakers late Tuesday the importance of confirming her former third-party running mate, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. But within the folds of the message lay a dark and direct warning for two specific senators whose campaigns she backed five years ago.

“This hasn’t been widely reported, but in 2020 I cut large checks to Chuck Schumer to help Democrats flip two Senate seats from red to blue,” Shanahan said in a video posted to X. “The two candidates I helped select: Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, please know I will be watching your votes very closely.

“I will make it my personal mission that you lose your seats in the Senate if you vote against the future health of America’s children,” she said.

The ex-wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin then went on to challenge the potential “no” votes from multiple other politicians, promising to find and back political challengers to their seats if they didn’t swing for Kennedy.

“And more than that, I also want to say to Senators Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins, Bill Cassidy, Tom Tillis, James Lankford, Corey Booker, John Fetterman, Bernie Sanders, and Catherine Cortez Masto—this is a bipartisan message, and it comes directly from me, while Bobby may be willing to play nice, I won’t,” Shanahan warned.

“If you vote against him, I will personally fund challengers to primary you in your next election, and I will enlist hundreds of thousands to join me. You’re either on the side of transparency and accountability, or you’re standing in the way.”

Kennedy, a virulent vaccine conspiracy theorist, is slated for two confirmation hearings this week. He will appear before the Senate Finance Committee on Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. and will face further questioning from the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pension, or HELP, Committee on Thursday.

Kennedy’s history in public health is questionable at best. His stances, which include unscientific beliefs that AIDS is not caused by HIV and that a large number of vaccines should be stripped from the market, could have major impacts on the agency designed to protect America’s health, especially as bird flu outbreaks begin to dot the country.

In December, Donald Trump announced that Kennedy would spend his time at the top of HHS researching an already thoroughly debunked conspiracy that ties vaccine usage to autism rates.

And Kennedy’s vaccine conspiracies aren’t just easily refutable, anti-vax hogwash—they’ve caused legitimate, real-world harm. Preceding a deadly measles outbreak on the Pacific islands of Samoa in 2019, Kennedy’s anti-vax nonprofit Children’s Health Defense spread rampant misinformation about the efficacy of vaccines, sending the nation’s vaccination rate plummeting from the 60–70 percent range to just 31 percent, according to Mother Jones. That year, the country reported 5,707 cases of measles—an illness that was declared eliminated by the United States in 2000 thanks to advancements in modern medicine (read: vaccines)—as well as 83 measles-related deaths, the majority of which were children under the age of 5.

Further still, the 71-year-old’s private life has given pause to a number of lawmakers responsible for confirming him. Kennedy has publicly admitted to dumping a dead bear cub in Central Park, was accused of (and sort of apologized for) groping his children’s babysitter in the late 1990s, and last week was described by his cousin Caroline Kennedy as a “predator” who is “addicted to attention and power.”

“I have known Bobby my whole life; we grew up together,” the former ambassador to Australia and Japan wrote in a letter to lawmakers obtained by The Washington Post.

“His basement, his garage, his dorm room were the centers of the action where drugs were available, and he enjoyed showing off how he put baby chickens and mice in the blender to feed his hawks,” she continued. “It was often a perverse scene of despair and violence.”

Tim Kaine has a warning for any federal workers considering Trump’s buyout offer: It’s a scam.

The president announced on Tuesday that federal workers must return to the office full-time, or they can resign by next week with a buyout and severance pay through September 30. This is part of his effort to overhaul the federal bureaucracy in his own image, and with his own supporters.

“If you resign under this program, you will retain all pay and benefits regardless of your daily workload and will be exempted from all applicable in-person work requirements until September 30, 2025 (or earlier if you choose to accelerate your resignation for any reason),” the email read.

Aside from angering federal workers, the buyout raised immediate red flags for Democrats, and Senator Kaine particularly.

“The federal employees received an interesting email at the end of the day today,” Kaine said on Tuesday, referring to the buyout email. “So tender your resignation, and then boy it’s just gonna be a gravy train, you’re just gonna get paid for seven months without working. The president has no authority to make that offer!

“There’s no budget line item to pay people who are not showing up for work,” Kaine continued. “My message to federal employees who received this is: Yeah, the president has tried to terrorize you for about a week, and then gives you a little sweetheart offer if you resign in the next week.… Don’t be fooled! He’s tricked hundreds of people with that offer. If you accept that offer and resign, he’ll stiff you.… That promise is worth nothing.”

Some federal workers seem to be heeding Kaine’s warning.

“You can’t buy me off, scare me away, or intimidate me into resigning. I’m angry, spiteful, and resolute in holding the line and outlasting anyone trying to destroy the agency whose work I believe in and a mission I take to heart,” said one user in the popular r/fednews subreddit.

Donald Trump’s petty crusade for revenge continues: General Mark Milley will be the next of the president’s former advisers to lose his security detail.

Fox News reported Tuesday that according to multiple senior officials, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth will announce that he is “immediately pulling” Milley’s security clearance and personal security detail.

Hegseth will also direct the inspector general to determine whether Milley should be stripped of a star in retirement for undermining the chain of command.

Milley refused Trump’s orders in 2020 to send the military to crush protesters in Washington in the wake of George Floyd’s death. He has also described Trump as a “fascist” and a “wannabe dictator.”

Ever since entering the White House, it seems Trump just can’t stop thinking about the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Within minutes of being sworn in, Milley’s portrait was stripped from the wall of the Pentagon. Last week, Trump posted that his presidential personnel office was “actively in the process of identifying and removing over a thousand Presidential Appointees from the previous Administration,” including Milley, whom he listed by name.

Trump has already pulled the security details for some of his other former colleagues turned political adversaries, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, John Bolton, and Mike Pompeo. Each one has publicly criticized Trump, and the latter two had their security details removed despite warnings from the Biden administration that they were still receiving threats from foreign adversaries.

Tulsi Gabbard is facing more scrutiny over her foreign travels, specifically a trip she made to the Middle East while a member of Congress.

In 2017, as a member of Congress representing Hawaii, Gabbard made a trip to Syria and Lebanon to meet with Syrian leader Bashar Al Assad. But shortly after her visit, The New York Times reported, U.S. intelligence agencies intercepted a call between two Hezbollah officials in which they said that she met with “the boss” or “the big guy.”

Intelligence officials assume that the person in question was a senior Hezbollah official, or a high-ranking Lebanese government official with strong ties to Hezbollah. Gabbard denied meeting anyone from the militant organization and political party but acknowledged that she met with different Lebanese officials on her trip, including some close to Hezbollah, such as the head of Lebanese intelligence at the time. 

The Times spoke with unnamed people close to Gabbard who said that she disclosed all of her meetings from the trip and that the reports were misinterpreted. But this latest revelation is sure to introduce another snag into Gabbard’s confirmation process to serve as director of national intelligence. Gabbard hasn’t yet won over the Republicans on the Senate Intelligence Committee, nor influential Senator Mitch McConnell. 

The report also notes that Gabbard found herself under additional scrutiny from a federal agency that protects flights, thanks to a trip she made to the Vatican for an event organized by a European businessman on the FBI watchlist.

Trump’s allies are trying to force the normally secret committee vote to be made public in the hopes of forcing skeptical Republicans, like Senators Susan Collins and Todd Young, to back her. Gabbard can’t afford to lose a single committee vote, stacking the odds against this particularly quixotic Cabinet choice. 

Trump’s ultimatum to federal workers is backfiring—making them vow to stay in their positions out of sheer spite. 

On Tuesday, the president announced that he’d be giving federal workers a choice: return to the office full-time or quit with a buyout and severance pay through September 30. This is part of his effort to revamp the federal bureaucracy in his own image, and with his own supporters.

“The President required that employees return to in-person work, restored accountability for employees who have policy-making authority, restored accountability for senior career executives, and reformed the federal hiring process to focus on merit,” a mass email said. “As a result of the above orders, the reform of the federal workforce will be significant.

“If you resign under this program, you will retain all pay and benefits regardless of your daily workload and will be exempted from all applicable in-person work requirements until September 30, 2025 (or earlier if you choose to accelerate your resignation for any reason),” the email continues.

Federal workers aren’t taking this lying down.

“I’ll be honest, before that email went out, I was looking for any way to get out of this fresh hell,” said one user in the popular r/fednews subreddit. “But now I am fired up to make these goons as frustrated as possible, RTO be damned.”

These sentiments were echoed throughout the thread.

“I’ll continue to do my job and fight for the position I’ve earned,” another said. “It took me 10 years of applying and 20 years experience in my field to get here. I will not be pushed out by two billionaire trust funds babies. I’M NOT LEAVING!”

“I’ve never been more motivated to stay. Before the ‘buyout’ memo, I was ready to go job hunting, but then a revelation hit. I took an oath under this position to the American people and leaving my job under the current state would be failing to maintain my oath as civil servant,” another worker wrote. 

“You can’t buy me off, scare me away, or intimidate me into resigning. I’m angry, spiteful, and resolute in holding the line and outlasting anyone trying to destroy the agency whose work I believe in and a mission I take to heart,” one comment stated. “My colleagues feel the same way and we’re not leaving, you’ll have to drag us out. We’ll continue to follow mission we’re charged with executing and serving the individuals we’re charged with serving.… We will be here and continue to be here.” The user also noted that he and 12 other co-workers would be wearing “Rebel Alliance” T-shirts under their work clothes every Friday in the office.

“They just created the imaginary deep state they convinced everyone they were fighting against, oh the irony,” another user noted.

Federal employees also noticed that the memo announcing the buyouts was eerily similar to the one Elon Musk sent Twitter employees in 2022.