A coalition of 30 Republican members of Congress, including Reps. Andrew Clyde (R-GA), Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL), Lauren Boebert (R-CO), and Byron Donalds (R-FL), recently sent a letter to the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) — the government’s human resources arm — pleading for it to reject the Biden administration’s attempt to “burrow” Claire Trickler-McNulty, the assistant director of the Office of Immigration Program Evaluation in the Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) into a career civil servant position.
“Burrowing” is when the administration embeds political appointees with potentially extreme ideologies into permanent government positions, making them almost impossible to replace, even when the White House changes hands. It’s anti-democratic cronyism at its absolute worst.
As the members’ letter showcases, this particular case of burrowing is extremely problematic because the government bureaucrat in question is a radical open-borders progressive who is considered by many to be an architect of the “Abolish ICE” movement.
According to the GOP members, as an ICE employee, Trickler-McNulty and her colleagues systematically replaced “enforcement, compliance, and removal of illegal aliens with ‘catch and release’ social service programs” and closed “existing operational ICE processing centers around the country.”
Just the person we want working in the government for the generations to come, am I right?
With the pollsters predicting the GOP will take the White House in the next presidential election, the Biden administration correctly fears that she may be out of a job soon, so they’re trying to procure her government work that doesn’t require political re-appointment. This is wrongheaded and dangerous, and the GOP is right to do everything it can to prevent it. But the larger problem here is how much power the OPM has in the first place.
Even though the private sector has a great track record with hiring and managing the federal workforce (the government has contracted with these companies in the past), the Biden administration continues to let OPM bureaucrats take the lead because the agency is complicit in the White House’s goal of re-making the federal workforce into a leftist pipe dream.
In addition to accepting burrowing requests from the administration, the agency is DEI-ing the federal workforce to the extreme — prioritizing ideological conformity over competence, merit, and efficiency.
OPM stated unequivocally in a blog post that its “mission is to recruit and support the best possible federal workforce” and that “prioritizing [diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility will improve individual and team performance,” but the agency isn’t fooling anyone. DEI is not a recipe for an effective, streamlined federal workforce — it’s a recipe for turning the federal workforce into the rainbow-colored radical leftist cabal that the current administration desires.
Given how little OPM seems to care about ensuring efficiency, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that its negligence has caused disasters that cost taxpayers millions of dollars.
In 2001, the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office placed OPM on a “High-Risk List — a list that identifies federal programs and operations that are “high risk” due to their vulnerabilities to fraud, waste abuse, and mismanagement. 23 years later, it remains there. Even after its failures caused the largest case of hacking of the U.S. government at the time it occurred (which taxpayers are still paying for), it refuses to put pragmatism before partisan politics.
Thankfully, Congress is finally putting OPM’s power to the test.
In addition to the the burrowing letter the 30 GOP lawmakers recently sent to OPM, Kentucky Rep. James Comer, the Chairman of the House Oversight Committee, has taken significant steps to address OPM’s issues, including holding oversight hearings on OPM’s operations and practices. The GOP aims to privatize the agency, strip it of some of its powers, and/or offer true reform that has been lacking for a quarter of a century.
OPM has had its fun with politicizing the federal bureaucracy for far too long. It’s long past due for the adults to take charge.
Haley Kennington (@LadyKennington) is a conservative commentator who served as the Research Director & Story Editor for “2020:The Plot Against the President” and Research/Archive Editor for “What Is a Woman?“
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller.