Latest news with #ScheduleF
Sky News AU
25-06-2025
- Politics
- Sky News AU
Top Donald Trump official calls US airstrikes on Iran ‘pointless,' suggests ‘deep state' swayed President
A top staffer in the federal agency overseeing personnel for the Trump administration has denounced the US strikes on Iran as 'pointless' and suggested the decision was made by members of DC's 'deep state.' Andrew Kloster, who serves as general counsel at the Office of Personnel Management, tweeted — and then deleted — a string of posts ripping the US for having sent 'handouts' to Israel in the past and for previously downplaying the threat of Tehran getting a nuclear weapon. Within a half-hour of President Trump announcing successful US airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities Saturday night, Kloster wrote on X, 'I apologize and will never again doubt the power of the deep state.' In a response to an X user saying that 'Iran's nuclear sites being crushed seems a long-term benefit for the US,' Kloster wrote, 'I think it was just kind of pointless.' He also boosted a post from Vish Burra, disgraced former New York Rep. George Santos' ex-director of operations, that referred to Israel's conflict with Iran as a 'tribal squabble' after Tehran broke a cease-fire Trump secured Monday night. The posts — still visible as of Tuesday morning — have since been deleted. The senior official's candid commentary is extremely unusual — due in part to the fact that he can be fired at will as a political appointee. OPM also has a role in implementing Trump's 'Schedule F' directive to ensure that non-political appointees in the federal bureaucracy are upholding the president's policies. In April, Trump tweeted that pursuant to one of his Day One executive orders, all career government employees would need to 'be held to the highest standards of conduct and performance. 'If these government workers refuse to advance the policy interests of the President, or are engaging in corrupt behavior, they should no longer have a job,' Trump added. Kloster's posts reflected the broad unease among Trump's non-interventionist supporters who fear that US involvement in bombing Iran will trigger a prolonged conflict in the region, sap trillions of dollars more from the US Treasury and result in American deaths — after prior US interventions turned into quagmires in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt had urged the president's jittery MAGA base ahead of the bombing mission to 'trust in Trump' to secure 'peace through strength.' Just two days after his unprecedented attack on Iran, Trump swiftly returned to his anti-war messaging — brokering a cease-fire Monday and then strong-arming both sides after violations Tuesday. A source close to the White House described Kloster's tweets as foolish. Kloster worked at the White House Office of Presidential Personnel during the final year of Trump's first term and also as a lawyer for then-Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz's congressional office from February 2023 until his resignation in November. He also had stints as deputy general counsel and later acting general counsel in OPM during the first Trump administration as well as in senior positions in the Department of Transportation and the Environmental Protection Agency. The tweets are just the latest drama surrounding Trump appointees put in charge of filling his administration. Presidential Personnel Director Sergio Gor allegedly sparked Trump's feud this month with Elon Musk. Sources also revealed that Gor, the top administration official in charge of vetting job applicants, had not submitted paperwork for a standard government security clearance and that despite saying he's from Malta was not born on the Mediterranean island. 'Sergio Gor is a trusted adviser to President Trump and he has played a critical role in helping President Trump staff the most talented administration in history,' Leavitt has said in the past. Trump and Vice President JD Vance have also both praised Gor for his work filling out the staff of the second administration, with the latter touting his 'effort to ensure committed, principled America First advocates staff the President's government.' Kloster has been described by sources close to the White House as a close friend and ally of Gor. Kloster did not respond to Post requests for comment. The White House declined to comment. Originally published as Top Donald Trump official calls US airstrikes on Iran 'pointless,' suggests 'deep state' swayed President
New York Post
24-06-2025
- Politics
- New York Post
Andrew Kloster calls US airstrikes on Iran 'pointless,' suggests ‘deep state' swayed prez
WASHINGTON — A top staffer in the federal agency overseeing personnel for the Trump administration has denounced the US strikes on Iran as 'pointless' and suggested the decision was made by members of DC's 'deep state.' Andrew Kloster, who serves as general counsel at the Office of Personnel Management, tweeted — and then deleted — a string of posts ripping the US for having sent 'handouts' to Israel in the past and for previously downplaying the threat of Tehran getting a nuclear weapon. Within a half-hour of President Trump announcing successful US airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities Saturday night, Kloster wrote on X, 'I apologize and will never again doubt the power of the deep state.' Advertisement 7 Top Trump administration staffer Andrew Kloster posted views on X within a half hour of the president announcing successful US airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities Saturday night. Andrew Kloster/X 7 'I think it was just kind of pointless,' Kloster added Sunday in a response to an X user. Andrew Kloster/X In a response to an X user saying that 'Iran's nuclear sites being crushed seems a long-term benefit for the US,' Kloster wrote, 'I think it was just kind of pointless.' Advertisement He also boosted a post from Vish Burra, disgraced former New York Rep. George Santos' ex-director of operations, that referred to Israel's conflict with Iran as a 'tribal squabble' after Tehran broke a cease-fire Trump secured Monday night. The posts — still visible as of Tuesday morning — have since been deleted. 7 Kloster's commentary is extremely unusual — due in part to the fact that he can be fired at will as a political appointee. ARKloster/X The senior official's candid commentary is extremely unusual — due in part to the fact that he can be fired at will as a political appointee. Advertisement OPM also has a role in implementing Trump's 'Schedule F' directive to ensure that non-political appointees in the federal bureaucracy are upholding the president's policies. In April, Trump tweeted that pursuant to one of his Day One executive orders, all career government employees would need to 'be held to the highest standards of conduct and performance. 7 The Trump official also boosted another post that referred to Israel's conflict with Iran as a 'tribal squabble.' Andrew Kloster/X 'If these government workers refuse to advance the policy interests of the President, or are engaging in corrupt behavior, they should no longer have a job,' Trump added. Advertisement Kloster's posts reflected the broad unease among Trump's non-interventionist supporters who fear that US involvement in bombing Iran will trigger a prolonged conflict in the region, sap trillions of dollars more from the US Treasury and result in American deaths — after prior US interventions turned into quagmires in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt had urged the president's jittery MAGA base ahead of the bombing mission to 'trust in Trump' to secure 'peace through strength.' 7 Kloster's posts reflect the broad unease among Trump's non-interventionist supporters who fear US involvement in bombing Iran could trigger a prolonged conflict in the region. Planet Labs PBC/AFP via Getty Images Just two days after his unprecedented attack on Iran, Trump swiftly returned to his anti-war messaging — brokering a cease-fire Monday and then strong-arming both sides after violations Tuesday. A source close to the White House described Kloster's tweets as foolish. Kloster worked at the White House Office of Presidential Personnel during the final year of Trump's first term and also as a lawyer for then-Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz's congressional office from February 2023 until his resignation in November. He also had stints as deputy general counsel and later acting general counsel in OPM during the first Trump administration as well as in senior positions in the Department of Transportation and the Environmental Protection Agency. 7 Just two days after his unprecedented attack on Iran, Trump swiftly returned to his anti-war messaging. via REUTERS Advertisement 7 The US used B-2 bombers to help nail Iran over the weekend. AP The tweets are just the latest drama surrounding Trump appointees put in charge of filling his administration. Presidential Personnel Director Sergio Gor allegedly sparked Trump's feud this month with Elon Musk. Sources also revealed that Gor, the top administration official in charge of vetting job applicants, had not submitted paperwork for a standard government security clearance and that despite saying he's from Malta was not born on the Mediterranean island. Advertisement Kloster has been described by sources close to the White House as a close friend and ally of Gor. Kloster did not respond to Post requests for comment. The White House declined to comment.
Yahoo
02-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Russ Vought: key Project 2025 figure set to continue Trump cuts after Musk exit
Russ Vought's years-long quest to dismantle the federal workforce and consolidate power for the president is coming to fruition, and he may be given a major boost when he reportedly takes on Elon Musk's cost-cutting efforts as the billionaire bows out of the federal government. The director of the office of management and budget has worked alongside Musk's 'department of government efficiency' to slash through the federal government since Trump took office. The Wall Street Journal reported this week that Vought would take on an increased public role in Washington as Musk transitions out and the president's budget process advances. The outlet reported that Vought could use the budget process to make some of Doge's cuts permanent. Vought embraces Christian nationalism and is more ideologically driven than Musk. He knows more intimately how to use the levers of government to enact his goals. He was a key figure in Project 2025, the conservative manifesto to guide a second Trump term, and authored a chapter on how to lead the agency he's again tasked with leading. His distaste for civil servants, the so-called 'deep state' that prevented Trump from carrying out his full agenda the first time, is profound. 'We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,' Vought said in a video obtained by ProPublica and the research group Documented in October. 'When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down … We want to put them in trauma.' Musk and Vought have forged a 'quiet alliance', Politico reported in March. Musk served as the public face of cutting the government, the wrecking ball whose team forced its way into federal agencies to access data to underpin cuts to spending. Vought and his team had the knowledge and precision to then parse that data and figure out whether and how to cut, Politico reported. A former official told the outlet that Vought was a ''by any means necessary' guy', grasping the political moment to serve his vision. Max Stier, who leads the Partnership for Public Service, a non-profit that seeks to advance the federal workforce, told Politico that the difference between the two men is that 'Vought wants to reshape our government into a bludgeon for his ideological vision, while Musk seems much more focused on destruction without understanding or care for the many harmful consequences of his actions'. Vought told the conservative commentator Tucker Carlson he thought Doge was 'bringing an exhilarating rush' and creativity to slashing the government, praising the agency's 'outside- the-box thinking [and] comfortability with risk and leverage'. Vought is expected to work on the new version of Schedule F, a proposal he advanced in Trump's first term that was revived, which would eliminate job protections for tens of thousands of career civil servants, making it easier to fire them and replace them with loyalists. Vought wants to flex executive power and exert the president's role over the federal budget by impounding funds, or not spending money Congress has already appropriated in its role as budget-maker. He's spoiling for a court battle on the topic, hoping the US supreme court will overturn the Impoundment Control Act, which limits impoundment. Before he was confirmed in his role, the office of management and budget sent a memo that created confusion and chaos nationwide when it called for a mass freeze on federal grants and funds in the early days of the Trump administration. That memo had 'Russ's name written all fucking over it', a Republican aide told Politico, though Vought was not formally tied to it. Vought served in Trump's first term as deputy director of the agency, then director, ending when Trump left office. Before his White House tenure, Vought was a fixture in rightwing politics in Washington, holding a variety of roles in Republican offices. Related: Russell Vought: Trump appointee who wants federal workers to be 'in trauma' After his time in the White House, Vought started the Center for Renewing America, an organization with a mission to 'renew a consensus of America as a nation under God' that has railed against critical race theory and progressive ideology. The center has recommended invoking the Insurrection Act and ending the Impoundment Control Act. The center, and Vought, contributed to Project 2025, which was helmed by the conservative thinktank the Heritage Foundation. In Project 2025's chapter on the office of the president, Vought lays out how the federal government is not beholden to the president's plan and is instead 'carrying out its own policy plans and preferences – or, worse yet, the policy plans and preferences of a radical, supposedly 'woke' faction of the country'. The bureaucracy believes it has independent authority and protection, making it too powerful to be reined in, Vought said. 'The great challenge confronting a conservative President is the existential need for aggressive use of the vast powers of the executive branch to return power – including power currently held by the executive branch – to the American people,' he wrote. As for his own role, the budget director 'must view his job as the best, most comprehensive approximation of the president's mind as it pertains to the policy agenda'. Vought, and the project writ large, call for mass firings of federal employees to better stock the workforce with Trump loyalists who will not stand in the way of his agenda. 'The overall situation is constitutionally dire, unsustainably expensive, and in urgent need of repair,' he wrote of the federal bureaucracy. 'Nothing less than the survival of self-governance in America is at stake.' Since Trump has taken office, a host of Project 2025-aligned proposals have been introduced or put in place, cementing the role the ideological document plays in the advancement of the rightwing agenda. The first wave of Project 2025-aligned actions has been conducted largely by executive orders. A second wave of recommendations requires the rule-making process at agencies, and others would require congressional action. In this more precise stage, Vought would carry out his plans to create long-term changes to how the federal government functions and operates. He has written the budget office plays a 'vital role in reining in the regulatory state'.
E&E News
16-05-2025
- Politics
- E&E News
EPA withholds records on jobs losing civil service safeguards
EPA is declining to make public a list of jobs that could be reclassified and stripped of standard civil service protections . 'The records are exempt from disclosure because they are predecisional and deliberative and would harm agency decision making if released,' an employee in EPA's Office of Mission Support wrote in a response this week to a Freedom of Information Act request from POLITICO's E&E News. In the request, E&E News had sought the review of EPA positions 'to be placed in Schedule Policy/Career, otherwise known as Schedule F.' EPA and other agencies were supposed to turn in their interim recommendations to the Office of Personnel Management by April 20, according to a memo from acting OPM Director Charles Ezell. Advertisement Near the end of his first term, President Donald Trump in a 2020 executive order created Schedule F, which would have made it easier to fire employees involved in policy-making positions. Trump framed the approach as a way to instill more accountability into the career federal workforce; critics said it would spur the workforce's politicization.
Yahoo
14-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
One major part of Project 2025 is falling apart
If it's not enough that Elon Musk's DOGE has been taking a chainsaw to the federal labor force, about three weeks ago, the Trump administration announced that it is going to begin implementing "Schedule F," the creepy huxleyan name for the Executive Order they produced at the end of the first term to make it easier to fire civil service employees deemed disloyal. President Biden threw it in the trash, but, as expected, it's back. After all, it's part of Project 2025 architect Russell Vought's tools of the trade, and now that he's back at the Office of Management and Budget he's been itching to use it. It's estimated that 50,000 people will be subject to the law once they are re-classified from civil service protections to "at will" policy employees. It's pretty obvious that a witch hunt for personnel that any rando MAGA appointee suspects of being a turncoat (or just a Democrat) will soon be fired. The whole idea was to fill the jobs with the kind of people Russell Vought thinks have America's best interests at heart. That means white, Christian nationalists. The Washington Post reported on this back in 2024, in anticipation of his expected influence in a Donald Trump second term: Vought also embraces Christian nationalism, a hard-right movement that seeks to infuse Christianity into all aspects of society, including government. He penned a 2021 Newsweek essay that disputed allegations of bias and asked, 'Is There Anything Actually Wrong With 'Christian Nationalism?'' ... Looking at immigration through that lens, Vought has called for'mass deportation' of illegal immigrants and a 'Christian immigration ethic' that would strictly limit the types of people allowed entry into the United States. Essentially Vought takes the same position as Trump adviser Stephen Miller but he comes at it from a Christian nationalist perspective. All roads lead to persecution of immigrants in the Trump administration. Vought believes that we are in a "post-constitutional" time which explains a lot about how the administration is going about its work through the courts. In a piece he wrote back in 2023, Vought laid out his critique of what the MAGA types refer to as the "deep state" insisting that a federal government staffed with experts and bureaucrats had taken over the government and usurped the will of the people. It's a bit confusing since he seems to also think that "the Left" has been degrading the Constitution for over a hundred years and that the Congress needs to have more power — but maybe not so much. In any case he concludes with this rousing cri de guerre: But the long, difficult road ahead of returning to our beloved Constitution starts with being honest with ourselves. It starts by recognizing that we are living in a post-Constitutional time. Our need is not just to win congressional majorities that blame the other side or fill seats on court benches to meddle at the margins. It is to cast ourselves as dissidents of the current regime and to put on our shoulders the full weight of envisioning, articulating, and defending what a Radical Constitutionalism requires in the late hour that our country finds itself in, and then to do it. That and only that will be how American statesmanship can be defined in the years ahead. A big part of Vought's strategy, as with Miller's, was to legally challenge the prevailing meaning of precedents, rulings and words themselves. I was reminded of all this when I read this piece by Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo about the coming implementation of Schedule F. As he rightly points out, "it's absurd to think that Congress would create the Civil Service system in such a way that a President could simply reclassify people and suddenly the whole system of protections would disappear." Why would they even have bothered to do it at all? Marshall observes that such actions as Schedule F (or DOGE or the use of the Alien Enemies Act) rests on "the assumption (quite possibly right) that the federal judiciary would dispense with the plain meaning of the relevant federal workforce laws and substitute novel definitions of key phrases put forward by Trump administration lawyers." I don't think there's any doubt that this is their intention. But Vought, at least two years ago, understood that it might not be that easy. In that essay about radical constitutionalism, Vought wrote at length about immigration and how it should be understood as an "invasion," which he believed should empower border governors to apprehend migrants and deport them according to Article 1, Section 10, Clause 3 of the Constitution. (It does no such thing.) Vought complained: My point in bringing this up is that you would be surprised at how hard it has been to get conservative lawyers to see this for no other reason than its novelty. That is what has to change. This is where we need to be radical in discarding or rethinking the legal paradigms that have confined our ability to return to the original Constitution. It doesn't seem to be taking, at least not in the way Vought hoped. Ian Millhiser of Vox attended a Federalist Society gathering and found the conservative legal community "far more ambivalent about their president's second term than one might expect after such a fruitful partnership." 'They are going to have the same level of success they had in the last administration' with getting rid of long-standing rules and regulations, George Washington University law professor Richard Pierce told the conference, 'which is virtually none.' Implicit in this critique is a belief that the web of procedural barriers, bureaucratic trap doors, and paperwork burdens that prevent any presidential administration from changing too much, too fast will survive the second Trump administration more or less unscathed. Pierce predicted that many of Trump's deregulatory efforts would simply be struck down in court. Millhiser says that some of this can be attributed to a turf war — the conservative legal community is not happy with the cavalier treatment of the judiciary by the Trump people. Evidently, they are feeling a bit stroppy about all this unitary executive business now that it's being wielded by an elderly con man and a car manufacturer with a chainsaw. So far, most judges have been similarly unwilling to go along with Russ Vought and Stephen Miller's mad schemes. But late Tuesday night a district judge in Western Pennsylvania did give them some succor. She held that the Alien Enemies Act had originally applied to pirates and robbers so it does apply to foreign gang members. (She did say they have to be given a hearing within 21 days so at least there's no grant to just shoot them as one imagines would have been allowed in one of those 18th century pirate invasions.) The case is headed to the Supreme Court where we will almost assuredly see at least two, probably three, of the justices uphold this cockamamie definition. And there are many more cases coming based upon Vought's "radical constitutionalism" which rely on the Supreme Court throwing out the plain meaning of the English language and adopting MAGA extremists' definition of the constitution. I wish I could say with confidence that they won't. Perhaps we just have to hope that Millhiser's observation that the conservative legal fraternity isn't happy about Trump and company treading on their turf will get us out of this mess. For now anyway.
