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pnwmom

(109,697 posts)
Thu Jan 30, 2025, 03:15 AM Thursday

On Reddit, an anonymous poster says: "OMB has been compromised and taken over." [View all]

From an anonymous OPM employee on Reddit, submitted 3 hours ago by Throwaway918284

"I'm a current employee at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM). This is a throwaway account for obvious reasons. I’m posting this because people need to know what’s going on at OPM.

I’ve been an OPM employee for nearly a decade and a Federal Employee for almost 20 years. I’ve never witnessed anything even remotely close to what’s happening right now. In short, there's a hostile takeover of the federal civil service.

Let me say this in no uncertain terms — OPM has been compromised and taken over. The very backbone of American Government, the HR of all HR in the U.S. Government has been taken over by outside politicals. In just five days, they managed to push aside dozens of non-political, career civil servants who were there specifically to prevent the civil service from becoming the President's henchmen.

The current Acting Director, Charles (Chuck) Ezell is a low-level branch chief. He's the friendliest “yes man” you'll ever meet. He never says no. It’s clear they pushed aside all the high-level non political civil servants who refused to do Donald Trump's bidding, until they found Chuck.

Under his name, they’ve sent numerous requests to all the agencies to collect information on gov't employees that they see as a threat to their agenda. Instructions say to send these lists to Amanda Scales. But Amanda is not actually an OPM employee, she works for Elon Musk. She wasn’t even properly cleared by OPM Personnel Security.

Our CIO, Melvin Brown, (also a non political career public servant) was pushed aside just one week into his tenure because he refused to setup email lists to send out direct communications to all career civil servants. Such communications are normally left up to each agency.

Instead, an on-prem (on-site) email server was setup. Someone literally walked into our building and plugged in an email server to our network to make it appear that emails were coming from OPM. It's been the one sending those various “test” message you've all seen. We think they're building a massive email list of all federal employees to generate mass RIF notices down the road.

The non-political civil servants here at OPM are watching helplessly as our government is being systematically dismantled bit by bit. Even the IGs are being fired to prevent them from investigating the numerous whistleblower complaints we've filed.

Please share this and tell the world that OPM is not the bad guy. We're just as helpless to stop this as the rest of our fellow public servants. Hopefully someone out there can help us, but it’s looking pretty grim."

And this is about the I.G.s who have been fired:

President Donald Trump fired more than a dozen inspectors general across the federal government apparently without giving Congress the required notice and reasons, providing an early test for a recently formed caucus aimed at protecting agency watchdogs.

Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, launched the bipartisan Inspector General Caucus less than two weeks ago with five other senators and the mission to “support federal watchdogs in their efforts to ensure government accountability and compliance with the law.”

On Friday, Trump fired the internal watchdogs at the departments of Defense, State, Transportation, Labor, Health and Human Services, Veterans Affairs, Housing and Urban Development, Interior, Energy, Commerce, Treasury and Agriculture, as well as several independent agencies, according to media reports.

Such a large-scale firing of internal watchdogs has not happened for decades. Several experts argued that the firings were a threat to the entire system established in the 1970s for internal watchdogs to root out waste, fraud and abuse.

https://rollcall.com/2025/01/27/trump-firing-of-watchdogs-gives-early-test-to-new-senate-caucus/
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