America's oligarch-in-chief Elon Musk is extending his tendrils beyond the half-baked Department of Government Efficiency and into the Office of Personnel Management, which is essentially the HR body for federal agencies.

The top brass of the OPM has been hollowed out to make room for Musk's former henchmen, according to federal sources tapped by Wired, where they're poised to "monitor and enforce" loyalty to Trump across the federal government, University of Michigan's Don Moynihan told the magazine.

Though Trump's pick for OPM director, Scott Kupor, still has to pass Senate and DHS scrutiny, the soil is already being prepared for his arrival by appointees, some of whom are so inexperienced that their qualifications sound like a surreal joke about Musk's penchant for nepotism.

"One, a senior adviser to the director, is a 21-year-old whose online resume touts his work for Palantir," per Wired, while another "who reports directly to Scales, graduated from high school in 2024." A copy of the latter's resume include his summer internship with Musk's Neuralink, alongside jobs as — we assure you that we are not joking — a camp counselor and bike mechanic.

Although both these tykes are ostensibly poised to rip and tear through America's federal agencies, Wired declined to name them "because of their ages" — a somewhat baffling choice given that both appear to be of legal age. (And if they're not, well, that's a much bigger problem.)

Populating the OPM with naive-yet-loyal yes men seems to be a key strategy in Trump's plan to drastically cut down the federal workforce. It also follows Musk's disastrous playbook at Twitter — the two young OPM hires are reminiscent of a move the billionaire pulled when he hired his alarmingly junior and inexperienced cousins to facilitate three massive rounds of layoffs as he took over the platform.

Other high-profile Musk-adjacent picks include Chief of Staff Amanda Scales, formerly of Musk's xAI, and senior advisor Ricardo Biasini, former director of operations for Musk's extremely underwhelming and poorly constructed Vegas Hyperloop.

For the OPM's general counsel, Trump and Musk have installed the self-described "raging misogynist" Andrew Kloster, a disaster of a pick who was subject to a 2022 restraining order for domestic violence allegations.

And if the official staff list is giving you a sinking feeling of despair, other people calling the shots at OPM aren't government personnel at all.

On Monday, some federal HR chiefs received a memo from the OPM's acting director regarding hiring freezes and return-to-office orders, making concrete some of Trump's promises to drastically cut down the federal workforce. Eagle-eyed redditors quickly found the memos contained metadata which linked back to Noah Peters and James Sherk — two right-wing lobbyists who aren't officially affiliated with the OPM, but who are officially connected to the ultra-right Project 2025.

That memo led to a class-action lawsuit on behalf of two federal employees, alleging that the OPM set up its own internal server for the purpose of storing federal employee data in one central location. The suit alleges that OPM chief of staff Amanda Scales received and stored the information without ever running a privacy assessment — directly violating a United States Digital Service statute from 2002.

The OPM's growing menagerie of Musk-lackeys is troubling news, indicating that the tech mogul has been granted carte-blanche to hand out the keys to the kingdom to anyone he wants — even if they can't legally buy alcohol.

More on our oligarchy: Trump Gives Elon Musk Access to All Unclassified Data in the US Government


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