The top lawyer at the Office of Personnel Management is a self-described “raging misogynist” who for years has talked up a “campaign” to purge the federal civil service and staff it with MAGA diehards, per a series of previously unreported appearances on right-wing podcasts.
As envisioned, this campaign would intimidate federal employees into resigning or cow them into submission. Cabinet secretaries would devote all of their efforts to “cleaning house,” clearing the way for partisan cronies to dominate the workings of the federal government, all orchestrated by Trump appointees who have spent the past several years marinating in and reproducing online cesspits. The remarks by Andrew Kloster, the new general counsel at OPM, suggest a concerted, premeditated effort to both wreck the nonpartisan federal civil service and replace its remnants with workers easily under the President’s control.
Kloster revealed his aspirations for remaking the federal workforce in appearances on two podcast episodes hosted by Auron Macintyre in 2022 and 2024, and published a series of writings from 2021 through to the 2024 election on a Substack and Telegram channel reviewed by TPM. Throughout, Kloster, who served as acting general counsel at OPM in the last year of Trump’s first term, described a “government-wide” effort to “clean house.”
The comments prefigure what the country has seen for the past 10 days. In practice, that’s meant asserting the ability to fire categories of civil servants through Schedule F, firing nonpartisan DOJ staff, pushing employees to retire early, and urging federal employees to report on others who support DEI.
“People need to understand that they need to clean house, so we need barn burners, people with backbone. It needs to be government-wide so that everyone has air cover,” he said in a June 2022 conversation with Macintyre on an episode titled “Staffing the Regime” of the program, The Auron Macintyre Show.
Two years later, he appeared with Macintyre again, in an episode titled “Replacing the Deep State.”
“I think a concerted political effort can take control of the civil service per se,” Kloster said, suggesting that the effort was intended to clear out existing career government workers and replace then with Trump loyalists.
“You need a pipeline. You need a lot of replacements,” he said. “You’re going to get a lot of flack for it.”
With Macintyre, himself an online provocateur, Kloster occasionally used internet-magnified threats, at one point joking about moving federal employees to Alaska. But he was clearly conversant in the ideas and language of the new right: He discussed how seizing the federal service could help “win on the other two elements of the cathedral,” a concept used by anti-democratic influencer Curtis Yarvin to describe society’s opinion-forming institutions. At other points, Kloster referenced Adrian Vermeule, a Harvard Law Professor who has argued for dramatically expanded presidential power guided by Christian teachings.
Kloster is not the only new hire at OPM. The new administration has reportedly stacked it with Elon Musk-linked appointees more committed to a DOGE vision of the federal workforce. One deputy counsel, Clayton Cromer, has experience working for a white shoe law firm and in the Austin AI and tech scene, TPM has learned. It’s not clear what he and other appointees bring to the table in terms of personnel law.
Kloster himself embodies the MAGA contradictions: as POGO and HuffPost reported, he’s a self-described “raging misogynist” who clearly enjoyed getting a rise out of people online. As reported, Kloster was also subject to a temporary domestic violence-related restraining order in Maryland, which was dismissed several days after issuance pursuant to an agreement. His first job out of law school was working for FIRE, defending sexual assault cases; TPM reviewed a “Rules for Radical Patriots” guide that Kloster published which included calls for business owners to “only hire or support people who want to preserve my community.”
At the same time, he has publicly expressed a clear vision of how to destroy the federal workforce’s nonpartisan identity and bring it under Trump’s direct sway.
“It’s not just the case that we have evidence that the experts get things wrong. I think that as a theoretical matter, the very notion of expertise and independence makes no sense,” he told the Yale Law School Federalist Society’s podcast in 2022. “So I very much rely more on structure and incentive and political control and unity between the technology and the people that are using the technology.”
OPM declined to comment. Kloster did not return an emailed request for comment.
After Trump left office in 2021, the MAGA movement was cut somewhat adrift. Though Trump and his supporters proclaimed at the time both that they had actually won the election and that the first term had been a success, that was belied by complaints from former administration officials. They echoed Trump’s complaints about the “deep state,” scapegoating federal employees and turncoat political appointees for the administration’s failures.
Kloster reflected on this in a June 2022 interview with Macintyre, recalling how, in 2016, he laughed as former never-Trumpers scrambled and begged for administration jobs. “But the joke was on us because pretty quickly these grifters and people that were super anti-Trump and never Trump very quickly came back in and were able to get these positions,” he said.
It’s unusual for OPM or its staff to receive any public attention in an administration. Nominally independent, it mainly works as the human resources and employee benefits manager for the federal workforce.
But the segment of Trumpers who took the President’s complaint that the real problem was his lack of total control over the nonpartisan civil service set their sights on OPM as a vehicle to strip protections from federal workers and, potentially, replace them with people who are ideologically simpatico.
To Kloster, that means empowering the President to hire and fire any employee at will.
“Without that, you have nothing,” he said in 2022. “Imagine, again, Biden or Trump issuing a hundred executive orders and people just don’t listen to him. If he wasn’t able to remove people, he could have four years of him sitting in a box and the machine would run itself.”
Kloster described a campaign to enact this in a 2024 interview with Macintyre, saying that it would mean appointing cabinet secretaries who had the willpower and coordination to prioritize an assault on the civil service.
“The number one thing that you want government-wide is an understanding that personnel is difficult and will get you a lot of blowback, so you need to have the willingness to see it through,” he said. “You hear the refrain, I can either spend my time working on policy or I can spend my time cleaning house and I can’t do both. And I think that needs to be broken. People need to understand that they need to clean house, so we need barn burners, people with backbone, it needs to be government wide so that everyone has air cover.”
Later in the interview, Macintyre brought up the example of Louis XIV, and his decision to move the French nobility to “Versailles just so he could make sure to maintain control,” complaining that having federal employees in D.C. reenacts that situation.
Kloster replied with a joke about “reassignments to Alaska,” before expressing a hope for a “shock and awe campaign bigger than any particular policy with respect to the civil service or any issue under Trump.”
“I think the main thing is shock and awe,” he added.
The issue for Trump in 2025 is the same as it was during the first term: what he’s trying to do is against the law. It’s also counterproductive on it’s own terms. You can try to gut the civil service in order to bring it under control, but that leaves you with little left to enact your policies.
“There’s an effort both to dismantle, but also to occupy or to seize control of the administrative state,” Blake Emerson, a professor of law and political science at UCLA, told TPM. “And those two goals don’t necessarily align, and this is where we might get some friction.”
In the 2022 Yale Law federalist society chapter appearance, Kloster recognized some of these tradeoffs.
“It goes all the way to the top. So what may have been lacking in the last administration was a president who didn’t want to get involved. I mean, with Trump, everything was personal,” he said. “If Trump had died during his four years in office, who knows what would’ve happened because everything really did go to him. And the last person in the room with him might always win the argument or whatever. There are all these critiques, but it was him. He was the institution.”
