According to Politico, the White House Presidential Personnel Office is conducting interviews that subjects have described as “loyalty tests” to ensure appointees, particularly those in public health positions, are sufficiently loyal enough to the President Trump.
It’s “an exercise in ferreting out people who are perceived as not Trump enough,” one person interviewed by Politico said.
Political appointees and certain civil servants swear an oath when they assume office, but the loyalty they swear is to the Constitution, not to the person in the Office of the President.
Coupled with the reported effort by White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to root out leaks by selectively feeding information to specific staffers to see what information makes it to the media, the “loyalty tests” portray an administration that is more interested in serving the interests of Donald Trump rather than the American people.
“It just seems like you could be a rocket scientist, but all they care about is whether you are MAGA,” said one senior administration official familiar with the interview process told Politico. “It is fair to do something to prepare to fill jobs in a second term, but right now, it is hard to know what the metrics are with this personnel office for being successful. There is no set criteria for what makes a good political appointee.”