What the Purge Was For

By March, the Trump administration had cut 387,000 federal employees ^[1]. Then it started hiring them back. OPM Director Scott Kupor explained the reversal with a candor that doubled as a mission statement.

We probably have some skills that we now need to hire back, quite frankly. — Scott Kupor

The surprise was not the purge — readers watched it happen. The surprise was the pivot, and what the pivot revealed about what the purge had been for. The administration was not merely restaffing the federal government. It was rewiring it to produce different outputs. The mechanism took shape across the spring. On June 3, an executive order created a new employment category — "Schedule Policy/Career" — and reclassified roughly 8,000 senior federal employees as at-will, stripping them of civil-service protections. OPM estimated up to 50,000 positions could eventually be reclassified ^[2]. Kupor explained the purpose of the reclassification.

In order to affect the policy priorities of the administration, we need to have people who are in these senior policy making decisions willing to and capable of obviously carrying out those directives. — Scott Kupor

Weeks earlier, on May 26, the administration proposed a government-wide non-disclosure agreement for all current and future federal employees, warning that refusal to sign could mean removal or criminal penalties ^[3]. AFGE president Everett Kelley called it what it was.

This proposed NDA is another attempt by the administration to purge the civil service of nonpartisan career employees and replace them with loyalists who won’t speak out against waste, fraud and abuse. — Everett Kelley

With the survivors silenced and made removable, the administration turned to filling the vacancies. The FBI under Director Kash Patel shortened agent training to nine weeks, waived interviews and written assessments for support staff transitioning to agent roles, and promoted less-experienced agents into leadership ^[4]. The Justice Department suspended its one-year experience requirement for prosecutors, began hiring directly from law school, enlisted military lawyers, and recruited on social media ^[4].

let good cops be cops — Kash Patel

The rehiring was centralized to ensure ideological alignment. Kupor said the authority was structured to ensure new recruits align with presidential ideological priorities, and the administration launched Tech Force — a partnership with Meta and OpenAI to deploy engineers into government service ^[1]. Then the outputs began to shift. In early July, Patel surged 260 FBI analysts to Atlanta to re-investigate the 2020 election in Fulton County, Georgia — a county whose ballots had already been counted three times, including a hand recount, each affirming Biden's victory. Each analyst was assigned roughly 708 records to review by July 17, searching for "derogatory information, associations, and business activities" ^[5]. The probe built on a January raid in which DNI Tulsi Gabbard accompanied agents seizing 600 to 700 boxes of ballots ^[5]. Days later, on July 16, Trump used a primetime White House address to publicly direct the FBI to reopen a closed 2020 voter fraud case in Muskegon, Michigan — a case the FBI itself had closed in 2025 after finding no criminal violations or national security threats ^[6]. The FBI's mission was also redirected toward immigration enforcement. Agents assigned to immigration cases rose from 279 to more than 6,500 in nine months — nearly a quarter of FBI personnel now work immigration matters ^[7]. Meanwhile, Patel assembled what one investigation called a "payback squad" to investigate Trump critics, part of a DOJ probe led by Joseph diGenova that produced over 100 subpoenas through Trump-appointed judges and targeted former CIA Director John Brennan ^[8]. At the Justice Department, the reorientation was equally stark. The department closed approximately 23,000 criminal cases — covering terrorism, drugs, and white-collar crime — to prioritize 32,000 new immigration prosecutions ^[7]. The Public Integrity Section, which prosecutes public corruption, was reduced from 36 prosecutors to 2. The FBI's public corruption team and Foreign Influence Task Force were disbanded. At least 75 career officials were removed from DHS and DOJ election security roles and replaced with political appointees, including some who had previously attempted to overturn the 2020 results ^[9]. At USCIS, the immigration benefits agency, the administration fused adjudication to FBI databases. Every green-card application, asylum claim, and naturalization petition now requires enhanced FBI criminal-history checks through the Next Generation Identification system, with officers required to resubmit fingerprints for previously processed cases and withhold approvals until expanded vetting completes ^[10]. The revived Public Charge Rule gives USCIS officers broadened case-by-case discretion to deny green cards based on benefits usage — a mechanism DHS itself warned could chill roughly 950,000 people in immigrant households from using public programs ^[11]. The result is an 11.6 million case backlog ^[10]. Kupor, the OPM director, later described the redirection not as an accident of leadership changes but as the point of the exercise.

The president has certain priorities in the administration, and when we decide to actually exercise and do those priorities, people may call that political. But to me, thats the way the process was designed. — Scott Kupor

The capture is not total. Federal courts have blocked key administration orders: Judge Casper permanently barred the proof-of-citizenship voter registration order, ruling the president has no constitutional authority over elections and DOJ provided no evidence of widespread fraud ^[12]. Judge Boasberg blocked a visa ban targeting foreign nationals working in content moderation and disinformation research, ruling that the policy put researchers' immigration status at risk based on their profession ^[13]. Over 50 fired FBI employees have filed a class-action lawsuit alleging political retaliation ^[14]. The FBI Agents Association condemned the moves.

Our removal from federal service — without due process and based on a false perception of political bias — is a profound injustice that raises serious concerns about political interference in federal law enforcement. — Michelle Ballantyne

But the courts are a friction point, not a brake. The administration has defied lower-court rulings in at least 31 lawsuits and over 250 immigration petitions in 15 months, with judges accusing agencies of bad faith — and higher courts, including the Supreme Court, have overruled nearly half of the contested district rulings ^[15]. Inside the intelligence community, CIA and FBI leadership are actively resisting a Trump directive to compile a master centralized list of all foreign intelligence targets, with senior counterintelligence officials warning a single leak could compromise covert operations ^[16]. The resistance is real. It is also isolated — pockets of professional norms holding out inside institutions whose outputs have already been redirected. The loyalty test moved from who sits in the chair to what the chair produces.