White House asks federal job seekers to write essays proving loyalty to Trump after massive DOGE layoffs
WASHINGTON, DC: After months of leaving federal desks empty and thousands of government jobs hanging in limbo, President Donald Trump's administration is finally hiring — but there's a catch.
Before you dream of becoming a government nurse, janitor, economist, or even a lawyer, you’ll have to pass an essay test that might read more like a presidential fan letter than a job application.
Under a new memo from the Office of Personnel Management, applicants must pledge their allegiance to President Donald Trump’s mission and vision before they can even land an interview.
The policy, quietly rolled out by the White House’s domestic policy head Vince Haley and obtained by The Independent, orders every federal agency to start screening applicants with a battery of essay questions aimed at measuring their dedication to Trump’s executive orders and “founding principles of the United States.”
Applicants must explain how they’d “help advance the President’s Executive Orders and policy priorities” and even “identify one or two relevant Executive Orders or policy initiatives” that they personally support.
If you pass the written test, you’ll then sit down for an “executive interview” with a political appointee from “agency leadership” who will judge your “organizational fit and commitment to American ideals.”
Donald Trump administration's 'merit hiring plan'
The “merit hiring plan” is being pitched as a way to weed out federal hires who might not be on board with Trump’s America First playbook and “prioritize recruitment of individuals committed to improving the efficiency of the Federal government, passionate about the ideals of our American republic, and committed to upholding the rule of law and the United States Constitution.”
The memo even includes language to block anyone “unwilling to defend the Constitution or to faithfully serve the Executive Branch.” In theory, this means rooting out slackers. But critics feel that it smells a lot like a loyalty test designed to filter out anyone who’s not on the Trump train.
One of the essay questions asks about an applicant’s “commitment to the Constitution and the founding principles of the United States,” while another demands they outline “one or two relevant Executive Orders or policy initiatives” that resonate with them, plus a breakdown of how they’d personally help implement them.
Stanford political scientist Adam Bonica took to his "On Data and Democracy" Substack and called the directive “a profound departure from a cornerstone of American democracy: the non-partisan, merit-based civil service.”
Bonica said it’s the clearest sign yet that Trump’s allies are using the federal hiring system to implement Project 2025, a long-hyped plan to replace independent experts with loyalists. “A merit-based civil service that took generations to build is being dismantled via memo,” he warned.
According to the Independent, it looks a lot like the 19th-century “spoils system” — the era of hiring your friends and firing your enemies, which America ditched after President James Garfield was assassinated by an angry office-seeker in 1881.
Does Donald Trump want a MAGA bureaucracy?
Donald Trump's team isn’t just rewriting job applications — they’re reportedly rewriting the rules for who counts as a civil servant.
Shortly after reclaiming the White House, Trump signed an executive order forcing agencies to reclassify thousands of workers under a new “schedule” that strips them of the civil service protections that have shielded government experts for decades.
Trump first tried this back in 2020 with his efforts to establish “Schedule F,” which was set to be comprised of any federal worker in “confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating positions.”
Thanks to the Elon Musk-backed DOGE cuts and mass resignations that cleared out more than 100,000 federal jobs early in Trump’s second term, the administration now has room to hire an army of MAGA replacements.
Once these new hires are in, they’ll likely enjoy protections from removal, even if a future administration wants to reverse course.
This article contains remarks made on the Internet by individual people and organizations. MEAWW cannot confirm them independently and does not support claims or opinions being made.
