Sources within the federal government tell WIRED that the highest ranks of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM)—essentially the human resources function for the entire federal government—are now controlled by people with connections to Musk and to the tech industry.
“I think on the tech side, the concern is potentially the use of AI to try and engage in large-scale searches of people’s job descriptions to try and identify who would be identified for Schedule F reclassification,” says Moynihan.
“OPM is not a very politicized organization,” says Steven Kelman, a professor emeritus at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. “My guess is that typically, in the past, there have been only one or maybe two political appointees in all of OPM. All the rest are career. So this seems like a very political heavy presence in an organization that is not very political.”