Reported Trump ‘loyalty tests’ for national-security officials draw criticism

Good government groups and Democrats are reacting to news first reported on Monday by The Associated Press that incoming senior Trump administration officials have begun questioning federal employees who work on the National Security Council about their political affiliations as part of an effort to ensure the White House entity is composed of loyalists. 

“The folks that are at the NSC, the career people that are there, are apolitical. They're the best experts in the fields that they're involved in that are about maintaining our national security,” said Max Stier, president and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service, at a press briefing. “It appears as if they're being subjected to a loyalty test that's, I think, fundamentally irrelevant to the quality of the work that they're going to do and certainly irrelevant to their expertise and reason for being there.”

Mike Waltz, Trump’s pick to be national security adviser, has said that the president-elect’s administration will “clear the decks” so that NSC staffers are “fully aligned with his America First agenda.” 

“We’re getting the team in place with the political [appointees] and we literally just got the list of the folks that are currently there [the detailees from the agencies] and like I said they’re all going to be asked to go,” Waltz said in a Jan. 9 interview with Breitbart. “We’re taking resignations at 12:01 [on Inauguration Day] and we’re going to put the president’s team in place.”

Staffers are generally detailed to the NSC from intelligence and national security agencies. If they are removed from NSC, they would return to their home agencies. 

Stier warned that “loyalty tests” are one method the Trump administration will likely use early on to upend the federal workforce. 

“I'd be looking at more behaviors like that in the near term — things that might actually not involve a formal change of status, but rather create the same impact of chasing away great talent that is actually really fundamental to delivery of good service to the public,” he said. 

Rep. Gerald Connolly, D-Va., the ranking member on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said in a statement that: “Partisan loyalty tests have no place in national security.” 

“President-elect Trump and his transition team are making the National Security Council ground zero for its purge of non-partisan civil servants,” he said. “Replacing the experts on the council with political cronies threatens our national security and our ability to respond quickly and effectively to the ongoing and very real global threats in a dangerous world.” 

Neither the American Federation of Government Employees nor the National Treasury Employees Union immediately responded to a request for comment. 

In 2019, Alexander and Eugene Vindman, twin brothers and then both NSC officials, raised concerns about a phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, which led to Trump’s first impeachment. Trump later fired the pair following his first impeachment acquittal. 

Eugene is now a newly elected Democratic congressman from Virginia.