Get to know a few of the 400 government officials hired by Trump
While the spotlight was on Betsy DeVos, Jeff Sessions, Ben Carson, and Rex Tillerson, hundreds of other government jobs that do not require Senate confirmation were quietly filled by the Trump administration.
The White House has declined to name any of these hires, but ProPublica was able to compile a list of more than 400 officials tapped for positions across the government. They are in "beachhead teams," meaning they're temporary employees who will work for four to eight months, with many expected to be moved into permanent jobs. ProPublica found that among the hires are at least 36 lobbyists, several Breitbart contributors, noted conspiracy theory peddlers, former congressional staffers, some top officials from the George W. Bush administration, and a few holdovers from the Obama administration.
Perhaps the youngest official is Danny Tiso in the Department of Labor, a 2015 high school graduate who worked for the Trump campaign in New Hampshire. Curtis Ellis, a special assistant to the secretary at the Labor Department, was a columnist at WorldNetDaily, who once wrote a column with the headline "The Radical Left's Ethnic Cleansing of America" that was received favorably by Stephen Bannon. At the Treasury Department, Jon Perdue was hired as a special assistant; viewers of the reality show Make Me a Millionaire Inventor may recognize Perdue, a self-described guerrilla warfare expert and a onetime contributor to Breitbart — he came up with a bow and arrow that can be used as a compass, tent pole, walking stick, and water purification tablet receptacle. Read more about the new hires at ProPublica.
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Catherine Garcia is night editor for TheWeek.com. Her writing and reporting has appeared in Entertainment Weekly and EW.com, The New York Times, The Book of Jezebel, and other publications. A Southern California native, Catherine is a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
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