President Donald Trump has already left the State Department in chaos with his massive layoffs and marginalization of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. Now it appears that, because of Trump's past habit of getting his information from right-wing news outlets, many government staffers across the executive branch are afraid that conservative media hit pieces against them will cost them their careers.
The belief that executive branch staffers are insufficiently loyal to Trump and are secretly working to promote the policies of President Barack Obama has inspired a wave of attack articles from right-wing sites like Breitbart and the Conservative Review, according to Politico. Breitbart has even published a list of so-called "Obama loyalist bureaucrats" that it urged Trump to "either fire immediately or remove from their current positions."
Breitbart's former CEO, Steve Bannon, is currently Trump's chief strategist.
In the State Department, right-wing media have targeted individuals like Sahar Nowrouzzadeh from the policy planning office and Alan Eyre, director of the Office of the Middle East and Asia at State’s Bureau of Energy Resources, due to the belief that they would undermine Trump's policies toward Iran. Within the National Security Council, Israeli-Palestinian conflict specialist Yael Lempert has been accused of being anti-Israel, despite the fact that she's reportedly held in high regard by Israeli officials. One Breitbart article drew special attention to the Department of Homeland Security's U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services division, claiming that bureaucrats there secretly supported an open borders agenda.
Jacqueline Simon, policy director at America's largest federal employee union (the American Federation of Government Employees), told Politico that civil servants "didn’t work for Obama and they don’t work for Trump. They work for federal agencies, and the agencies carry out the laws. This is a completely apolitical civil service. Their employer is the American people."
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