Left-leaning federal bureaucrats aim to oppose President Donald Trump from within the administrative state, and some Biden administration appointees have attempted to “burrow in” to the federal bureaucracy by switching from “political” to more permanent “career” positions.
While presidents appoint more than 3,000 people for political positions, the federal government directly employs roughly 2.3 million people, most of whom serve in ostensibly nonpolitical, career positions.
“The biggest challenge that every single new Cabinet secretary and their subordinates will face is the entrenched bureaucrat,” Stewart Whitson, senior director of federal affairs at the Foundation for Government Accountability, told The Daily Signal in an interview Wednesday.
“Some of it is overt, and we saw an example of that with the FBI employee trying to coerce his subordinates to ‘dig in’ against the administration,” he noted, referencing an email FBI agent James Dennehy wrote in January shortly before his retirement.
“What’s worse is the quiet insubordination,” Whitson warned. He said many bureaucrats will “slow policy,” simply ignoring the president’s orders.
A recent poll found that a whopping 75% of Washington, D.C.-based federal employees making $75,000 or more per year who voted for Democrat presidential nominee Kamala Harris in November said they would not follow a lawful Trump order if they considered it bad policy.
Furthermore, a recent Foundation for Government Accountability study found that Democrat employees outnumber Republican employees by a 2-to-1 margin across federal agencies. In the 2024 presidential election, 84% of the money that federal employees gave in political contributions went to Harris.
Sean Higgins, a research fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, also highlighted the threat of employees slow-walking the president’s agenda.
“It’s easy to throw sand in the gears for something you don’t like, and that’s one of the reasons why things run so slowly in the government,” he told The Daily Signal.
Higgins noted that while analysts are familiar with the problem, no comprehensive study has shown exactly how many political appointees “burrow in.”
However, the Office of Personnel Management keeps a record of how many political appointees request—and receive—nonpolitical “career” placements.
An Overview of the Data
“OPM is committed to upholding merit system principles and preventing improper conversions from political to career positions,” McLaurine Pinover, an Office of Personnel Management spokeswoman, told The Daily Signal in a statement Friday. “This year, we launched a new review process to strengthen oversight and improve transparency in how agencies allocate career-reserved SES [Senior Executive Service] positions in the federal civil service, and we are closely reviewing all previous political conversions.”
“Our goal is to ensure all career appointments are based on merit,” she added.
The Daily Signal analyzed the available records, finding that the period between Jan. 1, 2024, and Jan. 20, 2025, had the largest number of political appointees approved to “burrow in.” Forty political appointees had been approved for “career” positions during that roughly yearlong span, with 17 approved just between Oct. 1 and Jan. 20.
The data includes yearly reports for non-presidential election years, and quarterly reports for presidential election years, with the final report for each presidential year lasting until the Jan. 20 inauguration of the new president.
The data shows higher numbers of political-to-career position placements during the Biden administration than during the first Trump administration. Eleven political appointees burrowed in during 2023, 23 burrowed in during 2022, and 33 did so in 2021. This brings the Biden administration total to 107.
During the election year-plus period Jan. 1, 2020, to Jan. 20, 2021 (Trump’s last year of his first term), 29 political appointees burrowed in. Seventeen did so in 2019, 7 in 2018, and 15 in 2017, yielding a Trump 45 administration total of 68.
The archived reports do not go back as far as the beginning of 2016, but the period between Oct. 1, 2016, and Jan. 20, 2017, during the Obama administration shortly before Trump took office, had a rather low number—only 8 political appointees burrowed in.
A few caveats: Some of the political appointees who appear in these reports had switched to career positions earlier than they appear in the Office of Personnel Management’s reports—the reports merely include dates that the switches were approved, and they often mark that a bureaucrat made the move before the office approved it. Due to these delays, Trump political appointees received approval during the Biden administration and Obama appointees appear in the lists during the Trump administration.
Requests to burrow in are rarely denied, but it does happen, and when a request is denied or in process, the Office of Personnel Management withholds the name from the report.
The Daily Signal combed through the report for Oct. 1, 2024, to Jan. 20, 2025, and a few names illustrate the phenomenon of President Joe Biden’s appointees burrowing in ahead of the Trump administration. Some of these political appointees applied to burrow in long before Trump’s election, but the Office of Personnel Management under Biden approved most of them after Trump’s victory. The final example comes from earlier in 2024, but illustrates a leftist ideological bent among some of the bureaucrats who burrowed in.
Kerry Doyle
Kerry Doyle, a lawyer, worked for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security under Biden, according to her LinkedIn profile.
She requested to move from DHS to the Justice Department, becoming an immigration judge. The Office of Personnel Management received the request on July 31 but processed it on Dec. 15. Doyle went from making $168,000 annually to $176,548.
As an attorney at ICE and DHS, she would have represented the Biden administration amid policies that, critics say, allowed more than 9 million illegal aliens to enter the country.
Doyle was about to be sworn in at the Chelmsford immigration court in Massachusetts but received an email from the Executive Office of Immigration Review in February, firing her, The Boston Globe reported.
Prior to her service in the Biden administration, Doyle had served as managing attorney at Church World Service, one of the nonprofits that went on to receive federal funding to move immigrants across the country during the Biden administration. She also worked as a scheduler and legislative assistant for Rep. Bob Wise, D-W.Va.
Margot Benedict
Margot Benedict, who started as an attorney at the Justice Department in July 2021, rose to become senior counselor to Attorney General Merrick Garland in 2024, according to her LinkedIn profile. According to the law firm Morrison Foerster, which currently employs Benedict, she first received an offer for a career position in 2023. She became a trial attorney for counterintelligence and export control in January 2024 after the Office of Personnel Management approved the transfer on Nov. 17.
Benedict had received $116,653 annually in her previous position, and she received a pay raise to $131,243 in the transfer to a career position.
The Trump administration fired her in March.
Before joining the Biden administration, Benedict had interned with the left-leaning National Women’s Law Center and served as a law clerk for the Senate Judiciary Committee’s ranking member, Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt. She also worked for three years at Montgomery Foerster, where she returned after the Trump administration fired her.
Elisa Santana
Elisa Santana, who joined the U.S. Agency for International Development in August 2022, applied to switch to a career position at the Department of Commerce. The Office of Personnel Management received her request in September and approved it on Dec. 15.
She went from making $104,604 annually to a salary of $106,382.
Santana posted on LinkedIn that she lost her job last week.
Before joining USAID, Santana worked for Sen. Maggie Hassan, D-N.H., and before that, for Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Texas.
Tara Boggaram
Tara Boggaram, a director of strategy execution at the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, asked to switch to a career position as project finance specialist at the same body. The Office of Personnel Management received the request in late October and approved it on Jan. 12.
Boggaram took a pay cut, from $136,780 to $111,032.
According to her LinkedIn profile, she still works at the International Development Finance Corporation. She previously worked as a field organizer for Texas Democrat Beto O’Rourke’s failed 2018 U.S. Senate campaign.
Ruirui Kuang
Ruirui Kuang, an adviser to the International Development Finance Corporation board of directors, requested a career appointment at the same place. The Office of Personnel Management received on Nov. 7 and approved on Jan. 12 her transition to become managing director of pipeline management and execution.
Like Boggaram, Kuang took a pay cut—from $145,617 annually to $125,133.
Kuang previously worked in the Obama White House as an innovation specialist on the Social and Behavioral Sciences Team from February 2015 to August 2016.
Susan Wang
Susan Wang, a senior implementation adviser in the Biden White House Office of Management and Budget, requested a career position. The Office of Personnel Management received her request on Nov. 18 and approved her transition to attorney adviser in the DOJ’s office of legal counsel on Jan. 6.
Wang took a hefty pay bump, from $62,500 to $104,604.
According to her LinkedIn profile, Wang interned with then-Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., worked as a field organizer for the Obama campaign in 2012, and served as digital chief of staff for the Biden Presidential Inaugural Committee.
Megan Doherty
The Office of Personnel Management received a request for Megan Doherty, a deputy assistant administrator at the U.S. Agency for International Development, to switch to a career position on Nov. 21. On Jan. 12, the Office of Personnel Management approved her request to become vice president of programs at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
Doherty received a substantial raise in the transition, going from $126,370 annually to $200,000.
On March 15, Trump signed an executive order calling for the elimination of several federal entities, including the Wilson Center. Mark Green, the center’s president and CEO, resigned on April 1, a day after the Department of Government Efficiency visited the center. Only five employees reportedly remain at the center, and it seems likely Doherty is one of them.
According to her LinkedIn profile, Doherty spent seven years at the National Democratic Institute, an ostensibly nonpartisan nonprofit that admits to having a “loose affiliation with the Democratic Party” and has received more than $1 million from the Foundation for Open Society (part of the foundation network of Hungarian American billionaire George Soros now run by his son, Alex). She served on President Barack Obama’s National Security Council as director for North Africa.
Andrea Delgado-Fink
Andrea Delgado-Fink’s name did not appear in the Oct. 1-Jan. 20 report, but earlier in the 2024 reports. Even so, she also illustrates the general trend of the previous seven names.
Fink, who appears to still be serving as deputy regional forester at the Forest Service, switched from her political appointee role as chief of staff for natural resources and the environment for Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack in October. She received a pay bump from $112,980 to $131,243.
Before joining the administration, Fink worked at the environmentalist group Earthjustice from 2012 to 2019. She joined the Biden-Harris transition team in November 2020 and joined the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council in March 2021, according to her LinkedIn profile. Her “environmental justice” past suggests she may oppose Trump’s efforts to reverse Biden’s policies on climate change.
A Pay Raise for Doing the Same Job?
The Office of Personnel Management list included multiple political appointees who applied for career positions but did not receive official approval or denial before Jan. 20, the end of the Biden administration. It also included many approvals that the office did not receive until months or years after federal agencies had already processed them, which indicates that many more Biden political appointees may have “burrowed in” before Trump took office.
In most cases, political appointees received a pay bump when switching to a career position.
Higgins, the Competitive Enterprise Institute research fellow, noted that the pay may prove “motivation for people to burrow in this way.”
“If you can get yourself $15 grand more a year while still essentially doing the same job, why wouldn’t you?” he asked.
