Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) sent messages to all members of Congress terminating their positions, stating “Your performance has not been adequate to justify further employment.” All Democratic and independent members of Congress, as well as two Republicans, found themselves locked out of their offices after everything inside had been confiscated.   read more

Dodman took his first “hardship post” when he served as economic counselor at the embassy in Baghdad, Iraq, in 2008–2009, then headed back to Europe to serve as economic counselor and chargé d'affaires at the U.S. mission to the European Union in Brussels, Belgium. Dodman took a second hardship post at one of the most dangerous U.S. diplomatic locations in the world, serving from July 2012 to August 2014 as consul general at the U.S. consulate in Karachi, which is Pakistan’s largest city.   read more

As U.S. consul in Tokyo in 2002, Barlerin signed documents compensating the victims of a collision the previous year between a Japanese fishery school boat and the attack submarine USS Greeneville. The U.S. agreed to pay more than $11 million to the survivors of the accident and the families of those killed. Barlerin spent two years in Paris as economic policy advisor and later worked in the Office of Regional and Security Affairs and served as the State Dept’s Chad Task Force coordinator.   read more

President Obama chose Bass to be U.S. ambassador to Georgia at a time when Georgia was recovering from a military conflict with the Russian government. When France approved the sale of two amphibious assault ships to Russia, Bass, in 2009, authored a cable calling it “'the wrong ship from the wrong country at the wrong time.” In 2011, Bass was charged by the Tbilisi government’s opposition with “meddling in Georgia’s domestic affairs” by encouraging the government’s crackdown on protests.   read more

In his third try at naming a Secretary of the Army, President Trump has turned to a longtime lobbyist for the arms industry, raising serious questions of ethics and conflicts of interest that are nothing new to this administration. Mark Esper has been vice president for government relations at Raytheon, a major weapons contractor, since July 2010. In a July 2017 conference call with investors, Raytheon CEO Tom Kennedy enthused that the Trump administration “has opened several doors for us.”   read more

Attorneys said the Trump administration will “lose badly” for failing to respond to a family’s petition regarding Border Patrol agents' killing of their loved one at the border. The family claims human rights abuses over the agents’ extrajudicial killing and an allegedly botched investigation by U.S. officials. The U.S. has remained silent – breaking decades of tradition of cooperating with the human rights agency IACHR, even with regard to abuse of prisoners kept at Guantanamo Bay.   read more

Krebs joined the George W. Bush administration as a policy adviser to Bob Stephan, then the assistant secretary for infrastructure protection. Krebs helped develop and implement DHS’ Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards regulatory program. Krebs left government in 2009 to join Dutko Risk Management, a lobbying firm, as a VP in a new division to focus on consulting with governments and businesses on risk-management issues involving threats and disaster recovery.   read more

Mitchell has spent his career since 2004 at CEPA, a foreign policy analysis firm. In 2015, Mitchell and CEPA secured a contract with the Pentagon to produce a study that supported moving NATO troops and “prepositioned equipment” closer to Russia to protect Poland, Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia. Mitchell believes that Russia, China and Iran want to challenge U.S. power by nibbling away at smaller countries and that the U.S. needs to challenge this strategy.   read more

Craft is primarily an activist in GOP politics. After getting assurances from Donald Trump that he would not try to oust Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell or Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, Craft and husband Joe gave $431,000 to Trump Victory, which supported Trump’s 2016 campaign, the RNC and state Republican parties. They also donated $750,000 to Future45, a pro-Trump PAC that produced attack ads against Hillary Clinton. Joe Craft once gave more than $3 million to Karl Rove’s super PAC.   read more

Desrocher started his State Dept career with stops in Monrovia, Liberia, and Bonn, West Germany, and served in the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative working on free trade agreements with Chile and Singapore. He also served as the State Dept desk officer for Iraq. Desrocher was serving as economic officer in the U.S. consulate in Jerusalem in 1999 when he helped get Palestinian customs agents to destroy bootleg 17,000 CDs of American musicians’ work.   read more

Flowers joined FTA as a senior advisor in 2015, and was named acting administrator in 2016. After leaving FTA when Donald Trump assumed the presidency, Flowers joined Los Angeles-based engineering firm AECOM as senior VP and head of its transit practice. That move has generated ethics criticism, as AECOM is set to be a major beneficiary of a large ($647 million) grant for a California rail project that Flowers approved two days before resigning and two weeks before she went to work for AECOM.   read more

Appointed in 2013 to a Republican seat on the CPSC, Buerkle has been a consistent pro-industry vote for looser regulation and trusting businesses to enforce their own safety standards. In 2016, she was the only CPSC member to vote against the record $15 million civil penalty imposed on Gree Electric for selling humidifiers they knew were prone to catch fire. And she was the only commissioner to vote against even publishing a proposed rule addressing risks associated with portable generators.   read more

President Trump's nomination of Joseph D. Kerman shows that his love affair with military officers shows no sign of abating. A former commander of Navy SEALS demolition teams, Kernan, in 2002, took part in the Battle of Takur Ghar against al-Qaeda forces in Afghanistan, considered the largest battle fought by the U.S. military in more than a decade. In 2009, then-Secretary of Defense Gates made Kernan his senior military assistant, and later deputy commander of the U.S. Southern Command.   read more

King, who has no diplomatic experience, is a former FBI agent who, in 1967, investigated civil rights violations in the South. Over the course of his career, he has been a Wisconsin Republican operative who served as state Republican Committee chairman and held a position in the U.S. Department of Agriculture. He was later founder of venture capital firm King Capital, a Boy Scouts of America board member, and an RNC delegate bound to Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas in the 2016 presidential election.   read more

President Trump nominated a notorious climate change denier to run federal policy on U.S. island possessions—several of which are threatened by rising seas caused by global warming. In 2015, Domenech joined the oil industry-funded Texas Public Policy Foundation as director of a project that opposes legislative measures to fight global warming. He has called the EPA “an overreaching federal agency unbounded by public opinion or congressional oversight that acts recklessly on secret science.”   read more

A research fellow at the right-wing Heritage Foundation, Muhlhausen is pro-death penalty, asserting that it’s a deterrent to crime, even though studies show otherwise. He has opposed the Violence Against Women Act because he believes the money it allocates is not well-used. And he supports voter IDs, claiming they may boost voter turnout, in spite of studies showing that minority voting has dropped in states with strict voter ID laws, benefiting the GOP.   read more

Dabbar, a Trump campaign donor, has long worked for investment banker J.P. Morgan, handling mergers and acquisitions of power plants and utilities. Former Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz was not pleased with Dabbar’s nomination because it will reverse a department reorganization that combined the under secretary of energy and of science into one position that had facilitated innovation by enabling rapid integration "among basic science, applied research, technology demonstration and deployment."   read more