Title: Monday Morning Politics: ICE Raids, Foreign Aid Freeze, & More

Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good Monday morning, everyone. As it remains difficult to keep up with all the actions coming in these early days of the Trump administration, here are a few that I have my eye on. Not only have immigration raids begun in Chicago and the Dallas area, Trump has issued a stop work order for federally-funded lawyers who represent immigrants whose cases are being heard in immigration courts.

ABC News reports that will mean many more adults and even some children will now be arguing their cases for permission to stay in this country without an attorney while the Trump Justice Department lawyers present against them to the judge. Another stop work order, this one from the new Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, went to the State Department and the agency USAID, which are supposed to stop distributing most foreign aid now for the next 90 days, even aid that's already been allocated by Congress.

CBS News reports that even includes provision of life saving antiviral medications in the government's much praised PEPFAR program for HIV relief, which began during the George W. Bush administration. Reuters reports that Trump issued a memo threatening disciplinary action against any USAID staffers who try to ignore the stop work order and continue what they're doing posted in some other country.

That's reminiscent of the disciplinary action he threatened last week against any federal worker who fails to report a job in the government that involves diversity, equity, and inclusion work so they can remove that position. Also on the personnel front, The Associated Press national political reporter Jill Colvin, who'll join us in a second, reports that intense loyalty tests are now being applied to anyone looking for work with the administration.

She quotes some federal workers saying loyalty is being put over competence in the work they're applying to do. Jill also contributed reporting to the story of the diplomatic confrontation over deportations that Trump apparently won yesterday against the President of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, after an intense few hours of economic threats by each. Associated Press national political reporter Jill Colvin does join us now. Jill, thanks for coming on. Welcome back to WNYC.

Jill Colvin: Thanks so much for having me. Good morning.

Brian Lehrer: Want to start on Colombia. President Petro refused yesterday to accept Colombians being deported back there on US Military planes. What happened after that?

Jill Colvin: There were two military planes that apparently were not allowed to land in Colombia. Trump took to Truth, as he does, and put out this very intense threat, saying there will be visa restrictions, there'll be a 25% tariff on all Colombian goods entering the US, which will then raise to 50% in one week. He did his rattle-sabering online that he often does. What we saw is even before we had any of the orders in hand, we had the Colombian president issuing a release saying, actually, if you want to send those people back, I'll send my presidential plane to the US so that they can be returned in dignity instead of coming over on military planes. We'll be more than happy to accept them back. It was sort of within a number of hours, this threat turned into what the White House has been touting as a huge success.

Brian Lehrer: What sounds like a capitulation by Colombia case, as you just described it in that little bit of face-saving, that they would come on Colombian presidential planes instead of US military planes. That came after Trump threatened 25% followed by 50% tariffs, as you say, but also President Petro said, "Oh, yes, we'll impose the same tariffs on you, United States," but then he backed down. Was that because they just had more to lose economically once he realized what he was staring into?

Jill Colvin: Yes. We're waiting to hear a little bit more back on the kind of Colombian side and how this transpired over those couple of hours, but it really did seem like as soon as they realized that Trump was serious, and we started getting word that the State Department was moving towards, it wasn't just tariffs, but some sanctions on Colombian officials, visa restrictions, really making it difficult for government leaders in Colombia and people involved in this to leave the country or to visit the US, they seem to realize that Trump was serious here.

I feel like we got one of our first tests of Trump governing by Truth. During his first term, Trump often-- we'd see his tweets, and people would react. Here, in the course of a couple of hours, you had a country reversing its policy in response to those threats.

Brian Lehrer: Just to be clear to our listeners, when you say Trump governing by Truth, you don't mean by stating the truth. You mean by--

Jill Colvin: I'm so sorry. Yes. By Truth Social, his own social media platform that he launched when all of the other social media platforms kicked him off after January 6th for fear he would incite further violence.

Brian Lehrer: How important a precedent was this short standoff and the way it turned out, if you think it is one?

Jill Colvin: I do think it's significant. I think that it is a warning for other countries. Look, we got no advance notice that Trump was considering tariffs or any other action against Colombia. We've heard him threaten other countries, but you saw how quickly Trump can hear something, see something maybe on Fox News and pull out his phone or dictate to an aide to send something out there and in a much faster way than the traditional cogs of government where these things are discussed and orders are written. It's just a much faster and a far less predictable process.

Trump has already threatened severe tariffs against two of the country's top allies with Mexico and Canada. Those were done in press conferences and in conversations that he had one-on-one with those leaders. Those threats have had serious consequences. I've got a lot of family in Canada. They, along with the government there, is incredibly concerned about the economic impact of potential tariffs that Trump says he'll put into place on February 1st against Canadians.

What we're seeing here is Trump just really shaking everything up. At this point here, he made a threat, and it looks like those tariffs are now off the table because the government has complied in the way that he wants. We'll see in the next couple of weeks whether a lot of these things are threats to get things that he wants or whether he's serious in putting these tariffs into effect, which will, of course, have huge trickle-down consequences for our relationship with our closest allies to American consumers buying all of these goods. We're going to have to pay those passed-on tariffs.

Brian Lehrer: You talk about your people in Canada. I found myself wondering the other day, what if Canada really did become the 51st state? How many electoral votes would they have with that size population, and would they be likely to vote for a Republican for president? I have just this wild guess--

Jill Colvin: [unintelligible 00:08:09] larger population--

Brian Lehrer: Oh, go ahead.

Jill Colvin: Larger population than California. Effectively you would wind up creating the largest Democratic state and completely transforming the Electoral College and the makeup of Congress.

Brian Lehrer: Maybe he's going to invade Panama and Greenland, but maybe not Canada. Listeners, we want to invite you in on at least any of the stories that I mentioned in the intro. Anyone with any connection to Columbia or to Chicago or Dallas-Fort Worth, on the immigration raids there, or job applicants on Jill's story that we'll get to on what might be different in this administration about what kind of loyalty you have to prove before getting hired, even for a regular job, not a cabinet appointment, or anybody connected to foreign aid with that stop work order for almost all foreign aid, or to Immigrant Legal Services with the stop work order there for government-funded immigrant legal services in this country, who can help us report any of these stories. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692.

I'm guessing that some of you at your workplaces or hearing from people you know who work in any of these areas, with all these changes happening at the same time here at the end of week one of the Trump administration, what can you tell us about how they're actually playing out in your job description or with anybody you know? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, call or text with AP National Political Reporter Jill Colvin.

Jill, staying on immigration, I don't think you've reported directly on the immigration raids in Chicago or the Dallas-Fort Worth area, but do you have a sense of who and what are being raided specifically? We hear that the first priority is supposed to be violent criminals or those at least accused of violent crimes. We know there was a workplace raid in Newark on Thursday, which would seem to be casting a wider net on people just here to work. I can't tell from the reporting I've seen on Chicago or Dallas, can you?

Jill Colvin: It's interesting because the administration is really trying to publicize what it's doing. We had this big raid happening over the weekend on Saturday where we had Dr. Phil reporting live alongside Tom Homan, who's Trump's chief immigration czar at the White House, and really wanting people to see what's going on here. We understand that there have been raids happening in Arizona, California and Colorado, in Georgia and Nebraska and Texas. We don't know all the details about a lot of these raids.

There was one that they publicized over the weekend where in the Denver area where 50 people were taken into custody and that looked like it was a party with a bunch of gang members and gang leaders with a lot of drugs. Most of the people taken into custody there were people who had seemed like criminal records. There were a couple of American citizens that were in the mix and that kind of thing. Apparently that was an operation, an investigation that had started under the Biden administration that had continued on. That kind of large scale event.

We don't know a lot about some of these smaller ones. What we've been seeing is if they're coming and doing a raid somewhere, there are going to be people who have not committed violent crimes that are in the mix. They're American citizens who wind up being detained or questioned as part of that process, the chaos that happens. There was a scare in Chicago about agents potentially going into a school, which it turned out it was Secret Service agents and not ICE agents.

With the way that these executive orders have been written just eliminating these restrictions that had been in place previously for the places that can be raided, so putting places like schools back on the table. I've heard in New York of people being concerned about going to the hospital when they're sick, calling an ambulance because they're worried about the impact on health care facilities.

At this point, it's interesting because up until Saturday, the number of people being detained was actually quite similar during the early days of the Trump administration to the historical averages during the Biden administration. They were trying to make a big show of this, but basically they've been saying it takes time to ramp up. There were about 300 of these arrests happening on average during the last year. They ramped that up to nearly 1,000 on Saturdays. You're seeing that gradually increase. I think we'll see over the coming days who gets sucked up in that effort.

Brian Lehrer: It didn't make the news in the same way over the Biden administration's four years or during the Obama administration's eight years, but it was already US policy to deport people convicted of violent crimes if they were here illegally. Obama got protested sometimes by immigration advocates as the deporter-in-chief. Some of it is not really a policy change, but a PR change. It does seem that they're going to go much further than that from the early indications. I want to play a clip of Democratic Illinois Governor JB Pritzker with what's going on in Chicago on CNN's State of the Union yesterday, responding to reports of ongoing or impending raids in the Windy City.

Democratic Illinois Governor JB Pritzker: Well, let me start by being clear that when we're talking about violent criminals who've been convicted and who are undocumented, we don't want them in our state. We want them out of the country. We hope they do get deported. If that's who they're picking up, we're all for it. They show up with a warrant, and we're going to hand over people who are in our prisons or in our jails who fit that description.

Now, what they're also doing, though, and it's quite disturbing, is they're going after people who are law-abiding, who are holding down jobs, who have families here who may have been here for a decade or two decades, and they're often our neighbors and our friends. Why are we going after them? These are not people who are causing problems in our country. What we need is a path to citizenship for them. We need to secure our border. We need to get rid of the violent criminals, but we also need to protect people, at least the residents of Illinois and all across the nation, who are just doing what we hope that immigrants will do.

Brian Lehrer: JB Pritzker, Democratic Governor of Illinois, on CNN yesterday. Is that a key strategy of Democrats now agreeing on the deportation of violent criminals? He seemed to make sure to lead with that agreement at the beginning of his first answer there on CNN, and then trying hard to make the distinction between those detainees and others who may now get swept up by ICE.

Jill Colvin: Absolutely. It's really, really fascinating to see just how the rhetoric has changed on the Democratic side. As you've seen the results of this election and polling that shows that large percentages of Americans believe that there have been too many people coming in and that people who've committed violent crimes should be deported. You've got Democratic officials in Chicago and New York having to recognize that reality.

What's also interesting is that before these deportation raids started, JD Vance, now the vice president, also voiced pretty similar distinctions there in terms of we're going to start with the people who are violent. The reality is, is that, and I think what we could see that could wind up really having an impact is the images that that will surely come out of the impacts of some of these raids. If you have a situation where a parent is being taken away from their child violently, you've got pictures of children crying and screaming and losing--

Those heartbreaking scenes that we've seen in the past when people really start to put a human face to who these people are, the stories of people who've been working jobs who've been here maybe for decades, who can talk about the reasons why they came to the country. Once people start making that distinction between, oh, violent, criminal, yes, of course, we don't want them to be here, versus those more human stories, that the public will end up landing and how those government officials will end up seizing on those different stories.

Brian Lehrer: We have some very interesting looking calls coming in from people connected to various of these stop work orders and things that I mentioned in the intro and that we've started talking about. My guest is Jill Colvin, national politics reporter for The AP. One more question on this thread first. What's the law now, as we heard JB Pritzker there say that Illinois still wants to protect immigrants who are here law-abiding, except for their immigration status. What's the law now? If it's clear to you, because it's not clear to me, on sanctuary-

Jill Colvin: It is not clear to me.

Brian Lehrer: -city protections. I'll lay it out for our listeners who may not be following it. On sanctuary city protections at the local level versus the new federal policy, which includes threatening local officials with investigations if they don't cooperate with immigration raids. Is it clear to Pritzker or anyone else in any democratic city or state which law governs?

Jill Colvin: I certainly don't know the answer to that. These cities have very strict rules about not cooperating with ICE, about not letting ICE officials into prisons. These are laws that are on the books in some of these places. Trump has spoken very aggressively over the last probably eight years now about wanting to target sanctuary cities. He's threatened federal funding. We haven't seen him pursue that yet. We could really end up seeing a showdown here between his assertions versus whether these cities and states, how far they want to go here.

Brian Lehrer: Larry, in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hello, Larry.

Larry: Hey. Hi. Thanks for taking my call. My point was, and I do have some connection to legal services for immigrants of varying statuses. For obvious reasons I can't discuss that specifics on the air. I do want to say that what I find disturbing from the perspective that I share your basic New York City, Brownstone, Brooklyn liberal thing is the lack of concern for the labor point of view of this. I read in the New York Times, I hear on NPR that one of the costs of the Trump's mass deportation plan will be increased costs to us for food products, for services provided by immigrant workers of varying statuses and so on, like nannies, chicken, strawberries.

I find that disturbing. It seems to be an almost tacit admission that what we want is an exploitable population of workers who don't have recourse to workers comp, to OSHA, to labor laws who are easily cheated out of overtime and so on. I find that disturbing. I do. I think it's a major issue.

Brian Lehrer: You know what I think that the Democrats who hold that position would argue is that we need that many workers because Americans who are here are not willing to do that work for the wages that are being paid, but then they would say, these Democratic politicians and commentators, they would say, "What we also want is a path to legal citizenship status for the people who are here doing that work so that they also are covered by the wage and hour laws and things like that."

Larry: Yes. That sounds like some day to me. Not now.

Brian Lehrer: Larry, I hear you. Thank you very much. Let's go next to Kashish in Jacksonville, Florida. You're on WNYC. Hello, Kashish.

Kashish: Hi, Brian. Can you hear me?

Brian Lehrer: I can hear you.

Kashish: I wanted to speak about the stop work order that's been placed over the weekend for USAID. I'm originally from Nepal. Actually, USAID is Nepal's oldest bilateral development partner since 1951, arguably also the most important development partner that Nepal has. USAID helps with everything from disaster preparedness, climate crisis, agriculture, public health, everything essentially, education.

Interestingly, it was during Trump's first presidency in 2017 that USAID worked really hard for Nepal to sign a $500 million project called MCC. Extremely controversial in Nepal, but America had its way. Nepal government approved it. Now I guess that there's no information in Nepal as of, well, it's just Monday now here, but it's end of Monday in Nepal. If you look at the American Embassy's website, the latest news they have is a brand new grant that they announced for some conservation project in the birthplace of Buddha in Nepal, that was in December, a few thousand dollars of grant.

If you look at the USAID Nepal's website, you see a press release from last year announcing a new grant. There's a huge uncertainty in Nepal right now as to what happens because everything is on hold. It seems the media has not been able to provide any clarity. The Embassy and USAID obviously still not sure what they're going to say because the press releases are still announcing old grants on their website.

I actually worked as a communications consultant for USAID for several years. I've seen on ground how effective the work actually has been in Nepal. The assistance from USAID has actually been extremely well used and Nepal has benefited a great deal from it, and America, too, because of the geopolitical situation with obviously Tibet and China to the north of us and India to the east, west, and south of us. What's going to happen most likely is if America does create this kind of uncertainty, China, which is already edging in on its geopolitical influence, will just have its way as much as possible.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. We have another caller who I think we're not going to have time to get to, but who said a similar thing with respect to China and the standoff with Colombia. Apparently we have a lot of economic power over Colombia still. They backed down on that deportation standoff with Trump yesterday. Some other commentators had said, look, the United States is Colombia's number one trading partner, but China is trying to horn in on that really hard.

If the United States did go ahead with big tariffs to punish Colombia for not cooperating with deportations, then China would be able to sell its goods more competitively to Colombians than they were yesterday. This is going to come up around the world. Kashish, let me ask you a follow-up question because the memo from now Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, on this 90-day suspension of foreign aid, in most cases, said what they're doing now is reevaluating every foreign aid program from an America-first perspective and determining if each program not just helps the people of whatever country, but is also in some way in the interest of the United States. Would you make a case that some of those programs you were just describing in Nepal are in the interest of the United States and could withhold that test of that standard?

Kashish: Absolutely. Particularly the MCC, because China has obviously come in with its one belt, one road project. It's a huge competition, infrastructure-wise, as to who spends the more money and who has the larger sway with the political parties and government in Nepal in terms of infrastructure development. Where I'm really worried is that the Trump administration a lot of the projects that are funded in Nepal through USAID revolve around women's health, even abortion rights, social justice issues, climate change, environment conservation.

These are all issues that are obviously on the back burner or, as far as the Trump administration is concerned, not a priority at all. I'm worried that a lot of these fundings for these really important projects are going to go away from Nepal. Even though larger projects like MCC, which was passed under Trump's first term, may come by, other projects may suffer, especially cultural, social justice, environment conservation issues.

Brian Lehrer: Kashish, thank you so much.

Kashish: Nepal is fortunate because of its geopolitical location. We're just placed in a situation where it has always been in the interest of Western powers to maintain as much of an influence as possible because of its proximity to China.

Brian Lehrer: Kashish, thank you for helping us report this story. We really appreciate your call.

Kashish: Thank you, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: As we continue with Jill Colvin, Associated Press National Political Reporter. Jill, on one little piece of what he said, it's hardly made news considering everything else that's going on. The back and forth that always takes place between Democratic and Republican administrations over whether aid continues to flow to women's health programs that include any reproductive elements, they keep getting canceled when Republicans come in. They keep getting reinstated when Democrats get in. Those got canceled again, I believe, on day one of Trump, from what I read. There's so much that's new that this back and forth that's been going on for decades hardly made any news. What were you thinking listening to that call from Kashish or, for that matter, the previous caller?

Jill Colvin: It's such a fire hose, as I think you were alluding to there, of this blitz of executive action. As you dig into each and every line of these things that are sometimes written in bureaucraties, each of these things impacts millions of dollars and thousands of people all across the world. You realize that what does it mean if we're going to put a pause on X to evaluate whether it satisfies the America first criteria? What that actually means is an anti-HIV program that saved 25 million lives, including millions of children, is now being threatened.

You think about the aid workers who are paid very little money, stationed in places across the world who are saying, "Well, do I need to close up shop? What do I tell these families that I'm working with in these villages I'm embedded in?" Each of these things that we're hearing about that we don't even have the bandwidth to unpack in the first 24 hours just has such long, deep implications that need to be unpacked to find out what they actually mean for people.

Brian Lehrer: We should say, in the interest of completeness and fairness, that aid that goes directly to food relief, emergency food relief, is not being cut off under this.

Jill Colvin: That is the one exception. Yes.

Brian Lehrer: As well as apparently aid to Israel and Egypt that dates back to the peace accord between those countries from the 1970s, that is not being cut off, nor is the emergency food aid, but all other kinds of foreign aid, including medical aid, as the CBS News story I cited before noted. All right. We'll continue in a minute. We have more really interesting calls coming in on some of the other stop work orders and other things that are going on right now as we continue with Jill Colvin, national political reporter from The Associated Press, and your calls and texts. Stay with us.

Brian Lehrer on WNYC as we continue with Associated Press National Political Reporter Jill Colvin. Jill, before we go to another call or move on to any other topic, some interesting texts coming in on the foreign aid question. One listener writes, I think it's important to point out that less than 1% of the US budget is spent on foreign aid. That's 1. Can you confirm that? Is that about right?

Jill Colvin: Yes, that's about right. About 1%. Though, I should say that even though it's only 1% of our budget, I think that's still about $60 billion, which is more than I think any other country.

Brian Lehrer: I don't think this is mostly an economic thing as opposed to a positioning thing that they're doing right now to make sure they're doing things that have some very direct relationship to US interests. On that point, listener writes, isn't it a bit naive to say that we are suddenly evaluating foreign aid programs from a what's in it for us perspective? Jill, that's a good text, right? Because haven't all administrations been evaluating it from that perspective?

In fact, another text here says, US foreign aid is an extension of American soft power across the world; clean water for millions, stopping AIDS through PEPFAR, helping protect girls and women from unwanted pregnancies. It goes on from there. The point being that these things are always being evaluated from a what's in it for the US national interest standpoint. Fair?

Jill Colvin: Yes. I mean, they are. Each administration has obviously a different definition of what is in America's best interest. Trump is literally his America-first movement, is what he calls it, and this very transactional zero sum way of looking at the world of is it in our interests, or are we being suckers and losers for helping these people when there's no benefit to us? Then cast that against this backdrop, you were discussing earlier, of China working in other countries trying to get their purchase into these places and find when the US moves out, there are other people who can move in.

Brian Lehrer: On the federal government trying to negate sanctuary city status of some states and cities controlled by Democrats, which we were talking about before, Liz in Manhattan wants to point out, I think, what she sees as a contradiction. Liz, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Liz: Thanks for taking my call. Also, shout out to the prior caller. My uncle worked at USAID in Nepal. I was aware of how important those projects were. The thing that's really confusing me, in addition to agreeing with everything that everybody said so far, is the federal government, particularly this administration, talks about states' rights, states' rights, states' rights; states' rights for guns, states' rights for abortion, give it back to the states. The Civil War wasn't really about slavery, It was about states' rights, blah, blah, blah. Now when we have states and municipalities enacting laws regardless regarding sanctuary cities, now we don't have states' rights. I don't understand how anybody does the mental gymnastics to make that work.

Brian Lehrer: Liz, thank you very much. Jill, I'm sure you would be able to report on many examples of those kinds of contradictions. We talked on the show recently about the Republican's stand on parents' rights. They make such a big thing. It was an issue in the campaign of parents' rights to be notified by a school if their kids are presenting as non-binary or a different gender than what's on their birth certificate, for example.

Then all these states pass these laws to prohibit gender-affirming medical care, like puberty blockers for minors, whose parents think that's the right thing to do in conjunction with their doctors. The Republican Party, really, activists in that party, don't want parents to have that right. States rights, parents' rights, it depends whose interests are seen as being at stake, right?

Jill Colvin: 1,000%. If you look at Trump's education agenda, this is somebody who proposed completely eliminating the Department of Education, except for one or two officials, but also then laid out a plan where he wanted schools to teach this very specific curriculum of being pro-American and teaching about the value of the nuclear family. There's a degree of when it's conveniently fitting into your worldview and your political agenda, then you go for one way versus if it doesn't the other.

Brian Lehrer: With so many things happening all at once, Patty in Lakeville, Pennsylvania wants to point out, I think, another stop work order that hasn't made much news around the country yet. Patty, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Patty: Hi, Brian. I think that there's a big one that folks are missing and/or need to be aware of. My son works as a seasonal National Park Service ranger. He got all kinds of emails last week saying that all of the seasonal jobs that he was in the running for have been canceled. It's just another thing. These parks depend on their seasonal rangers. They may not be able to open. They may not be able to have the capacity that they typically do if they can't hire the seasonal rangers.

Brian Lehrer: You're letting me know about this. I'm looking up right now, there's a Washington Post article with the headline park Service Yanks Job Offers After Trump Hiring Freeze. It says the National Park Service rescinded roughly 400 job offers for seasonal positions, prompting concerns that parks could be short-staffed during the summer. That's exactly what you said. You'll be glad to know that the Washington Post reporting aligns with your son's experience. Patty, is it his impression, though, if he has an impression, that this is just a temporary thing as they evaluate the whole federal budget, or that somehow there's an anti-national parks agenda here?

Patty: I don't know that he has an impression. I know I do. I will say that he did reach out to one person he had been a little bit further along in the process with, who basically said we were told not to continue with the process at all. We don't know at this point whether or not it will open again, but the problem is that if they don't do their hiring by say mid February, people can't make plans for travel and housing arrangements and things along those lines. I know that in his circles there's talk, of course, they're young people, about how it being an anti-park agenda and for fear of putting money in those kinds of things, but I can't say for certain.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you, Patty. Thank you for helping us report that story. The Washington Post article goes on to say the Park Service usually hires around 7,500 summer employees. Common seasonal roles include park rangers, trail workers, visitor service assistants, and maintenance workers. It cites the memo which said, "Your job offer has been rescinded at management request. Should the bureau be able to fill the position again, another announcement will be posted in due course."

Then the Washington Post says, the emails did not provide a reason for the move. In contrast, the Justice Department cited the federal hiring freeze when revoking offers to young lawyers in a prestigious honors program this week. Spokespeople for the Park Service did not immediately respond to a request for comment. There's that. Jill, that's a good segue to your article, which is out today on The Associated Press website about what you call the intense screening of job applicants now. What's this intense screening you're reporting on?

Jill Colvin: Every administration, as it's working to fill these thousands of political posts that each administration, is fully entitled to fill and put their own people in there to reflect their priorities. What we've seen over the last week and even before Trump was officially sworn into office was this very unusual intense questioning, both of people who are applying for jobs, but also people who want to keep their jobs.

This includes people in the national security space working for the National Security Council, people working for the State Department, that are being questioned not just on their histories and their qualifications for the job, but also their donation histories. They're being asked things like which Trump's campaign promises most appeal to them. They're being told that they're going to need to prove their enthusiasm to put in place Trump's policies.

We heard one person was even asked what their moment of MAGA revelation, what that was and when that occurred, and really being pushed in a way that they described as highly unusual. The way that the administration is having this work is it's all being controlled by the White House personnel office, and they've dispatched these aides to various agencies. Their jobs are to interview all of these people to prove that they are loyal to Trump and Trump's agenda.

Trump often talked about how he felt like his biggest mistake during his first term was hiring the wrong people. He talked often about how he felt betrayed, how he felt like these people were working against his objectives, trying to gum things up and not put in place the policies he wanted. The goal here for this new administration is to try to make sure that everyone working for him is going to be rowing in the same direction and believes what he believes.

Brian Lehrer: That was the premise of your article, that Trump considers his biggest mistake in his first term as not hiring the right people, but how far down the chain of employment did that go? It's one thing if he thinks he put General Mattis in charge and he turned out to be too conventional or whatever, but what about regular people applying for civil service jobs and things like that? Is that really what we're talking about here?

Jill Colvin: We've seen this going all the way, obviously, from the Cabinet secretaries to the dozens of people who are dispatched from various agencies to the National Security Council, people who are making very important decisions and are considered subject-matter expertise. We're right now talking about the political jobs. There are thousands of these jobs. They span the gamut of seniority. We're not talking here yet about the regular civil service jobs that Trump has put a hiring freeze on. We'll see how it filters down to that level. I mean, these are thousands of people who are the ones who are in charge of setting the policies for the country and implementing the policies for the country and their goal of making sure that they encounter no resistance as they are trying to enact Trump's agenda.

Brian Lehrer: Last thing on this, and then we're out of time. You cite some federal workers expressing concerns about the competency of the new hires in some cases. I was thinking, well, there's another ironic contradiction because supposedly they're getting rid of all these DEI hires, as they consider them, because allegedly people's identity is being placed above their competence. It sounds like in this case, political identity might be being placed above people's competence for certain roles. Have there been specific allegations of that that have surfaced yet, or just a general concern?

Jill Colvin: A general sense of dis-ease at this point as they realize what the priority in these questions are. Even when the transition team had an application form, so people across the country can apply for these jobs, they wanted to know people's social media handles so that they could go through and spend time digging to make sure that they had never said anything publicly that could be construed as critical of Trump. They're going through people's political contributions to make sure that they have donated that way. We've even heard of people who had photographs posted of them and other candidates. That was enough to derail their candidacy's dis-ease or to pause them. The concern is that those are the things that are feeling like they matter more than they have in past administrations.

Brian Lehrer: Jill Colvin, national political reporter for The Associated Press. Thanks very much, Jill. We appreciate it.

Jill Colvin: Thanks for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Much more to come.

 

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