Rise of the Trump Loyalists
How the civil service purge damages democracy
Kathleen Walters was an IRS official who was asked by the Trump administration to act illegaly and turn over data protected by privacy law. She refused.
That led her to a dramatic decision, as she told me in the fourth episode of this season of my podcast, Autocracy in America:
The decision to leave the IRS was the hardest thing I’ve ever done and yet the easiest decision. We all have boundaries in life. I had a clear one, and I was committed to it. So that made it easy. On the other hand, I also am the mom to a 9-year-old, who I’m responsible for caring for and paying for. I was 23 days shy of qualifying for early retirement, which would’ve given us some payments monthly and health insurance for life. So I had to tell my daughter what was going on, and I said, you know, We are gonna have to not spend as much money. We’re probably not gonna go out to eat much. But this is what I did and this is why. And it still chokes me up. She said to me, Mom, even if we have to live in a tent in someone’s yard, you made the right decision.
Integrity, to me, it’s the most important thing to maintain, because if you lose a job, you can get another job. But if you lose your integrity, it is very hard to get it back.
Who will replace people like Walters? That’s the question I asked Don Moynihan, a professor at the University of Michigan, and substack author, who writes about the civil service, among many other things. We talked about the origins of the meritocratic civil service in the nineteenth century, the legality of mass firings, and the hiring of loyalists who are picked not for their qualifications, but because they will, unlike Walter, break the law if the president asks them to do so. We finished by discussing the midterms. These are Moynihan’s words:
We’re currently operating under an administration where you probably can’t retain a significant job if you don’t go along with the idea that somehow the 2020 elections were crooked. It does mean that the leadership of these agencies, like the Department of Justice, are going to be very much driven by people with this conspiratorial worldview, who are perhaps less dedicated to constitutional principles.
So I think in the blue states, you will have attorney generals who will be anticipating these efforts and will be, in some cases, responding to Department of Justice investigations. In red states, you’re gonna have this partisan alignment between the president and the actors in charge of individual states. And so I think, in both cases, public support for elections, public support for maintaining the integrity of elections, will become very important. Visible demonstrations by members of the public, if they can start to realize that there are real threats here, will become, I think, useful in reminding society as a whole that these elections do not run themselves.
This week’s FBI raid on the election center warehouse in Fulton County, Georgia, may be an ominous harbinger of what is to come. The Georgia Recorder, a nonprofit local newspaper, has a full account of the raid:
Fulton County Commission Chair Robb Pitts said he has not been told where the ballots will be taken upon leaving the warehouse, and that he can no longer guarantee they will remain safe and secure. Audits of the 2020 election in Fulton County, he added, have repeatedly been found to be accurate.
“That election has been reviewed, it’s been audited, and in every case, every instance, we get a clean bill of health,” he said.
Already, some Georgia politicians are celebrating the raid. What if federal civil servants are forced to support an attempt to rig the election in the future? Will politicians celebrate that too?
Listen to the whole podcast or read the transcript here, on the Atlantic website. Or go back and hear the entire Autocracy in America series, from the beginning.
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Who Profits from Ice?
Excellent analysis this week from Peter Andringa, Clara Murray, Stephen Foley and Rafe Rosner-Uddin at the Financial Times revealed that government contractors have received $22 billion in contracts from the Trump administration’s immigration crack down. These contracts have been primarily awarded by Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), which received an enormous fudning boost from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. According to the FT, ICE and CBP spending on private contractors has exploded in recent months:
The windfalls come as ICE spending on contracts has more than doubled to $3.7bn in the two quarters following the passage of Trump’s landmark bill, compared with $1.5bn in the previous six months.
Spending by CBP on private-sector contractors increased sevenfold between the first and second halves of 2025. The agency has reported almost $2bn in new contracted work this month alone — more than in the entire first half of 2025.
The FT reckons that the largest beneficiary so far has been Fisher Sand & Gravel, headed by Republican donor Tommy Fisher, which has received more than $6 billion since July to build portions of a wall along the US-Mexico border. Other Trump allied firms have received substantial contracts, including:
Anduril – $511 million for autonomous border surveillance and ICE AI tools. Co-founders Palmer Luckey and Peter Thiel are long time Trump backers and have contributed significant sums of money to his campaigns and other projects.
Palantir – $81 million for developing a “self-deportation tracking” operating system and tools for identifying individuals to apprehend and deport. Its CEO Alex Karp donated $1 million to both the MAGA Inc. super PAC and the inauguration committee and the firm donated to the White House ballroom construction.
GEO Group – $811 million for new detention centers. The firm donated $500,000 to the Trump-Vance inaugural and its executives made millions in campaign contributions to Trump campaign groups ahead of the 2024 election.
Corecivic – $295 million for new detention centers. The firm donated $500,000 to the Trump-Vance inaugural and its executives made millions in campaign contributions to Trump campaign groups ahead of the 2024 election.
CSI Aviation – $1.2 billion for deportation flights. The firm hosted a rally for Trump ahead of the 2024 elections.
Dell Federal Systems – $68 million for ICE’s Microsoft Power BI licenses. Dell founder Michael Dell has pledged $6.3 billion to fund “Trump accounts” to complement the president’s planned tax-advantaged, stock-indexed accounts for babies born to low income families between 2025 and 2028.
Hendrick Motorsports Technical Solutions – $1.5 million from a no-bid contract to supply 25 Chevrolet Tahoe vehicles to ICE. Rick Hendrick, the firm’s owner, is a prominent Republican donor.
People Who Think, LLC – $25 million from a contract for an ICE recruitment campaign. The marketing and political consulting firm was founded by Jay Connaughton, a Republican political advisor.
General Dynamics – $102 million for biometric identity and IT services, as well as background investigations for ICE. The defense contractor paid lobbyist $3 million to influence the 2026 DHS budget.
This list surely is not exhaustive. There are many dozens of ICE contractors (a comprehensive list can be found here), many more of which could have unknown ties to the administration or its allies too. By handing out million and billion dollar contracts, the administration will surely create some new friends and donors too.
Kleptocracy Tracker
Continuing to monitor conflicts of interest, ostentatious emoluments, outright corruption and policy changes that will facilitate outright corruption. (Read my original article, Kleptocracy Inc and check out the SNF Agora Institute chart)
January 23
Saudi Arabia–backed LIV Golf announced it will host an August tournament at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey.
The SEC agreed to dismiss a case against Gemini Trust, a crypto exchange founded and run by billionaire twins who donated to a fundraising committee backing Trump’s re-election campaign and the construction of the White House ballroom. The twins are also founding members of a private club partly owned by Donald Trump Jr. and back a crypto firm co-founded by Eric Trump.
January 25
Trump has pardoned or reduced the sentences of 10 people convicted of fraud and other white-collar crimes in the past 10 days—nearly a quarter of the total number of similar reprieves issued during all of 2025.
January 26
The Commerce Department arranged to extend up to $277 million in direct funding and up to $1.3 billion in loans to USA Rare Earth Inc., a mining and manufacturing company. The firm also raised $1.5 billion from a consortium of private investors solicited by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s former Wall Street firm, Cantor Fitzgerald.
Eric Trump met with Romania’s energy minister on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum to discuss a potential Trump Organization–developed AI factory in the country.
January 28
The Trump administration announced it would convene a White House meeting with banking and cryptocurrency executives to garner their support for an crypto industry-endorsed bill regulating digital assets.
Amazon spent $35 million promoting its Melania Trump documentary—ten times what some other high-profile documentaries have received.
The cryptocurrency industry has already pooled nearly $200 million to back pro-crypto candidates in this year’s midterm elections.
January 29
Venezuelan lawmakers bowed to pressure from the Trump administration, amending the country’s laws to grant foreign oil companies greater access to its reserves and sharply reduce firms’ tax rates.
Donald Trump, his two older sons, and the Trump Organization sued the IRS and the Treasury Department for at least $10 billion over the leak of their tax returns.
The Treasury Department issued a general license allowing American corporations to purchase and resell Venezuelan oil, authorizing many transactions that had previously been prohibited under U.S. sanctions.
Vitol and Trafigura—the two oil-trading firms that purchased the first $500 million worth of Venezuelan oil sold under the Trump administration—were both previously prosecuted for bribery schemes involving oil sales elsewhere.
Ukrainian Winter
It went down to -22 Centigrade in Kyiv last night, and today the temperature is supposed to fall further. All across Ukraine, the power grid has been so badly damaged that millions are without light and heat during this unusually cold winter. Several European countries as well as the European Union are sending emergency equipment. In both Poland and the Czech Republic, civic initiatives are supplying generators to Ukraine too. The Czechs quickly raised more than $6 million, the Poles more than $2 million, in addition to more contributed by Polish foundations. The numbers are still rising. Their websites are linked below, in case readers feel moved to help. Both can be read in English. The Polish one requires a bank transfer, the Czech one also allows credit card payments.
Polish Winter
Please stay warm, I know the East Coast is freezing too…
Anne, I listen to your podcast and it has been an incredible lesson and way to document what’s happening.
Kathleen Walters made the choice I had to make.
I worked for the government. I took the oath of office. I left because I have integrity and couldn’t support what was happening anymore. The most disgusting part wasn’t the orders. It was watching colleagues around me choose money over principle. They knew what we were being asked to do was antithetical to our principles and immoral. When I told them why I was leaving, they said they needed the paycheck, they had to support the administration. I printed the oath of office and left it on my desk.
That’s exactly how authoritarian regimes consolidate. Not through force alone, but through ordinary people choosing comfort over conscience.
The colleagues who stayed aren’t passive bystanders. They’re executing the orders, conducting the raids, dismantling the foreign policy architecture that built the liberal democratic world order, betraying our allies, and constructing the systems of repression. They’re the Argentine bureaucrats who processed the disappeared, the Soviet apparatchiks who signed the arrest warrants, the functionaries who made dictatorship operational. They chose a paycheck over the Constitution.
That makes them collaborators, not victims.
Your reporting on the purge and replacement with loyalists also shows what happens next. The people who stay aren’t the ones with principles. They’re the ones willing to break the law when ordered. That’s not a civil service anymore, it’s an enforcement apparatus.
The $22 billion in ICE contracts to Trump donors, the FBI raid on Georgia election offices, the systematic replacement of anyone with integrity, this is the infrastructure of authoritarian capture being built in real time.
Walters and I got out.
The people replacing us will do what we refused to do. That’s the point of the purge.
- Johan
Surely by any measure it must now be concluded that with the lack of accountability for this administration, the USA is currently in a dictatorship? This is 100% what I thought before the back down at Davos and the back down over the two murders in Minnesota. However, perhaps even the dictatorship can "read the room" and adjust based on pushback by their own supporters? Whilst we have not yet seen an avoidance of elections that we would expect in a dictatorship, it is the lack of accountability that has me concluding the dictatorship is already underway. The question remains as to whether there will be elections in November.
The other thing I note from this week, and is covered by you Anne, is this search warrant carried out on the Georgia Electoral office. One can see a parallel operation going on in the background that is seeking to whitewash the actual history of January 6th and the lost election, to align with the traumpwitt's narrative. It is disgusting.
I was also astounded by conservative commentators in the last week, such as Niall Ferguson, who showed just how far the moral and intellectual corruption has taken over when they declared trump owned and dominated world leaders and business titans at Davos. It sure doesn't take a progressive to see quite clearly what a humiliation Davos was for trump and how he was bought to heel on the world stage by wiser people. And then those who pushed back at Ferguson were labelled as "arrogant" due to not acknowledging anything trump does right. please.....