Inside the Shadowy Crew Leading the Government’s HR Office

The top ranks of the federal government’s human resources office are filled with a motley crew of people who have been Elon Musk employees, a Project 2025 contributor, the former head of a leading group reportedly peddling lies about the 2020 election, and others, according to a roster of officials and resumes that the Project On Government Oversight (POGO) obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). 

Among them is the Trump White House liaison at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) — a locus of the Trump administration’s efforts to reshape the executive branch. The liaison is David LaCerte, who was accused of undermining accountability in a state government agency in Louisiana and was a contributor to Project 2025, a controversial set of proposals published by the Heritage Foundation.

The OPM employee roster also lists President Donald Trump’s Internal Revenue Service (IRS) commissioner nominee Billy Long. In addition, the roster reveals that a co-owner of a tax consulting company which reportedly compensated Long is also working at OPM. Both Long and that company have been recently accused by two U.S. senators of peddling allegedly fraudulent tax credits to investors.

Those are a few of the revelations from OPM’s roster, which further pierces the agency’s secrecy around its senior staff — a departure from the practice of the last administration, which posted the names of senior OPM staff online. Bloomberg recently published a similar, albeit somewhat different employee roster, also obtained under FOIA — Long and the co-owner of the tax consulting company, along with some others on POGO’s list, do not appear on Bloomberg’s version.

The roster shows overlapping links between many OPM senior staff and White House roles —undermining what experts say should be some degree of independence for OPM from White House control. The law creating OPM “could have placed OPM in the Executive Office of the President,” testified Linda Springer, a former Republican OPM director and first-term Trump advisor, in 2019. “But it did not.”

OPM did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

The DOGE staffers at OPM

More than half of the political appointees and special government employees — 19 of 36 — on the OPM roster are connected to the Elon Musk-associated Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). POGO’s analysis compared the roster with the ProPublica and the New York Times trackers of employees with DOGE links. Eight of the 36 names appear on a leaked list of DOGE staffers with Executive Office of the President email addresses. POGO identified 10 of the 36 as employees who have worked for Musk. (Special government employees are not intended to work for the federal government for more than 130 days in a year, and they are allowed more freedom to have outside employment.) 

The records shed substantial new light on the people behind sweeping actions involving the federal workforce, initiatives where OPM is playing a key role. Those include sending the “Fork in the Road” resignation offer, requiring the “five things you did last week email,” and implementing the removal of civil service protections from an estimated 50,000 employees. 

The “fork” offer and the “five accomplishments” emails have been promoted by billionaire Elon Musk, who obtained a position of massive influence inside the Trump administration after donating more than more than $280 million in the 2024 election. While Musk has announced his role as a special government employee will end soon, the Wall Street Journal recently reported that “OPM seems likely to figure prominently in efforts to institutionalize DOGE’s mandate post-Musk, according to current and former OPM employees.”

Many of these DOGE-connected OPM officials have been involved at other agencies such as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

DOGE ties are not the only way those on the roster are connected to the White House.

The White House Connections

One OPM official on the roster, Mary Sprowls, appears to also work at the White House Office of Presidential Personnel. She is identified on the roster as “advisor to the director” at OPM. Sprowls recently sent the termination email to former Vice President Kamala Harris’s husband Doug Emhoff, firing him from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council board of directors.

Another person on the roster is Marshall Yates, listed as “assistant general counsel” at OPM. Yates is now the head of the FBI’s congressional affairs office, and he is also the son-in-law of Steve Doocy, co-anchor of the Fox News show, “Fox & Friends” and one of two references Yates lists on his resume. (Trump recently praised Doocy for “always treat[ing] me fairly,” and has picked former Fox hosts Pete Hegseth, Sean Duffy, and Jeanine Pirro for roles in the current administration.)

Yates’ resume also states that he was the executive director of the Election Integrity Network, which a New York Times investigation found “has done more than any other group to take Mr. Trump’s falsehoods about corruption in the democratic system and turn them into action.” The FBI press release announcing Yates’s arrival in March does not mention the Election Integrity Network.

Neither Yates, the Election Integrity Network, nor Sprowls responded to a request for comment.

The Project 2025 Contributor

David LaCerte, whose contributions to Project 2025’s controversial proposals to change federal operations are unclear, is listed as “senior advisor to the director” of OPM in addition to “White House liaison” in the OPM roster. LaCerte’s LinkedIn profile says he “serves as Principal Liaison with the White House on all political appointments for the Executive Branch, OPM, and government as a whole” and “serves as principal advisor to the OPM Director regarding the development of senior executive policies for governmentwide impact.”

Critics have long raised red flags that proposals in Project 2025 would weaken accountability in the federal government. Although the Trump campaign distanced itself from Project 2025 prior to the election, many of the Trump administration’s actions have closely matched up with its proposals. 

LaCerte also served in OPM near the end of Trump’s first term, and he obtained a senior, three-year position inside an obscure office that investigates industrial disasters about a week before Trump left office in January 2021. An inspector general investigation “did not substantiate any allegation of misconduct related to the noncompetitive hiring of” LaCerte and another senior advisor.

Environmental advocates who raised concerns about that appointment noted that LaCerte was accused of poor management when he led the Louisiana Department of Veteran Affairs (LDVA). Louisiana’s legislative auditor and inspector general wrote nine years ago that “Former Secretary LaCerte engaged in questionable organizational, hiring, and pay practices that appear to have contributed to an environment with little accountability,” and suggested that LaCerte had inflated his military service record. LaCerte resigned during that investigation, but he has said the investigation’s findings are “unequivocally false” and he sued those state oversight offices for defamation. 

LaCerte's defamation case was dismissed in a Louisiana trial court, but is currently being appealed. LaCerte did not provide POGO with a comment.

Billy Long and a Co-Owner of a Controversial Tax Company

Also on the OPM roster is Billy Long, a former U.S. congressman who is currently Trump’s nominee to run the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Critics have warned that role may take on significantly more power under this administration. They’ve raised concerns that Trump may attempt to use the IRS as a tool of political retribution by revoking the tax-exempt status of non-profit entities he is targeting — a heightened fear given the administration’s efforts regarding Harvard University. The OPM roster describes Long as “senior advisor to the director.”

Although Long’s employment at OPM has been reported by media outlets, OPM’s employment of others in Long’s orbit has not been reported. Ben Elleson, described on the roster as an OPM “senior advisor,” worked for Long in the House of Representatives for more than a decade, including as Long’s deputy chief of staff and legislative director.

Another previously unreported person on the OPM roster with significant ties to Long: Mark Czuchry, also listed as a “senior advisor.” Czuchry is general counsel and co-owner of the tax consulting company Lifetime Advisors, whom Long reportedly worked with after leaving Congress. Czuchry’s bio on Lifetime Advisors’ website states that he has “the reputation of a ‘fixer’ among his clients,” and his private law firm has a long list of “clients/adversaries.”

Czuchry was among a group of donors, including two other Lifetime Advisors owners, who contributed to Long several months ago to help pay off campaign-related debts, according to Federal Election Commission records first identified by Issue One. 

Lifetime Advisors and Long have come under scrutiny by Senate Democrats for their role in promoting a pandemic relief program that the senators say was plagued by fraud.

Just weeks ago, Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV) and Ron Wyden (D-OR), who is the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee that is considering Long’s nomination, revealed that Long and Lifetime Advisors pitched “tribal tax credits” to investors, and “used the identity and image of Native American tribes without their knowledge.” These “tribal tax credits” do not exist and are fraudulent, according to the senators’ April letter, citing communications with the IRS. 

“The IRS must promptly investigate this matter to send the message that no one is above the law, regardless of whether they have powerful friends in high places,” wrote Wyden and Cortez Masto, calling for a criminal investigation.

As Long awaits his Senate confirmation to lead an agency that these senators are asking to investigate him, he and Czuchry have positions at OPM — and it is unclear exactly what they are doing. 

POGO did not receive responses to its requests for comment sent to Long, Czuchry, Lifetime Advisors, and Elleson.