“Raging Misogynist” Now Federal Government H.R.’s Top Lawyer
The Office of Personnel Management’s new general counsel has a history of racist and sexist social media posts.
(Photo: Getty Images; Illustration: Leslie Garvey / POGO)
This article includes quotes referencing sexual violence and violence against women.
Andrew Kloster, a self-described “raging misogynist” with a public history of racist comments and insistence on loyalty to President Donald Trump, has been installed as general counsel for the federal government’s human resources agency, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM).
After leaving the office in 2021, Kloster returned to OPM last week, according to federal records obtained by the Project On Government Oversight (POGO). His return came as OPM began issuing a number of government-wide memos, including one yesterday mandating agencies begin to launch efforts to strip protections from some career employees. Kloster worked as deputy general counsel at OPM at the end of the first Trump administration and briefly served as its acting general counsel. He was most recently the general counsel for then-Representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL). In 2022, Kloster was subject to a temporary restraining order for domestic violence in Maryland, which was dismissed days later after an agreement, according to the Maryland Judiciary case page.
OPM did not respond to repeated requests for comment. Kloster responded to only one part of POGO’s query. He said one accusation against him was “false”; POGO is not including that claim in this story.
OPM sets human resources policy across the federal government, including matters involving the treatment of women and minorities in the 2 million-strong federal civilian workforce. Last week, OPM mandated that all agencies send messages to every employee putting them on notice that Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility efforts in the federal government are now barred by executive order, and staffers are required to report attempts to conceal these efforts to the office. “Failure to report this information within 10 days may result in adverse consequence,” it warned in a January 21, 2025, memo. It directs questions to OPM’s new chief of staff, Amanda Scales, a former employee at an Elon Musk-owned company. (Musk visited OPM last Friday, according to NextGov.)
Kloster, who is now responsible for advising the government’s H.R. department, has a long history of racist and sexist online comments and social media posts. In a response to a post on The Volokh Conspiracy legal blog, as reported by The Daily Beast, Kloster wrote, “Consent is probably modern society’s most pernicious fetish.” He also has written online that “Slaves owe us reparations.” In 2023, roughly six months after being served a temporary restraining order, he tweeted, “I need a woman who looks like she got punched.” POGO’s queries sent to OPM and Kloster sought comment on these and other statements; neither addressed these questions.
The federal government is generally more diverse than the labor force at large, according to a December 2024 federal study. However, white men are overrepresented in the seniormost levels. White men make up 49.6% of the senior executive service and senior pay levels in the federal government, as opposed to only 35.7% of the broader civilian workforce. “Too many underserved communities remain under-represented in the federal workforce, especially in positions of leadership,” states an OPM webpage that was taken down last week.
As chief counsel for OPM, Kloster could influence policies that allow more politicization of the federal workforce, could undermine protections for career staff and allow political beliefs to become a factor in who to hire, fire, and promote. OPM crafts the rules that implement the Hatch Act, a law regulating federal employees’ involvement in partisan political activities.
The Office of Personnel Management is also playing a critical role in implementing the president’s “Schedule Policy/Career” executive order issued last week, overseeing every agency’s plans to strip statutory protections from some employees. Yesterday, the office issued a memo to all agencies directing them to designate a point of contact for their Schedule Policy/Career conversion efforts by this Wednesday (Schedule Policy/Career was formerly known as “Schedule F”).
At the tail end of the first Trump administration when Kloster was at the office, OPM did little to curb an effort by one agency to remove statutory protections from 88% of its career employees, according to records obtained by the National Treasury Employees Union under the Freedom of Information Act. Some of the job positions on the agency’s list “absurdly stretched the definition” of what a Trump executive order identified as eligible for change, according to the union.
Kloster is a fierce partisan. While he was working as deputy general counsel at OPM in 2020, the Associated Press reported that “Kloster worked as an observer for the Wisconsin Republican Party on election night and was accused of yelling at election workers and police in Green Bay, a claim he disputes.” He was directly involved in efforts to legally challenge the results of the 2020 presidential election by working for a controversial, taxpayer-funded effort in Wisconsin that ultimately found no widespread fraud. Days after the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, he responded to a tweet raising a scenario that could spark a “civil war” with hand clap emojis between the words “Do it.”
During his first stint at OPM, Kloster simultaneously held a position at the Trump White House’s Presidential Personnel Office during a period when this office was reportedly administering loyalty tests to Trump’s own political appointees.
Axios has previously reported that, in that White House role, Kloster “spent hours, sometimes over multiple days, conducting interviews and designing methodology to identify ‘someone who’s not on the team.’”
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