It’s not just the essay questions or the loyalty tests. Whether or not you are hired, and whether or not you get to keep your job is wholesale based on if a Trump Admin stooge thinks you pass the admins vibe check.

And, if you don’t pass the vibe check for your probation you get an adverse action on your personnel file which basically precludes you from working in the civil service again. (Page 7)

It’s shit all the way down ngl, and the civil service will take decades to recover from all this.

Yeah, thats the part the news outlets seem to forget. The hiring paradigms this time around favor cronyism and nepotism over actual merit and skill, and direct hire just augments that 10 fold