The House Oversight Committee is investigating the Biden administration’s last-minute efforts to embed its political appointees within the federal workforce to undermine the Trump administration, National Review has learned.
“We are concerned about job postings and hiring surges not based on actual agency mission needs, but based on political goals, including a desire to ‘Trump-proof’ agency staffs by placing personnel opposed to President Donald Trump’s agenda,” Chairman James Comer (R., Ky.) wrote in letters addressed to 24 federal departments and agencies on Friday.
Comer is asking for a list of new hires made after the November presidential election, after which the outgoing administration had 75 days to embed political appointees as career civil servants. He’s also requesting a list of all the job openings posted during that period and a list of all the positions for which the job title was changed in the last year.
Every presidential transition period undergoes a bureaucratic process, commonly known as “burrowing,” that converts political appointees to civil service positions. But the practice raises concerns that the second Trump administration would be thwarted by disloyal partisans from within the executive branch.
The letters reference one such beneficiary of burrowing, Elizabeth Peña, who under the Biden administration worked for the White House Presidential Personnel Office, the Department of Labor’s Bureau of International Labor Affairs, and former Vice President Kamala Harris’s transition team. After Harris lost the election, Peña briefly returned to the Bureau of International Labor Affairs.
She was fired last month after the Daily Wire reported on her appointment five days before Trump’s inauguration.
Peña planned to use her position in the Labor Department to promote “equity” in the workplace, she wrote in a LinkedIn post at the time.
The termination “appears to have been influenced by an article published in a conservative outlet, which alleged that I had ‘burrowed’ into the position,” Peña explained in a follow-up post. “The article insinuated that the role was simply handed to me. Let me be clear: nothing in my life has ever been handed to me. Every accomplishment I have achieved is the result of hard work, dedication, and perseverance—this position was no exception.”
The former federal employee contested the article’s claim that she was simply a DEI hire but admitted if she “had been hired as part of DEI efforts, I would take pride in that,” arguing she was more than qualified for the role.
Peña was a “term” employee, meaning her position was temporary. The term status allowed the Labor Department to avoid disclosing Peña as a political appointee hired for civil service, per the Oversight Committee. Under law, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management must provide a list of burrowed employees to Congress.
Her former job title, International Relations Officer, has historically been a permanent position. It was listed as such before the job posting was canceled and another advertising a three-year appointment took its place. That means she would have served for the majority of the Trump White House.
The committee believes there may be more federal employees, like Peña, who were improperly embedded by the Biden administration through loopholes in federal personnel law.
In two memos, one of which covered the period following the 2024 election, the Office of Personnel Management cautioned agencies against practicing burrowing.
“Despite these memoranda, we are concerned that the Biden-Harris Administration maneuvered to embed political appointees into positions in the competitive service,” the GOP-led committee said.
Representative Comer requested lists of all civil service job postings between January 1, 2024, and January 20, 2025, and the identities of Biden political appointees who are currently serving in the executive branch, among other documents. The items must be handed over by March 14.
The recipients of the correspondences were Trump’s confirmed nominees and interim heads of two dozen departments and agencies, including Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and acting Secretary of Education Denise Carter.
Months before Trump’s 2016 election victory, House Oversight raised similar concerns about burrowing during the Obama administration in letters to department and agency leaders at the time.
“Such conversions . . . run the risk of favoring political staff at the expense of more qualified career applicants. Conversions also create morale problems, in that qualified career applicants who lose out on promotions to applicants from the agency’s political staff can rightly wonder if the process was legitimate,” the committee said then. “The appointing officials must ensure each conversion of a political appointee to a career position results from a fair and open competition. Hiring decisions must be free from political interference, legitimate, and justified.”