The Trump administration is clearly lacking in qualified candidates willing to work for them in a wide variety of roles, including critical law enforcement positions. Rather than address the underlying problems—like worsening work environments, political persecutions of career staff, or buffoonish leadership—the administration’s response is to simply lower standards in order to get new Trump-friendly applicants in the door. A whistleblower who oversaw ICE recruit vetting, a 17-year agency veteran and a longtime Republican who voted for Trump in both 2020 and 2024, filed a formal complaint describing not just careless hiring but selective treatment.
The New York Times reports:
In addition to the vetting concerns, he also mentioned in the complaint that Trump administration political allies had received favorable treatment and obtained security clearances even though troubling information about them had surfaced in background checks. He cited Corey Lewandowski, a former top adviser to D.H.S.
The concerns about Mr. Lewandowski had been outlined in a memo written last year by the D.H.S. head of security and was viewed by the whistle-blower, who told The Times that a higher-up had asked him to vet Mr. Lewandowski for an ICE credential. The red flags in the memo included allegations that Mr. Lewandowski had been paid years earlier for work by a Chinese government agency, according to the whistle-blower and a report last year in the Daily Mail. That allegation has not been substantiated outside of that memo.
Lewandowski has denied ever being vetted by ICE and denies the underlying allegation. But the shape of the complaint stands regardless of how that particular claim shakes out: ordinary recruits were pushed through with no meaningful vetting at all, while a Trump-connected figure’s red flags reportedly got smoothed over rather than resolved.
Meanwhile, CBS News reports that FBI’s internal hiring standards no longer treat even stealing from employers as automatically disqualifying:
In June, the FBI quietly lowered some of the standards it uses when it conducts background checks on would-be federal agents and other personnel. According to multiple sources briefed on the matter, the FBI did so to facilitate hiring in some cases, even if candidates acknowledged they engaged in sexually deviant activities or stole from an employer.
The longer that Trump and his appointees are at the helm of our national security and law enforcement agencies, the more damage they will do to the professionalism, competence, and ethical norms of those agencies, and the closer they will come to turning them into armies of loyalists.
The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.
© The UnPopulist, 2026
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