In The Hunt for Red October, we learn that Soviet submarine carried a “political officer,” a Communist Party appointee whose job wasn’t navigating or torpedoing things, but making sure everyone on board remained sufficiently loyal to the regime. Not to spoil a 42-year-old book, but the Red October had — against all odds in the Soviet Navy — been staffed by officers who had slipped through the thought police cracks, rising through the ranks and now wanting to defect. And so the political officer “slipped on some tea” a few pages in.

But “political officer” concept struck American audiences at the time as both absurd and a testament to the USSR’s ultimate fragility. The government’s hold on power had grown so flimsy that it willingly traded competence for lockstep compliance. The political officer served as a symbol of the USSR’s institutional rot.

Anyway, in 2026, the Trump administration is conducting 1L job interviews with a White House official sitting in to vet the political loyalty of each candidate.

An email sent to Liberty University School of Law students over the weekend lays out, in refreshingly unvarnished terms, what the administration’s hiring pipeline actually looks like. And it’s exactly as bad as everyone suspected:

The two most important requirements are you MUST be aligned politically with President Trump and his administration and you must be willing to work hard. Don’t be scared off by the transcript requirement. GPA is not a strong factor. If you meet those two requirements, you have a shot.

Imagine a career services office writing this paragraph and not expecting it making a laughingstock of the law school? “GPA is not a strong factor” doesn’t make for a ringing endorsement of any law school’s mission. Telling students at a law school ranked in the 140s that their GPAs don’t matter if a candidate is politically correct enough is just open mockery of the curriculum.

But that’s the “anti-DEI meritocracy” for ya.

It’s also why the Pentagon doesn’t want its future lawyers to be the sort of people capable of a T14 education. Government jobs used to be the province of high achievement. Or nepotism. Now it’s about rewarding FedSoc’s weakest warriors. And nepotism.

And political alignment almost certainly trumps “willing to work hard,” because it’s not even clear what hard work would look like at this ironically named Department of Labor. Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer is the subject of an inspector general investigation into travel fraud, alleged inappropriate relationships with subordinates, drinking on the job, and staff trips to strip clubs. Her chief of staff and deputy chief of staff have both been placed on leave during the probe, and investigators have now expanded their examination to whether grants were improperly directed to favored political operatives.

Oh, and her husband has been banned from the Department of Labor’s headquarters after multiple female staffers accused him of sexual assault.

Those selected for interviews will meet with a 2025 Liberty graduate currently working as a Policy Advisor at the Department of Labor as well as “a representative of the White House Liaison Office.” According to the email, this dynamic duo — a first-year graduate and some cross between the Red October political officer and ersatz Jonah Ryan — will conduct interviews that:

will be a combination of traditional interview questions and political questions (i.e., did you vote for President Trump? Do you disagree with the President on anything? What do you think about XYZ executive order?). If you get selected for an interview, Ms. Smith or I are happy to meet with you to help prepare.

I don’t know what’s more disturbing: probing candidates about their secret ballot as a condition of government employment or that anyone would need interview prep for this.

Q: Did you vote for President Trump?
A: No… oh, fuck, can I try that one again?

That might be unfair though. For a school that bills itself as “Training Champions for Christ since 1971” it must take some work to tune out the hush money for sex with a porn star and the sexual assault adjudication and everything about the Epstein files when answering, “Do you disagree with the President on anything?” The email closes with an encouragement that Liberty Law would love to get “double digit” students into the program this summer. That’s going to take a level of denying that would make Peter blush!

Now, the email does note that “this is a political position in which interns will serve the Trump Administration for the duration of their internships,” which means the administration will argue these are political appointee positions. But this is, in itself, bogus. The Department of Labor doesn’t need 1L summer political positions. Or, maybe they do, if they’re just looking for anyone over there able to make it through a day on the job without getting drunk at a strip club. But in the normal course of business, bottom rung interns aren’t political roles. They might have been expected to perform work for political appointees, but they were not expected to swear that they’re in the bag with every unrelated presidential directive.

And the email begins by noting that the Department seeks “students (1Ls & 2Ls) interested in all kinds of areas: litigation, appeals, regulations, policy, etc.” Right off the top, the email acknowledges that they’re looking at roles that are traditionally handled by apolitical career employees.

But this is consistent with the Trump OPM “merit hiring plan,” which replaces merit with essay questions about advancing Trump’s executive orders for positions GS-5 and above. It’s the human resources blueprint that landed a 22-year-old Trump campaign worker with no national security expertise who got promoted to lead terrorism prevention at the Department of Homeland Security.

Legal scholars have noted, this approach runs headlong into Elrod v. Burns, where the Supreme Court held that only policymaking positions could be assessed based on political loyalty, and explicitly rejected “efficiency” and “loyalty” as justifications strong enough to overcome First Amendment protections for government employees. But if you redefine a 1L summer job as “policymaking,” you can redirect work to give a career boost to political acolytes from TTT programs.

The LSAT is probably woke anyway, amirite?

This is the whole government hiring endgame. The conservative legal movement fought for years to reclassify career government positions as at-will political employees through Schedule F and various rebrands. Now they’re filling those positions with ideological loyalists — people screened not for competence but for their willingness to answer “did you vote for President Trump?” correctly. Don’t be surprised when a future Democratic administration tries to replace these hires and the very same conservatives howl about “politicization of the civil service” and “illegal purges.” It’s a heads-I-win-tails-you-lose proposition designed to populate the government bureaucracy with a Fifth Column to frustrate future policy action.

A summer position isn’t embedding itself like a chigger into agency roots, but it’s representative of the staffing philosophy transforming tasks, no matter how mundane, into political positions.

Someone needs to train the future Red October political officers of tomorrow! And to stan for this administration, a good GPA is not only not a strong factor, it’s certainly a detriment.

Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

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