Andrew Kloster, who once proclaimed online he is a ”raging misogynist,” is now the general counsel for the Office of Personnel Management, an entity that oversees more than 2 million civilian federal workers.
Kloster described himself as a misogynist on X, formerly Twitter, in February 2023 when replying to a user who said, “women love a sprinkle of misogyny in a man.” He wrote: “I’m 100% women respecter precisely because I’m a raging misogynist. I’m so kind you’ll want to kill yourself and die, which is the goal.”
The Daily Beast reported in 2023 on other posts Kloster made on social media that the site archived before he deleted them. Kloster wrote that “slavery was voluntary” saying, ”(1) slaves did everything (2) white ppl didn’t free the slaves. Conclusion: slavery was voluntary.”
Kloster served as a deputy general counsel at the Office of Personnel Management during President Donald Trump’s first term. His return to the agency was first reported Wednesday by public corruption watchdog Project On Government Oversight.
Neither Kloster nor the OPM immediately returned a request for comment to HuffPost on Wednesday.
Brandon Brockmyer, the director of investigations and research at POGO told HuffPost Wednesday that it was “fundamental to democratic accountability” to pull back the curtain on who is serving in high-level government offices.
“Mr. Kloster’s history of controversial and public statements is directly relevant to the profound responsibilities he has at a powerful federal agency,” Brockmyer said.
Kloster slid into the role of general counsel just last week as a slew of hiring, firing and funding freeze memos and directives from the new Trump administration started flowing in. As HuffPost reported Tuesday, federal workers are currently being targeted with questions by the Trump administration, including asking them to explain whether any of their grants, loans or other financial aid is being used to engage in DEI programs, support or promote abortion or if their services assist immigrants.
In part of his responsibilities as general counsel, Kloster is tasked with helping to interpret and create rules that cover everything from how federal workers are protected in the workplace to how a government worker’s personal political activities should be regulated.
Before this return, Kloster was general counsel for the now-former Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, who came under federal and congressional investigation over alleged illicit activities. The Justice Department declined to press charges after a sex-trafficking investigation into the former lawmaker, but the House Ethics Committee issued a public report in December stating that it found “substantial evidence” Gaetz paid for sex, had sex with a 17-year-old girl and purchased illegal drugs while serving in Congress. Gaetz has strongly denied all of these claims.
The uber-conservative Federalist Society has Kloster listed as a contributor and describes him in a site biography as a “long-time fixture of the conservative movement” before also lauding his credentials: Kloster served as an associate director to the White House Office of Presidential Personnel under the first Trump administration.
Kloster, as The Associated Press reported in 2021, was a proponent of Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen in Wisconsin and was tapped to investigate the state’s election processes.
Kloster also was a legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation, the same group that helped shape the second Trump administration’s Project 2025 agenda. This week, metadata first reported by Citation Needed revealed the authors of at least two memos sent to federal workers mandating hiring and firing freezes and other disruptive directives were ghostwritten by onetime Heritage Foundation employees. (One of those authors was attorney Noah Peters; he once represented white nationalist Jared Taylor, the founder of the New Century Foundation, which is recognized by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group that “promotes pseudo-scientific studies and research that purport to show the inferiority of blacks to whites.”)
As for Kloster, according to public district court records in Maryland from 2022, the new general counsel in charge of the federal government’s human resources wing was once involved in a domestic violence dispute.
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Public records show he had a temporary restraining order requested against him that August with requests for several restrictions, including that he surrender firearms and stay away from certain residences and workplaces. A hearing on the temporary restraining order was held and the request was dismissed “with stipulated temporary agreement.”
An attorney who represented Kloster in that case did not immediately respond to a request for comment.