The same day the Office of Personnel Management informed hundreds of employees, including about 20 involved in the communications division, that they were being laid off, the department’s top spokeswoman posted an Instagram video she filmed in her office showing off her outfit with the caption: “a moment for mixed patterns.”
On the day O.P.M. sent a memo to all federal department and agency heads asking for lists of underperforming employees to terminate, she flaunted a “work look” that included a purple skirt that her followers could also purchase, retailing at $475. She would get a commission if they used her link.
The spokeswoman, McLaurine Pinover, is not the only member of the Trump administration to have used her federal office to promote outside business interests, but former agency officials and ethics watchdogs say that the timing and content of the videos were both unlawful and especially tone-deaf.
Government watchdogs say the videos, coming from the spokeswoman of the agency driving the layoffs of thousands of federal workers, exemplify a widespread disregard for government ethics across the Trump administration.
“It’s illegal for a public employee to promote a private company in their government office,” said Donald Sherman, the executive director and chief counsel for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a government watchdog group.
“On its own, maybe it would qualify as small potatoes, but context matters,” Mr. Sherman added. “In the context of a president and an administration that are routinely engaged in profiteering and using the office of the presidency for financial gain, in the context of someone who owns a private company, Elon Musk, coming into the administration and dismantling the government as he has, and in the context of O.P.M. being central to the administration’s attack on civil servants who actually want to be there to work for the American public, an O.P.M. political appointee engaging in this conduct is egregious.”