On Friday I wrote about the silly Department of Justice lawsuit against SpaceX charging them with discriminating against non-permanent residents when hiring.

SpaceX deals in highly confidential and senstive national security matters, and as with all such organizations has strict limits placed on who they can hire and who they can’t. The laws themselves regarding this are extremely complicated, apparently, and there appears to be a rather bizarre loophole where non-permanent residents are excluded from employment in such industries, but refugees and asylees are.

At least in some cases. This is the sort of thing that probably keeps Human Resources department heads up at night.

Everybody with two or more working brain cells strongly suspects–to a near certainty–that the investigation that led to this point has been politically motivated. Ever since Musk–who has been a loyal Democrat voter at the federal level until recently–switched sides and made clear that he thinks Democrats have gone nuts and are anti-freedom Democrats have been calling for investigations and harassing him mercilessly.

Pretty much every major politician from the Left has called him a security risk, and Musk has even been singled out by President Biden as a target of investigation.

It would be silly to ignore this. The Justice Department’s actions are pretty clearly weaponized government, and expect more of this for the foreseeable future.

So when I saw this over the weekend I had to laugh.

The DOJ is suing @elonmusk and @SpaceX for focusing their hiring on US citizens and permanent residents.

Do you know who else advertises that only US citizens can apply for a job? The DOJ. https://t.co/EiGn95QYbY pic.twitter.com/Zo2KoocMSF

— Alex Tabarrok 🛡️ (@ATabarrok) August 26, 2023

The DOJ should be suing itself, it turn out. It, and many federal agencies, specifically note than they only hire US citizens even for jobs that have no obvious security concerns. Such as, in the case of this particular job at the Department of Justice, “Recreation Specialist” at a federal prison.

Now SpaceX may be wrong about the technicalities of the law, the distinction, as I understand it, rests on the difference between US Persons and US Citizens, but they are 100% correct that the DoD frowns on non-citizens working for military related ventures. As a result, jobs restricted to US citizens are common in industries that interact with the military or that involve technologies which are potentially dual-use, such as jobs at SpaceX. Jobs that require security clearances are, of course, typically restricted to US citizens but so are many jobs not requiring clearances. Here, for example, is an ad for an engineer at Northrup Grumman in aerospace structures that does not require security clearance but advertises US Citizen only. The U.S. military, of course, mandates citizenship or a green card for enlistment, a policy that is shared by another federal employer—can you guess? Surprise. The Department of Justice.

Below, for example, is an ad for a recreational specialist to work for the DOJ’s Bureau of Prisons–this is not a job involving national security!–but the ad states clearly that U.S. Citizenship is Required. Most federal government jobs, in fact, are restricted to US citizens. The Federal Reserve even requires US citizenship to get an internship.

Last year after the raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence Rassmussen Reports asked an odd but revealing question. Did Americans think Joe Biden was using the FBI as his “personal Gestapo?” The answer was a bit shocking: a huge number of Americans did think so, including some Democrats. Overall 53% of Americans thought the people at the top of the FBI were abusing their power simply to help Joe Biden.

Obviously, the majority of those agreeing with that sentiment were Republicans, but 37% of Democrats at least somewhat agree with that assertion.

It’s pretty obvious that this is the case. The federal bureaucracy has been mobilized to help the Democrats politically, and this has been true for a long time. Going back to the Obama years with the IRS and Lois Lerner, top-level bureaucrats have been using investigatory and regulatory powers to harm Republicans/conservatives and help Democrats/liberals.

Is it any wonder that Republicans are furious?

This DOJ lawsuit is simply another example of this effort.

Is it any wonder that so many people keep their heads down? The alternative is spending much of your life dealing with harassment or worse from the feds.