McLaurine Pinover, President Donald Trump's Director of Communications for the Office of Personnel Management, is making headlines after she was caught using her government office to film fashion influencer videos for her Instagram followers amid mass layoffs of federal workers.
In at least a dozen videos filmed in her OPM office, Pinover showcased her daily outfit choices while directing her 800 Instagram followers to a website where she could earn commissions on clothing sales.
The day OPM issued a government-wide memo urging officials to "swiftly terminate poor performing employees," Pinover shared a video of herself blowing a kiss to the camera, captioned "work look" with the hashtag #dcinfluencer. Her Instagram account directed followers to a site where they could buy the $475 purple skirt she wore in the clip.
Her posts featured hashtags like #dcstyle and #dcinfluencer, often set to popular songs like Sabrina Carpenter’s "Busy Woman." As recently as Tuesday, she shared a video of herself typing at her office computer. Nowhere on her account did she identify herself as a federal employee.
According to three former OPM staffers, the videos were filmed inside the office of the OPM communications director on the fifth floor of the agency’s Washington, D.C., headquarters. That office is located just across the hall from a secure annex that has become a central workspace for employees of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the cost-cutting initiative championed by Trump ally Elon Musk.
You can watch a news report about Pinover below.
Former OPM staffers from the Biden administration said they were offended by Pinover’s influencer activity on government property, especially while she defended mass layoffs of federal workers—a move backed by top Trump administration officials who have accused career employees of being lazy and wasteful.
Pinover has consistently supported the Trump administration’s efforts to lay off probationary employees and offer buyouts to tens of thousands of others. When OPM sent federal employees an email last month asking them to list five bullet points of their weekly accomplishments, Pinover defended the move, calling it "a commitment to an efficient and accountable federal workforce."
Now she's being called out for her hypocrisy.
Pinover was also dragged for her paltry Instagram following.
A former OPM communications staffer described the moment they realized Pinover had filmed her Instagram videos inside her office, telling CNN:
“I saw it, and I was like, ‘Are you kidding me, that’s my office.' She’s the spokesperson for the agency that is advocating for the firing based on performance and efficiency of the rest of the government workforce, and she’s using government property as a backdrop for her videos.”
A watchdog group suggested Pinover's videos may violate rules against using government property for personal gain, as she appeared to be using a website that pays content creators commissions from clothing brands they promote.
According to Donald K. Sherman, the chief counsel for the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, rules prohibiting the use of government resources for private gain don’t "give cover to a federal employee using government resources to subsidize their private business."
Sherman added that "it is highly problematic that while dedicated civil servants who want to work for the government are being fired for all manner of dubious reasons, or are being forced out by this administration, that someone at the agency leading that attack on the civil service is using their government job for private gain."
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