During World War II, the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency, sent a manual into territory held by the enemy. Its title was the “Simple Sabotage Field Manual.”
The guide told managers to penalize their most efficient workers, award promotions to people who had not earned them, and funnel tasks into large committees for no reason.
Eight decades later, a former aide to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says that same playbook has found its way into the federal workforce.
Calley Means made the allegation on the “Joe Rogan Experience,” in an episode released Friday.
He told the host that bureaucrats are working to sabotage President Donald Trump’s administration from the inside.
Means said the material is moving from desk to desk among government employees.
“They were sending around a memo — a CIA manual — about how to be a bad bureaucrat and subvert an institution from within,” he said.
He named the people he says are passing it along. “That’s, like, sent around by all the career officials. They hate President Trump.”
The Daily Caller News Foundation asked the White House for comment. The White House did not immediately respond to the request.
Means left the White House on Oct. 22, when he resigned. Before that, he advised Kennedy, who oversees a department Means put at 90,000 employees.
Means painted a grim picture of the environment around his former boss.
“He’s [Kennedy] got a 90,000-person agency. He’s surrounded by demons who want him out and want him destroyed,” Means said.
Then he turned to the president’s side of the ledger. “And Trump’s sitting at 2 million people.”
Rogan pressed him for clarity. “So, his staff is all completely compromised?” the host asked.
Means answered without hedging much. “Yeah, for the most … especially the whole infrastructure,” Means, who resigned from the White House on Oct. 22, claimed.
He said he did not intend to excuse anyone, then described the scale of the problem as he sees it.
“I’m not making excuses for anyone, but it’s, like, kind of crazy, right? Like, what the hell do I do? This is an unruly government and the president has orders of magnitude more than that,” Means said.
The conversation then moved to the administration’s agenda. Means said Trump can recognize the frustration that has built over the past two years.
“I do think it’s possible for him to recognize that there’s frustration over the past two years of not aggressively moving on the policies that he ran on that are widely popular, but there’s been a severe consolidation of power using the fact that he’s very busy to slow many policies down,” Means said.
Means said the president holds the power to respond. “But yes, he can make a change to his staff,” he continued.
He closed with a statement about what Trump knows of the people around him.
“The president knows who the people are that are not going to sell him out to a foreign government. The president knows the people around him that will try to go hard to really drive some compelling change … to have an impact on the country he wants to have.”
Voters weighed in on the president’s performance in the 2026 midterm elections.
An NBC News exit poll found that 43 percent of respondents cited rebuking Trump’s performance as one of the reasons behind their vote.
The Daily Caller News Foundation reported that Democrats flipped both chambers of Congress in those elections.
