Jeffrey Neal appears on “Government Matters.”

/ Jeffrey Neal

It’s no secret that President Donald Trump likes watching television. In 2017, the New York Times reported that he spends at least four hours, and sometimes eight, in front of the TV screen. Many of the president’s tweets appear to line up to segments on Fox News’ morning show, and indeed, some pundits also contend that his pardons line up with the network’s programming.

But it appears that Fox News may not be the only network with some influence on the commander in chief. A Washington Post report about Trump’s decision not to pursue dissolving the Office of Personnel Management contained this interesting detail:

In recent weeks, Trump soured on continuing the fight after seeing an obscure Washington-area television program about government, according to White House officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. WJLA’s “Government Matters” has aired several segments about the OPM proposal. Top budget office and other White House officials were rushed to meet with Trump the following day.

WJLA, also known as ABC 7, is a Sinclair Broadcast Group-owned local television station in D.C., and Government Matters is a wonky offering from the station that focuses on the practice of government. While Sinclair itself is right-leaningGovernment Matters strives to be non-partisan and eschew politics in favor of policy. Recent topics include modernizing performance reviews for federal workers, insurance options for government employees, and how to fix the contract debriefing process.

So Trump’s ongoing interest in shutting down OPM—which basically acts as the human resources agency for 2.1 million federal workers—is a natural fit for Government Matters, which covered the story with frequency over the past few months. While it’s unclear if there’s a direct link between these segments and the president’s decision, at least one of those segments aired on October 3, when Trump was at the White House.

Government Matters has not responded to a request for comment.

The guest on that October 3 show was Jeffrey Neal, a former chief human capital officer for the Department of Homeland Security who now runs Chief HRO, a blog with federal government human resources news and analysis.

Neal says he heard yesterday that his segment may have had an impact on Trump’s thinking about OPM. “I was surprised—I didn’t know the president watched Government Matters,” he tells DCist.

“It’s kind of wild when you think about it,” he says. “When you do things like this, it’s generally not because you like to hear yourself talk. It’s because you have a point of view on something and you want people to go in a particular direction, but you generally don’t see any direct feedback where Person A says something and Person B hears it, and happens to be the person making the decision.”

Neal says that he wouldn’t have changed what he said had he known Trump was watching—as the segment showed, he’s opposed to shuttering OPM, “For whatever reason he decided to back off on it, I think that’s great,” he says. While he acknowledges that OPM “is an agency that has been troubled for a while,” he thinks that “this particular proposal didn’t have a lot of analysis. It’s one of those seat-of-the-pants types of proposals.”

Among the points Neal brought up in the segment is that the proposal isn’t particularly new: The notion of closing OPM has been around since President Bill Clinton’s administration, and was discussed during Hillary Clinton’s failed bid for the White House as well.

“It may very well be that the president was presented with the idea that what he was actually investing political capital in was a warmed-over Clinton idea,” says Neal.

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