“I feel like Joseph must have felt when he found himself to be second in command in Egypt. How did I end up here?” he told byFaith last month. “There’s no simple explanation apart from the providence of God.”

‘He’s not well known’

A Washington insider he is not. Even in Macon’s government circles, he’s hardly a fixture. Several local Republican activists say they had hardly heard of him before his appointment, and he was no regular at local political meetings.

“The first time I heard Mr. Ezell’s name was when I read it in the paper,” said Macon Mayor Pro Tem Seth Clark. “He’s not well known in Macon civic life.”

A few months ago, Ezell led a quiet life as a church elder with mean guitar skills. Now he’s facing intense scrutiny as a key figure in the cost-cutting initiative led by Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.

Ezell has said that hackers have attempted to breach his email and phone, and that he has been targeted with death threats. Calls from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution to his friends and associates went unreturned, and Ezell’s church removed his picture from its website to protect his privacy.

And yet Ezell is playing an instrumental role in President Donald Trump’s shake-up of the federal workforce — including his own agency.

In a video posted last week, Ezell said Trump aides recently approached him with a one-week “challenge” to process a federal retiree’s application end-to-end digitally — without “printing anything on paper.”

The video cut to footage of rows of 26,000 file cabinets and pallets of paper-stuffed boxes stacked in a limestone mine in Pennsylvania, where the agency has stored and processed retirement records for decades.

One agency officials said it could take up to a year to go paperless. But the video ends with another official, Kimya Lee, declaring victory: “Record time, within two days, without printing one piece of paper.”

‘All the sudden’

The son of a Southern Baptist preacher, Ezell moved around Georgia much of his childhood as his father took different clergy positions. After college, he helped launch two churches in Athens and Lawrenceville, where he’d often play guitar during services.

Before joining the OPM in November 2017, Ezell worked for a global data analytics firm. But the strain of international travel took its toll, and he worried he was neglecting his wife and children.

“I did something many would consider to be foolish,” he told byFaith, when he quit his job and took a pay cut for an analyst role at the Macon office of the agency, which serves as a human resources agency for the federal government but doesn’t have the power to hire or fire staffers.

Credit: AP

Credit: AP

For about five years, Ezell led the agency’s data and analytics branch, crunching workforce figures in a bureaucratic backwater. Then came an unexpected call from a Trump deputy shortly after his victory. Ezell thought he was being recruited for a private-sector gig.

“All the sudden,” he told byFaith, “I was offered the opportunity to serve as the acting director of OPM.”

It’s not clear how he came to the attention of administration officials, and several senior Georgia Republicans had never heard of Ezell before he was tapped. An OPM spokesman said Ezell relocated to Washington, though records show his family still owns property in Middle Georgia.

Ezell’s appointment came just as Musk ramped up efforts to slash the federal workforce. The Wall Street Journal reported that shortly after he started his job, Ezell helped Musk’s programmers gain access to OPM’s vast digital storehouse of workforce data.

Soon, the agency issued memos outlining steps to fire an estimated 200,000 federal probationary workers, triggering a legal challenge contending that Ezell’s agency “had sown significant chaos” and exceeded its authority.

Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com

Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com

A federal judge in California last week ruled that the mass firings were likely illegal because the agency has no authority “under any statute in the history of the universe” to hire or fire any employees but its own. The judge set an evidentiary hearing for March 13.

Meanwhile, Ezell’s office sent federal workers emails ordering them to list five things they did in the last week or risk being fired. Though the agency later said the directive was voluntary, many federal employees have since received a follow-up notice.

And Ezell’s agency, along with the Office of Management and Budget, sent a missive last week that could significantly expand Trump’s plan to shrink the federal workforce by targeting career officials with civil service protection instead of just probationary staffers.

The slash-and-burn approach has drawn growing pushback. Federal workers, labor unions and Democratic leaders warn the sweeping cuts could cripple essential services, from food inspections to park safety programs.

On Thursday, 141 House Democrats signed a letter urging Ezell to end the “unlawful mass terminations of employees in probationary status” by reinstating them immediately.

Some Republicans, too, have urged Trump and his deputies to slow the breakneck pace of the cuts. U.S. Rep. Rich McCormick, a Suwanee Republican who faced blistering criticism over the DOGE cuts at a town hall last month, said Trump was moving “a little too fast.”

“We should have impact studies on each department as we do it, and I’m sure we can do that,” McCormick told the “Politically Georgia” podcast. “We’re moving really, really rapidly, and we don’t know the impact.”

Ezell has largely avoided the public debate over the layoffs, insisting on social media that his agency isn’t hiring or firing employees at other federal departments, but rather providing “guidance.” He also said the pressure-cooker nature of his job has only strengthened his convictions.

“It has forced me to turn to God in ways I’ve never had to before.”