Speaking to Fox News on Thursday, RNC Chief Strategist Sean Spicer boasted that “almost 50,000" people have submitted resumes to join the Donald Trump administration through his website. Whether all of those people are real, however, is far from certain.
In order to fill some 4,000 presidential appointee positions, the President-elect’s transition team set up an online application form at apply.ptt.gov this week. But as Daily Dot writer Gavia Baker-Whitelaw notes, the website has no email or address verification system, “so you can ‘apply’ for a job in about 30 seconds.”
In Gizmodo’s own tests, we found that the application accepted just about any input for the required fields, including the email addresses “kornfan311@dubstep.gov,” “animeluvr1488@pepe.meme” and “thirstyboy@marcorubio.com.” Sadly, “420" was not accepted as a valid zip code. “42069,” on the other hand, was.
When we submitted an application with a legitimate email address and made-up information, Gizmodo immediately received an response thanking us for our interest.
There did appear to be one hard limit on the site: Applicants could only apply for jobs at 100 different federal commissions at a time. Either way, sorting through all the submissions seems likely to be a major job in itself for Donald Trump.
Gizmodo has reached out to the President-elect’s transition team for comment. This post will be updated if and when they respond.