President Trump began his presidential bid in 2015 with a call to the Drain the Swamp, that is, to get rid of the grifters and rent-seekers that had made the Republican Party and the federal government nothing but a self-licking ice cream cone, that is, organizations that exist solely to sustain themselves. After his inauguration, we were introduced to the Deep State in the first of three coup attempts carried out against President Trump. Here, we had long-time Democrat apparatchiks who had burrowed their way deep into the federal government, and who had pulled mobs of fellow-travelers along with them, organizing surveillance of President Trump’s campaign, and by extension him, and sabotaging his efforts to staff policy positions in the government and carry out his own foreign and domestic policy.
Over the past four years, a lot of these people have been fired or so marginalized that they resigned, but there are plenty more where they come from. Or so we thought. This is from Politico, Biden confronts staffing crisis at federal agencies.
Donald Trump’s four-year war with the so-called “deep state” will leave Joe Biden a hollowed out and weakened federal workforce — one the president-elect will be forced to rebuild if he wants a shot at executing his sweeping policy agenda.
Trump just this week forced out his Defense secretary and top officials overseeing policy and intelligence at the Pentagon. More than two dozen political appointees have fled the Department of Health and Human Services since the start of the Covid-19 crisis in February. And the Agriculture Department has seen hundreds of scientists and economists quit their posts since Secretary Sonny Perdue forced two major research arms to relocate from Washington, D.C. to Missouri last year.
The mass exodus at federal agencies started Trump’s first year in office. Roughly 24,000 more government employees left in the first nine months of his term than departed at the start of President Barack Obama’s term. Trump’s relentless attacks on the civil service have dragged down morale and exacerbated decades-old trends of decline in some agencies, driving both political and career staff out in droves. Even now — as Trump refuses to concede, his officials threaten to fire staff caught looking for new jobs and his administration resists calls to certify Biden the official winner of the presidential election — hundreds of thousands of civil servants remain in limbo.
This is mostly bullsh**. The federal government is wildly overstaffed. In my experience, it is a one-job-one-employee type organization where the surest way to achieve promotion is by building an empire via featherbedding. The number of federal workers whose sole function is to merely carry out internal policies is staggering. Plus, there is absolutely zero evidence that there is any real expertise in the federal government beyond expertise in the process of moving inconsequential actions through the bureaucracy.
If Trump, in four short years, did manage to accomplish what Politico claims, then it demonstrates how wedded the civil service is to the twin gods of the Democrat Party and the perks of the job, and not to being the non-partisan and apolitical workforce that is supposed to help a president carry out his policy. It also provides conclusive proof that President Trump has superpowers.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member