Editor’s note: The following column was first published by Creators Syndicate.
The Biden administration is setting a booby trap in case a Republican wins the presidency in 2024.
On Friday, the White House unveiled a proposed rule that would make it even harder than in the past for an incoming Republican president to wrestle control of the left-leaning federal bureaucracy and actually implement the conservative policies promised to voters.
Of the 2.2 million federal civil workers, only 4,000 are presidential appointees. The rest stay in their jobs, from one administration to the next, protected by rules that make it nearly impossible to discipline or replace them.
They overwhelmingly favor the left. A staggering 95% of unionized federal employees who donate to political candidates give to Democrats, according to Open Secrets. Only a tiny 5% support Republicans.
Some federal workers in high positions slow-walk or even derail a Republican president’s agenda — and get away with it.
Why bother to vote if the left-leaning deep state stays in charge no matter who wins the presidency?
GOP candidates Donald Trump, Vivek Ramaswamy and Ron DeSantis are vowing to conquer this obstructionism.
Everett Kelley, union president of the American Federation of Government Employees, claims GOP contenders want to ‘politicize routine government work.’ Nonsense. We’re not talking about mail carriers. It’s time to make lawyers, PhDs and other top-level career bureaucrats implement the president’s agenda, not their own.
After Trump won in 2016, they went to town neutralizing him on almost every policy front, explains James Sherk, special assistant to the White House Domestic Policy Council under Trump.
Career lawyers in the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division flat out refused to challenge Yale University’s discrimination against Asian American applicants. Trump had to recruit lawyers from other divisions. After Joe Biden became president, the DOJ dropped the case. But the same career lawyers who refused to sue Yale made the losing argument in support of affirmative action before the U.S. Supreme Court.
Career health officials like Dr. Deborah Birx circumvented Trump’s instructions to moderate COVID lockdowns. Environmental Protection Agency lawyers pursued cases against fossil fuel producers and withheld the information from Trump appointees.
Trump mandated in a 2020 executive order that new federal buildings be designed to please the public, which prefers classical designs. Instead, General Services Administration architects chose modern designs they like. Trump mentioned as an example the San Francisco Federal Building, the ugliest edifice in the city.
It goes on, including weaponization of the FBI against the president himself.
In October 2020, Trump issued an executive order that federal workers who make policy should be reclassified as at-will employees who can be terminated.
But before it could be implemented, Biden became president. He canceled it immediately, knowing the bureaucrats were on his side.
The rule announced Friday would slow a president’s ability to reinstate Trump’s order. Democrats in Congress are going further, pushing to eliminate the president’s authority to reclassify jobs altogether.
The New York Times announced, ‘Biden Administration Aims to Trump-Proof the Federal Work Force.’
Ramaswamy vows to go further than Trump, eliminating half or more of civil service positions. ‘Speaking as a CEO, if somebody works for you and you can’t fire them, they don’t work for you,’ he said in a speech on Sept. 12.
New York Magazine facetiously claims holding employees accountable is a threat to good government, and warns that a Republican victory will mean ‘a new class of federal appointees charged with a partisan agenda.’
Democrats and their media allies falsely romanticize civil service, claiming it protects ‘merit’ over patronage.
Merit was the intention when the civil service was created in 1883 by the Pendleton Act. But merit is largely gone. Scramble those five letters and what you’ve got is the ‘timer’ system. Federal workers get bigger salaries and fatter benefits than private-sector workers doing comparable jobs. And they almost never lose their job, no matter how derelict they are. They put in their time and skate to a gold-plated retirement package.
It’s a gravy train, paid for by John Q Public. That’s sickening enough. But it’s even worse when these civil ‘servants’ put their own leftist leanings ahead of the president and public they’re paid to serve.
Bravo to the GOP candidates pledging to take on the deep state — replete with deadbeats and lefties — and return government to the people. It’s a worthy fight.
Shame on Biden for protecting bureaucracy instead of democracy.
Not in America.