Trump vs. the Deep State
With only a few days until Trump takes office, the bureaucrats are scrambling to oppose him.
If there’s one thing Donald Trump learned in his first term, it was the value of loyal employees. Unfortunately, that quality was rare. You can blame it on misplaced trust or perhaps the advisory that suggested he needed some experienced hands to assist him with the ins and outs of the job. Regardless, Trump was often handicapped by a workforce that was obstinate at best and, at worst, working against him.
While he did accomplish his signature tax cuts, produce some foreign policy achievements like bolstering NATO by forcing Europe to pay up and the Abraham Accords, and had the economy growing at a good clip, much of the Trump agenda was left on the table when Joe Biden emerged from his basement to run the country in the wake of COVID. As expected, all of that was detonated on day one of the Biden regime.
Fortunately, the American people remembered the good times of the first three years of Trump’s term enough to bring him back, dismissing the Biden/Harris ticket. Unfortunately, the new broom can’t necessarily sweep that whole agenda and workforce away with Biden attempting to secure as many federal employees as he can before he wanders aimlessly out the door. It’s no wonder a recent poll determined that while the group dubbed as “Main Street Americans” were willing to give Trump a chance by a 59-28 margin, the group of Federal Government Managers surveyed was split 44-42. Most of those against him plan to “strongly resist” the Trump administration.
To help build up sympathy for their cause, one house organ of the Left, The New York Times, ran a Sunday op-ed from Stacey Young, described as “a lawyer in the civil rights division of the Department of Justice.” Presumably, Young would be under the Trump appointee for that division, Harmeet Dhillon, who is already nominated for the task.
As Young sobs to her far-left echo chamber:
We understand what will happen if Mr. Trump fills the civil service with unqualified, inexperienced people selected for their political loyalty. But to stay in our jobs, we will need more than exhortation; we will need legal, psychological and other practical support.
One reason many federal employees are thinking of leaving government — often after decades of serving our country, under Republican and Democratic presidents — is that we’re afraid. The incoming leaders of the government have told us in aggressive terms that they want us either gone or miserable.
No, actually, we want you to carry out the agenda we the people voted for, not fight against us. This is why you have Kash Patel, who has been chosen to run the FBI under Trump 2.0, meeting with House Oversight and Government Reform Chair James Comer. The congressman told the media, “I want [Patel] to know that our committee will assist in any way possible to help him disrupt the Deep State.”
It’s also why Tyler O'Neil of The Daily Signal opines on three ways Trump and Congress can take down the deep state leviathan. The key change would be an amendment to the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, which codified a JFK executive order allowing federal government employees to unionize. As O'Neil makes clear, “When federal workers unionize, they set up an adversarial relationship with the people’s elected representatives, who hired these employees to serve the people. These unions then advocate for workers against the people’s elected representatives, shielding the employees from the ultimate accountability that comes at the ballot box.”
There’s also the low-hanging fruit of working with the DOGE recommendations to pass the REINS Act, bringing workers back to the offices that are wastefully underutilized, and relocating entire Cabinet departments closer to the people they serve. Trump started that process with portions of the Department of Agriculture in 2019.
It’s no secret that government employees and their dependents are not fans of Donald Trump, and it’s no wonder — he was hired by the American people to fire them. Their abuse of power and thwarting the people’s work by playing political games has gone on far too long. It didn’t help that we had a majority in Congress or a president, or both, who enabled these abuses for decades. While Young’s op-ed pleads for “practical support” and whines that we should “urge their elected representatives to promote legislation that protects civil servants and oppose draconian bills that would harm them,” we are done donating to organizations that work to protect public “servants” whose only interest is serving themselves.
Government is supposed to serve those it governs, not the other way around. The more Donald Trump can untangle the web of overburdening government, the better off Americans will be. Perhaps there’s still hope for those who lose their useless and fraudulent federal jobs: they can always learn to code.
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