Here is a logistical question I do not know the answer to: how easily can Trump fire career “civil servants”, particularly if they are blatantly insubordinate? Are we so insane as a nation that we have made it hard to fire people who not only do not want to do their jobs, but want to sabotage the initiatives of the person they supposedly work for?
I read in a left wing meme that Republicans had passed something that allowed individual employees of the government to have their pay cut to nothing, or effectively nothing, as part of bigger spending bills. I don’t know if this is true, but that would be great.
And Republicans control Congress: why not pass a law making it easier to fire assholes who are torpedoing and betraying the work of the elected President? These mother fuckers exist at the tax payer expense, and if they don’t want to do their jobs for any reason, then they need to sign non-disclosure, be forbidden from lobbying for five years, and get booted out the door.
I pondered the “politicization” of the bureaucracy governing our nation. Here is what I concluded: the President is elected to enact an agenda which is INHERENTLY political. He is elected to put into place his ideas, and it is the job of the bureaucracy–I keep wanting to use a word I believe Keynes invented, the Commisariat–to enact that agenda.
The President is CEO of America, Inc. His job is to deliver good things and avoid bad things, to the extent those things properly fall under his scope of responsibilities, and in this his job is no different than the job of any other CEO. And in any other context, insubordination and sabotage would be grounds for immediate dismissal, no questions asked. It doesn’t matter in any company, and should not matter in our government, if the people involved agree with the policies. I’m quite sure people who despised Obama nonetheless did their jobs.
But of course it is quite obvious that the people who work for government overwhelmingly favor MORE government, and only one party has been consistent in calling for that, even if both parties have effectively supported it. I would hazard a guess that AT LEAST 80% of career bureaucrats are Democrats, many of them ardently so.
When I think of decimation, I think of the scene–one actually enacted in history, as I read the book, too, and know this happened–where Mel Gibson, as Lt. Col Hal Moore (who just passed away in the last week or so) in “We were Soldiers Once and Young”, tells his troops to find anything that looks suspicious, and fire 3 rounds at it on his mark. When they do, they realize that heavily camouflaged NVA had been sneaking up on them all night long. It turns immediately into a major firefight.
It is almost certainly the case that more than 10% of Federal employees plan to oppose Trumps agenda–which is to say the agenda the American people called for enacting when asked in the polling booths–but firing 10% would allow us to get rid of most of the most vocal, the leaders, the Never Trump’ers; and as I have said, the 10% reduction is AFTER the clearly guilty are identified and prosecuted or fired.
Everything would be much, much easier if we had either elected Hillary, or elected a John Kasich, so that we could continue to conceal the lie that much of our government betrays the true interests of most Americans on a daily basis and has for many decades. The creep would have continued, and with no national leader with a podium to speak obvious and important truths, and full price of these lies would have continued to inch closer to fruition.
Trump is the first President in modern times with a clear mandate to reverse the Leftist erosion of our liberties, of common sense, of coherent morality, and of our nation itself. All of those who have been working in the shadows are now exposed, and as I said, it is ugly. Fucking ugly. But Trump did not invent it. He did not cause it. He is simply the one with the balls and the mandate and the tools to fight it.