Posts Tagged → insubordinate
Maybe too much of a good thing?
President Trump and his lawfully appointed government assistants at DOGE have hit the ground running fast, and they have hit the bloated, rogue federal government hard, without question. While Trump may have had an axe to grind with the brazenly insubordinate federal workforce in his first administration, and with all of the brazenly lawless government bureaucrats at DOJ, FBI, DHS etc et al who targeted him with made up nonsense criminal charges and official lawfare for eight years, I still don’t know how many people expected his felt impact to be quite this stunning, this soon.
Trump has been a ton of bricks coming down hard, and to his supporters this is just the beginning of the justice we have wanted for years. Because Trump was not alone in feeling the tyrannical wrath of out of control government. Many of us, his supporters, suffered with him, to one degree or another. Many of us were also maliciously targeted by the Biden Administration for the simple “crime” of having different political views than Biden et al., and so we are all cheering on Trump’s massively overdue housecleaning of the rogue bureaucracy.
Our joy has only been rocketfueled by the daily red meat descriptions of incredible Obama- and Biden-era fraud, waste, and abuse of federal taxpayer funds being discovered by DOGE. And certainly, Trump’s patriotic instincts for justice and hard-about correcting course are only more sharply honed by these really phenomenally outrageous reports. Official corruption now visibly real, and also apparently even bigger and worse than one could imagine. That reasonable Americans will want swift and harsh justice imposed upon the criminals who enabled and engaged in these destructive, nay, treasonous acts is also normal and expected.
All this said, there is sometimes too much of a good thing.
Amidst the required bloodletting we should also want to avoid the appearance of bloodlust. This distinction does not require so much of a let-up in quantity, but rather a more targeted reposte with the rapier. Because in the slash-and-burn comes collateral damage too much for even our beloved Saint Trump to bear. Recall none other than the much and long beloved United States Patent and Trademark Office. Founded by Thomas Jefferson, it is of long and great distinction, for many great reasons. And the USPTO is also of great importance to American business, and it is thus housed in the US Dept. of Commerce.
The highly respected USPTO may have just been caught with a DEI cheat in the executive office, but the office body itself bears no such resemblance. In fact, this work-from-home workplace was among the very first such experiments, begun nearly thirty years ago, with all out-of-DC USPTO attorneys working from expensive, carefully built home offices designed for use only with Dept. of Commerce software. No double incomes here, these attorneys are on the clock day in and day out. Step out of line, fall behind in your caseload, and yes, you, a government attorney, will find yourself standing in the unemployment line, lickety split. The production standards for USPTO attorneys are very high, and they enjoy real hard-earned respect in their field.
The USPTO is one of the very few federal government offices where such potentially harsh discipline still exists, and it exists for good reason: The likely cost of a single USPTO attorney lazing about is very high, borne directly by the AMERICAN businesses who rely upon the USPTO to help them fend off all of the nonstop Chinese fakery and thievery of intellectural property in the active international marketplace. So it also stands to reason that the cost of haphazardly uprooting these finely tuned instruments of American business will be quite damaging to the very companies and business sectors we say we want to protect. Among the ransacking, there are objects of great value worth protecting. The USPTO is one.
Yes, overall, the federal work-from-home thing looks as bad as it probably smells down there in DC. Yes, there are likely countless examples of how work-from-home has been abused across the federal workforce, especially since it became standard in 2020. I know from first hand experience, as I was one of the few at US EPA HQ who got to experiment with it back in the mid 1990s, simply to allow a little bit more room on local roads for DC-bound commuters. What I saw back then with a number of colleagues was what we see in the headlines now: Lots of posh gardening, home-based second businesses, etc., everything but getting The People’s business done. Getting workers back into the work environment is generally a good thing, especially holding federal workers accountable, who exist solely to serve We, The People.
In the critically needed march to bring sanity to our overall disastrously run federal government, let us not also toss the baby out with the bathwater, nor kill the lone golden goose. Let’s not have too much of the medicine America needs.
Forgive Me for Asking, But I Must
Forgive me, it is not my intention to cast cold water on our collective rejoicing at having President Donald Trump re-elected, again, and thus at having dodged the Democrat Party’s communist anti-democracy bullet aimed at America’s heart. It is true that Trump’s election gives us hope that our constitutional republic is not over. However, I feel like I am watching a repeat of 2016-2017, where highly qualified conservatives and Republicans were mysteriously bypassed, overlooked, left untouched by the then-new Trump Administration.
Well do I recall someone of real stature writing publicly then (2017-2018) about how mystified he was that no one from Team Trump had contacted him about any of the unique policy strengths he had, and how the new Trump Administration seemed disinterested or lost on whatever that policy subject was. Well, here we go again, from where I sit.
Trump supporters have learned to forgive the 2016-2017 lapses, missteps, failures, and missed opportunities as due to Trump’s unfamiliarity with government, his natural reliance upon long established and unreliable DC Beltway insiders, his understandably misplaced trust in deep staters and other bad actors, his misplaced faith in the weight of federal employees’ oaths of office.
We watched as Trump’s first term slowly, painfully, peeled away the mask from the hostile administrative state, generously bankrolled by American taxpayers and yet also so openly at war with us. We grudgingly learned to accept the stolen 2020 election as the cost of doing business within the parameters set for us by the establishment media, the administrative state, and its constellation of hostile non-government organizations, who then worked furiously from outside to undermine the very rules they set.
And so we miraculously prevailed in 2024, and America as founded yet lives again. And now we have earned the right to say openly, can we please not make the same and very avoidable mistakes again, this time around?
While President Trump is indeed appointing strong leaders who are willing to assertively implement his bold vision for a better government that is closely attuned to America’s founding documents and principles, one question has not been addressed: Who exactly is going to carry out these deep reforms?
With few exceptions (the US Dept. of Commerce being one), nearly the entire federal workforce was already openly insubordinate to President Trump the last time around. And there is no reason to believe that these public employees are going to honor their oaths of office this time. And if Trump follows through on the DOGE promise to eliminate entire federal agencies, and greatly streamline those that remain, then which law-abiding civil servants will there be to carry forward in those same agencies the Trump Administration’s policies?
Put another way, if President Trump installs leaders who, for example, change the name of the radicalized US Environmental Protection Agency, then which of the old USEPA staff will there be to then follow through with the systemic change through every artery and vein inside the old institutional body? If the federal government is going to aggressively do compliance checks or reel back in billions of dollars in Biden grants to far-left NGOs, then who exactly is prepared to hit that ground running? The current federal workforce is almost entirely unreliable, and if left in place, each and every federal employee will become a road block of one. The DOGE people had better be collecting lots and lots of names of prospective civil servants who are prepared to take the place of existing staff, who should end up fired from federal service for any number of good reasons.
House cleaning is promised, but who then moves into the house to give it new life?
Ending where this essay began, it is my turn to publicly complain: No one from Team Trump contacted me, way back in 2016-2020, or now, about my unique area of expertise. I am one of a very small handful of truly conservative Republicans nationwide with extensive hands-on experience with public land issues and wildlife habitat/ land conservation policy. No Trump staffer has called to ask my experienced opinion on federal appraisal standards, especially related to eminent domain, or on rights-of-way issues surrounding federal properties. To my knowledge, none of my few colleagues have been contacted, either. I am not looking for a job. I already run a small business that I really enjoy. But I am willing to volunteer my precious time to help shape sound federal policy that is a significant deviation from the longstanding horrible status quo.
President Trump has the loyalty of so many talented and experienced conservatives, any and all of whom will jump at the opportunity to simply help this one man (and his administration) who can save America. This is the big chance to get America back on track.
So why then do I feel like America via President Trump is once again missing easy opportunities to make lasting, good policy? If the right people do not identify and help fix these longstanding horrible policies, the civil servants will keep them in place, and we will miss a once in a lifetime opportunity for good government.
Two Steps to Political Heaven
Much talk going on now about how President Trump is supposed to get a stranglehold on the lawless and insubordinate federal bureaucracy if he is elected to a third term this November. As a former seven-year federal policy bureaucrat who fled the belly-of-the-beast US EPA in Washington, DC, in 1998, here are my suggestions. These are based especially on my witnessing the changing of the Senior Executive Service (SES) guard from the Bush I administration to the Clinton administration, and all of the cascading management changes that followed.
Step One: Enter the White House with a clear and specific staffing plan and the prospective personnel to implement it. Ground Zero is the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), which processes all federal personnel hiring and firing. From 2017 through 2020, OPM infamously held up a high percentage of Trump’s selected future staff to be seeded across the bureaucratic horizon, where they were supposed to implement Trump’s agenda. But many of Trump’s prospective picks had their paperwork deep-sixed and “lost” in obscure file drawers throughout OPM, their hiring process dragging on so long that they had to find other jobs after having put their current employers on notice of their imminent departure for the Trump Administration. When you control OPM, you can get all of your staff quickly seated and working throughout the bureaucracy. If you don’t control OPM, well, your hard-won third term won’t add up to much.
Step Two: Take no prisoners. Treat every at-will federal position as the at-will position it really is, and work hard from there to drill as deeply as possible. Treat all management positions as targets for immediate change. On Day One be prepared to immediately terminate every single SES and political position and have in hand their loyal replacements, with OPM processing them at record speed. The marching orders for all new loyal SES employees is to replace as many senior staff as they each can, as quickly as they can, with extreme prejudice. Which goes something like this:
New SES manager: “Hi Mary. Good morning. You have been a division chief in this agency for, gosh, twelve years. And yet here I find you late to our meeting this morning and dressed unprofessionally. I am issuing you two written warnings right now, one for each infraction…”
Division Chief Mary: “What are you talking about? I was only one minute late! And I have had a casual dress policy here since…”
New SES manager: “Mary, being unprofessional and insubordinate to your boss is a third violation of the OPM standards of conduct. I am writing you up right now with a third warning, which means that I am now beginning your termination and separation process from the agency as soon as we are finished here. You have three minutes to pack up your personal items and then Officer Jones here will see you out of the building.”
This “direct action” between new senior executive and entrenched senior managers must happen at every level throughout every federal agency, every day, until every senior manager has been replaced with a loyalist (loyal to the new administration and thus loyal to the Constitution). And each new, loyal senior manager will have the same directive for dealing with DC Swamp subordinates down to the bottom of the civil service staff barrel.
Anything less than this admittedly tough hands-on style means that the enormous communist rat warren continues to host a zillion rats, each one quietly gnawing away and illegally stopping the implementation of your presidential agenda and the will of the American People.
How well do I recall an EPA biologist sitting on a huge stack of biological tests done to study the effects of Chlorothalonil, a highly useful insecticide. He personally disliked and opposed the company that owned Chlorothalonil, and so he just sat on their studies. He was unwilling to meet the statutory deadline for agency review and approval or rejection. And his superiors did nothing to compel him to act. And so the company’s expensive research went nowhere, floated in purgatory, and their expensive chemical unnecessarily languished outside of the market. This story times a million is the lawless ball and chain wrapped around America’s throat right now. This must end, and if it doesn’t end by 2028 or sooner, then American government is no longer of, by, and for the American People; it will have become something utterly of by and for itself.
An autonomous, unaccountable federal bureaucracy is the end of representative government. The bureaucracy itself is not democracy, as so many DC Swamp Rats proclaim. Rather, the bureaucracy is now a stale and outdated exercise in representative government that must be dramatically changed. Democracy is the process in which We, The People hold our representative government accountable. And as the American Declaration of Independence states, The People not only get their rights from God, and not government, but The People have the right to abolish government and create a new one whenever they so choose.
Where America is at right now, with its out of control, lawless, unelected and unaccountable federal bureaucracy (i.e. heavily armed IRS SWAT teams like feudal tax collectors of olde), is the myriad federal bureaucrats have come to really enjoy their centralized power and artificially high pay. And they also don’t want to be told what to do by anyone who is not one of them. For America to adhere to democratic norms, this federal bureaucracy must be greatly reduced in size and scope, at least.
For those who might shed tears about all the sad Marxist bureaucrats being cut loose to find jobs in the private sector they mocked, hamstrung, and crapped on from their artificially protected positions, cry me a river. No bureaucrat is owed a job. They have these public service jobs solely at the will of The People and their chosen chief executive, the President of The United States. With OPM under new management and this tough love approach to running the federal government, that is the Constitutional democracy the DC bureaucrats say they are so worried about protecting.
A version of this essay was published here at the American Thinker.
