Trump called federal officials 'crooked, rogue bureaucrats.' FEMA whistleblower proved him right - Op-ed
It’s time to put our country and the Constitution above partisanship. The same is true for federal careerists.
These words were written not in the aftermath of FEMAgate but a fortnight earlier, before the elections, in an article published in The Hill. The author, one William S. Becker, urged Americans to “vote on Nov. 5 to save our merit-based civil service.”
Becker’s words haven’t aged too well given that the focus of his article was on the danger President-Elect Trump poses to “federal careerists.” At least one of their number has revealed themself (gender unknown, presumed female) to have little merit to head a FEMA team in Florida, where they ordered federal workers to skip over homes of Trump supporters when assessing hurricane-hit residents for eligibility for federal aid.
The Hill: Trump will take us back to the 'bad old days' of corrupt cronyism
Becker himself is a former federal worker (for the U.S. Department of Energy—DoE) and currently heads the Presidential Climate Action Project. He left the DoE almost 20 years ago and appears to have fond memories of federal government, calling it a “professional, merit-based civil service system.”
“A long time ago,” he begins his article,
... patronage determined who worked in the U.S. government. Jobs were awarded based not on merit and expertise but on a person’s political connections to the sitting president or his party. The result was “rampant incompetence and cronyism.”
In case the reader imagined that all that was still the case, Becker clarifies that it actually ended over a century ago, in 1883. Since then, he claims, everything has been quite wonderful, but now Trump threatens the merit-based system and wants to restore cronyism and incompetence.
Meanwhile, Marn’I Washington, the FEMA official who gave the order to skip Trump supporters’ homes and potentially bar them from federal assistance they are entitled to, has not, according to whistleblowers, been fired, but rather shuffled to another position in the huge bloated civil service that employs some two million people across the country.
According to Becker, Trump believes many of these two million federal civilian employees are “rogue bureaucrats” in a “mythical deep state.” He quotes Trump as saying that,
They’ve got to be held accountable. They’re destroying this country. They’re crooked people. They’re dishonest people.
One bad FEMA apple or a rotten barrel?
The Hill and other left-wing media are adamant that holding federal officials to account for “crooked” behavior is nothing more than an excuse to purge the civil service of meritorious, hard-working, non-partisan, patriotic officials and replace them with “Trump cronies.” Responding to the unfortunate incident in Florida, The Hill stressed that Ms. Washington was just “one FEMA employee ... [out of] more than 20,000 FEMA employees [who] every day adhere to FEMA’s core values and are dedicated to helping people...”
Certainly the FEMA employee who turned whistleblower and leaked internal memos to The Daily Wire in which Washington’s instructions were revealed was dedicated to the core value of helping others.
I thought we could go help and make a difference. When we got there we were told to discriminate against people. It’s almost unbelievable to think that somebody in the federal government would think that’s okay. I volunteered to help disaster victims, not discriminate against them.
But Florida Governor Ron DeSantis clearly doesn’t believe Washington was the only rotten apple in the barrel. He has ordered an investigation into what he calls “the federal government’s targeted discrimination of Floridians who support Donald Trump.”
The blatant weaponization of government by partisan activists in the federal bureaucracy is yet another reason why the Biden-Harris administration is in its final days.
NY Times, will you apologize?
That was Hurricane Milton. Not long before, Hurricane Helene passed through much of the United States, and FEMA wasn’t too far behind, unless, that is, you happened to live in a Republican stronghold such as Tennessee where residents waited for up to a fortnight for the feds to show up and offer their help. Outraged at suggestions that this had anything to do with political discrimination, the New York Times blazoned headlines blasting Trump for “falsely accusing the Biden administration of spending disaster funding on migrants, neglecting areas that had voted for Republicans, and ignoring a call from a Republican governor.”
While it appears that Georgia’s Governor Kemp did ultimately speak with President Biden, allegations that the Biden administration neglected Republican-leaning areas will prove harder to shake in the wake of FEMAgate.
Hi @nytimes, when will you issue a retraction and correction?
Not only that, but it seems that Trump’s views are shared by more than a few FEMA employees who complained about Washington’s order and echoed the views of many:
This behavior raises significant concerns of discrimination against United States citizens because of their political views. These actions not only undermine the integrity of our agency and create a hostile work environment for those who may hold differing political beliefs but they also threaten the very democracy of our country.
Proof that Trump will corrupt the federal system!
The Hill echoes the accusations and throws them right back, accusing Trump of planning to purge the civil service not to make it work better, but rather, to make it work for him, personally.
The plan has nothing to do with making government work better ... [Trump] undoubtedly would like unfettered control of the nation’s largest employer and its $4.5 trillion budget (2023), including programs and services that affect virtually every American.
Mainstream media persist in presenting federal institutions as working for the people against dictators who want to rule for personal glory. And they present what they claim is compelling evidence of how Trump, in his first term, revealed his true colors in corrupting federal institutions and overriding expert advice, to the detriment of the American people:
Two examples from Trump’s “war on science” illustrate how extreme and damaging this was — and would be again ... His administration regularly suppressed, downplayed, or simply ignored scientific research demonstrating the need for regulation to protect public health and the environment ... rolling back more than 100 environmental policies...
According to The Washington Post, by the end of his first term in office, Trump had “forced out, sidelined or muted” hundreds of federal scientists, motivated by policies that have “diminished the role of science...”
Worse still, “In 2020, a congressional committee documented 47 cases where the Trump administration sidelined, ignored or altered the advice of government scientists during COVID...”
The outlet did not address the research studies contradicting government policy on public health and the environment.
'Thousands of civil servants quake in fear'
In fact, WaPo is still convulsed in fear of what Trump is about to unleash during his second term, given that, as they wrote just a few days ago,
During his first presidential term, Donald Trump waged war on federal employees, unsettled agencies and disrupted government unions while creating a chaotic scene for the American people.
Now we’ll be at it again, this time on steroids, after he is inaugurated for a second stint in January.
According to one Justice Department employee who spoke to WaPo on condition of anonymity, supposedly “out of fear of retaliation,” huge numbers of federal staffers “have been threatened at DOJ recently,” by right-wing vigilante-type shadowy figures who want to blame them for federal policies.
Within the DOJ, its Gender Equality Network (GEN) is busy doing what it seems to do best (and exclusively), namely writing letters to people begging them to ensure that federal staffers get access to IVF treatment and abortions and aren’t “harassed.” No normal person is in favor of harassment, but the DOJ GEN wants to ensure that its members remain anonymous and aren’t “doxed” by angry Americans who blame them for doing what they do, rightly or wrongly.
In their letter to “administrators,” DOJ GEN president Stacey Young wrote:
For example, DOJ employees have recently appeared on online target lists, and reporting revealed that organizations are planning to dox hundreds of federal servants for their perceived political or ideological leanings.
It’s all a matter of perception, because federal employees allegedly don’t have any political or ideological leanings. That was all eliminated back in 1883 when cronyism became a thing of the past, according to Becker.
Federal officials could be fired: 'Did you ever hear this?'
But the worst is yet to come in the form of Schedule F. For those who don’t yet know, this is a plan, hatched by none other than Trump cronies, to “strip tens of thousands of federal workers of their civil service protections and fire them at will.”
Back in 2022, at an event hosted by the America First Policy Institute, Trump outlined his plans to take the proverbial chainsaw to the civil service and get rid of all the deadwood. In fact, Trump already authorized Schedule F via executive order in October 2020, but his administration failed to implement the measure before he left office and one of the first things President Biden did as president was rescind it.
Now, however, could it be open season for “rogue bureaucrats” such as Marn’I Washington. Trump was quoted as saying:
... make it much easier to fire rogue bureaucrats who are deliberately undermining democracy or, at a minimum, just want to keep their jobs.
Congress should pass historic reforms empowering the president to ensure that any bureaucrat who is corrupt, incompetent or unnecessary for the job can be told — did you ever hear this — ‘You’re fired, get out, you’re fired.’ [You] have to do it. Deep state. Washington will be an entirely different place.
The idea that a "corrupt, incompetent or unnecessary" worker might be fired seems incomprehensible to mainstream figures long accustomed to job protections the like of which workers in the private sector can only dream about.
According to left-wing figures, some 50,000 civil service jobs could be on the line, and while that is a drop in the ocean of the two million-strong federal workforce, the overall effect will be “chilling” with its intended effect said to be to “keep the rest of them in line.”
Heads on pikes
The Washington Post expresses the alarm felt by many bureaucrats, writing:
Especially notable and alarming is that the list puts the bull’s eye not on Biden administration political appointees who will leave office by January, but on career civil servants, who swear an oath to the Constitution, not to any president, and carry out the policies of presidents no matter which party they represent.
There’s one bright spot in the Deep State’s doom and gloom: Trump is no longer being compared to Hitler but rather, to King Henry VIII of England.
According to Don Kettl, professor emeritus and former dean of the University of Maryland School of Public Policy, following the Trump victory, “the anxiety level will be off the charts among federal employees.”
Back in Henry VIII’s time, the king didn’t have to have all of his opponents executed. He just put enough heads on pikes outside the Tower of London to get his message across.
Meanwhile, the woman lost the bid to block another Trump presidency has yet to express her opinion on Marn’I Washington and the corruption of the Deep State. Her coronation as next monarch of Democratic America didn’t go quite as smoothly as had been hoped. But at least she's not facing the wrath of Henry the Eighth.
