It sounds exactly like a Babylon Bee parody, but this article in the far left magazine Mother Jones, For July 4th, Let’s Celebrate Great American Patriots: Government Bureaucrats, offers an important lesson for conservatives to note well. The "independence" part of "Independence Day" doesn't comport too well with "federal bureaucarcy," so it is unsurprising that the holiday's true name is avoided throughout the piece.
Of course, the underlying critical reality is that the federal bureaucracy has become an instrument of the Democrat party and the left. Political donations from federal bureaucrats consistently run well above 90% in favor of the Dems. And the series of scandals showing favoritism to lefties and hostility to conservatives keeps growing. Lois Lerner suffered no incarceration or fine ad retired on a full pension after delaying tax free status conservative nonprofits. FBI adulterers Peter Strzok and Lisa Page reassured each other that they would stop Donald Trump from becoming president. There seems to be a widespread sense among powerful federal bureaucrats that they have the right, even a duty, to enforce their political preferences on the public that they pretend to serve, but in fact which they believe they should lead and master.
Veteran hardnose lefty David Korn must have realized that his title and lede sentence, “This Fourth of July, I’d like to salute some of the greatest patriots in the land: government bureaucrats,” risked mockery. But there is an important and siniser political agenda ahead that he got to five paragraphs into the piece:
For years, the leading strategists of Trumpism have been plotting how to gain control of the federal workforce. Steve Bannon and others have declared war on what they call the “administrative state,” which in their minds includes and extends beyond the nefarious “Deep State” cabal that is always conspiring against Trump. They believe that Trump did not achieve many of his policy aims because the federal agencies were staffed with career professionals who thwarted his plans. (snip)
At the end of Trump’s presidency, he signed an executive order that created a category of federal worker called Schedule F that covered possibly thousands of policy-related positions throughout the various agencies. Any employee assigned to Schedule F could lose civil service protections and be easily fired by the White House. At the time, University of Colorado, Boulder, professor Roger Pielke Jr. told Axios, “If you take how it’s written at face value, [this executive order] has the potential to turn every government employee into a political appointee, who can be hired and fired at the whim of a political appointee or even the president.”
The prospect of federal bureaucrats being accountable to an elected representative of the people seems to horrify Corn and his bureaucratic buddies. With the left in control of the bureaucracy, they want it insulated from any accountability.
He reverts to the early twentieth century vision of the progressives, that “experts” acting in the “public interest” are the ideal form of government, untrammeled by venal politicians whom lack the “expertise” to choose wise policies. This, of course, is totalitarian, a point well developed by Jonah Goldberg in his landmark bestseller Liberal Fascism, that gloriously exposed the adulation that progs and lefties heaped upon Mussolini before he became Hitler’s understudy in the effort to impose fascism on the world.
Trump or any other Republican that reaches the Oval Office must deal with the out-of-control bureaucracy. And enact Schedule F or its equivalent, as well as downsize and disperse out of DC as many departments as possible, ideally (in my book) beginning with the closure of the Department of Education.
The Lyndon Baines Johnson Department of Education Building in Washigton, DC
The left understands that federal bureaucrats are resented, even by many nonconservatives, for their arrogance (a product of their job security), their retirement, medical and other fringe benefits well beyond those available to most of us, their many days off (did you get a paid holiday for Juneteenth? Columbus Day? Martin Luther King Day?), and their compensation so high that the counties surrounding DC are the richest in the nation.
In a way, Corn is to be thanked for so vividly demonstrating that federal bureaucrats have become inextricably wedded to the goals of the Democrats and the left, and are a threat to what the same left usually calls “our democracy.”
Photo credit: Farragutful CC BY-SA 4.0 license
