We’re back to 2016 and that means the federal bureaucracy is plotting how to defy the elected president. And since all of this is also going on in D.C., they’re leaking their deliberations to the mainstream media.

Pentagon officials are holding informal discussions about how the Department of Defense would respond if Donald Trump issues orders to deploy active-duty troops domestically and fire large swaths of apolitical staffers, defense officials told CNN.

That’s not their job. It’s not their job to preemptively contemplate how they would respond to orders that have not actually been given or gone through the pipeline, especially when the entire purpose of the discussions seem to be about how to defy those orders.

Officials are now gaming out various scenarios as they prepare for an overhaul of the Pentagon.

“We are all preparing and planning for the worst-case scenario, but the reality is that we don’t know how this is going to play out yet,” one defense official said.

They’re supposed to be wargaming scenarios in which China attacks Taiwan, not in which the president gives them an order.

Defense officials are also scrambling to identify civilian employees who might be impacted if Trump reinstates Schedule F, an executive order he first issued in 2020 that, if enacted, would have reclassified huge swaths of nonpolitical, career federal employees across the US government to make them more easily fireable.

This isn’t what employees who answer to a civilian government do. This is what a bureaucracy trying to protect itself and block the will of the people does.