President Donald Trump’s first term popularized the phrase “fake news.” In the early days of his second term, it looks like the next phrase people will become familiar with is “malicious compliance.”
Malicious compliance occurs when bureaucrats directed to do something by law implement an overly strict interpretation of that law to inconvenience or scare people into opposing.
Often, their excessive interpretation directly violates the directives of the law. Sabotage is the point.
Take the fight in 2023 over Florida’s Parental Rights in Education Act, legislation designed to keep sexually inappropriate literature out of children’s classrooms. It banned “classroom instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students.” The ban was then extended to cover all grades.
Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) highlighted several inappropriate books that made this ban necessary. Gender Queer mentions the author’s “bonding with friends over erotic gay fanfiction,” while It’s Perfectly Normal recommends itself for 10-year-olds but includes illustrations of people having sex and a chapter on masturbation. These are the kinds of books targeted by the law.
To undermine this reasonable and desirable effort at good governance, several Florida school districts decided to remove or censor several works of Shakespeare, citing the law as justification. This deliberately distorted interpretation was intended to goad voters into thinking Florida Republicans wanted to ban Shakespeare and were irrational and unreasonable. This is despite the fact that many of the Shakespearean works that activist bureaucrats pretend violate state law are on the Florida Department of Education’s Standards for English Language Arts list.
This can have far more lethal consequences, as is the case with abortion. The overturning of Roe v. Wade has allowed Republican states to ban abortion, which has ramped up Democratic hysteria. Democratic politicians and their left-liberal media supporters searched for a case to help scare women into falling in line with their “anywhere, anytime” view of abortion. They found the case of Amber Thurman, who they declared was killed because of Georgia’s law banning abortion.
What actually happened was that Thurman successfully aborted her twins with a mifepristone pill, but her body did not expel their remains, leading to sepsis. She went to a hospital in Georgia, needing a dilation and curettage procedure, which the liberal-biased ProPublica dishonestly claimed had been banned by Georgia’s law. Georgia’s law explicitly states that abortion procedures are banned if they “cause the death of an unborn child.”
In this case, Thurman’s unborn children were already dead, so a dilation and curettage procedure to remove the remains was legal. In fact, there is an abortion exemption if “an abortion is necessary in order to prevent the death of the pregnant woman,” meaning doctors are given the green light to save the mother’s life at the expense of an unborn child anyway. Yet doctors waited 20 hours before operating on Thurman. Liberal fearmongering cowed the hospital into thinking that saving a woman’s life would violate state law.
We are now seeing what malicious compliance looks like at the federal level in the early days of the Trump administration. One of Trump’s first actions upon taking office was uprooting diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and curriculums in the executive branch, especially in the military. Air Force cadets recounted to the Washington Examiner the countless hours of divisive trainings and meetings they were forced to sit through. One described how, after going through several preliminary DEI trainings, the first thing he received upon arrival was a book by liberal celebrity activist George Takei, which denounced Trump and America itself.
Anti-American training encourages cadets and everyone else in the federal government to view people by their skin color and to hate what America stands for. When one examines this and the hirings and promotions based on filling skin color quotas, it is shockingly clear what is intended and what Trump and his team rightly want to excise from the federal government by removing DEI.
To sabotage this effort, someone in the Air Force blocked a course about the Tuskegee Airmen, the first black military airmen in American history. The point was, of course, to make it look like Trump’s anti-DEI efforts were trying to erase black men from history so the Air Force could continue to shame white cadets under its DEI policies.
Something similar happened when the White House Office of Management and Budget issued a memo ordering a “temporary pause” in grant program spending for agency activities “implicated” by Trump’s executive orders. The memo went as far as it did because executive bureaucrats were already stonewalling Trump’s efforts to examine the merits of each program. Bureaucrats at the Department of Health and Human Services then exploited it by warning about disruptions in state Medicaid reimbursements, with the portal even being unusable for many states.
This was despite the fact that Medicaid funding was not included in the memo. HHS bureaucrats pushed ahead with all this in the morning when the memo explicitly stated the pause wouldn’t take place until 5 p.m.
The White House had another memo clarification dispute over funding at the National Institutes of Health, with the administration claiming a legacy NIH official used an overly broad interpretation of the funding pause. The administration was not freezing “clinical trials, procurement of supplies, and submission of research papers to scientific journals.” The most lenient interpretation of what happened is that there was a coincidental miscommunication that happened to make the Trump administration look bad at a time when bureaucrats in other areas are doing so intentionally. Twice is a coincidence. Three times is a pattern.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Trump is no stranger to this, as even the creation of the Space Force was mired in accusations of “malicious compliance” that the Air Force was inflating the estimate of the cost of the branch. Nor can anyone forget the constant calls from Democratic politicians and liberal pundits for people in the administration to serve as a “Resistance” to Trump from the inside. With the Democratic Party apparently at its weakest in decades, one can expect left-liberal bureaucrats worried that their agenda is being rolled back, or that their unnecessary jobs may be eliminated, will do their best to muddy the waters and sabotage Trump’s standing with voters.
The best solution for this is twofold. The first is clear and undeniable directives that leave no room for malicious interpretations from bureaucrats who are more worried about undermining the administration than doing their job. The second is making sure any bureaucrat who takes part in sabotage is fired. Liberal career bureaucrats must not be allowed to inflict harm on the public through government self-sabotage.