When They LIVE in the Swamp

President Trump has a curious situation in his first days in office, before the Democrats in the Senate finally shut up and let his appointments to the Cabinet go through to run the agencies of the executive branch of government.

The "curious situation" relates to these first few days, when we do not yet have direct oversight of Cabinet and other executive departments by people actually appointed by, and therefore in policy synchronization with, Donald Trump.  This means that the most senior officials at places like EPA -- meaning "political appointees who have not yet been booted out" -- are not there to do the bidding of this president but, rather, the previous one.

So shortly, they will be gone, but we have to remember something.  If you imagine the senior leadership of an agency like HUD or EPA or Veterans Affairs, use this model.  The Secretary or the Administrator is the lead person, and is directly appointed by the president.  At least two levels of management below that person consist of political appointees, meaning that they, too, are appointed rather than hired as career civil servants, and serve ultimately at the instruction of the president.

Below that level, however, the employees are career civil servants, from senior professionals all the way down to the person answering a call-center phone and talking to you and me.  This means that the agency is their career, and the Secretary or Administrator cannot easily just decide that the person is doing a lousy job and can therefore be canned.

It also means that since lots and lots of them work in Washington, DC, a really dramatic percentage of them live in Washington, DC.  So what do we know about people who live in Washington, DC?  Well, one thing is that they didn't vote for Donald Trump.  We know that, because he only received 12,723 votes in Washington in November, which constituted only 4.1% of the votes cast for president in DC.

So I don't care if every single one of the 12,723 Trump voters works for the Federal government. There are 203,000 Federal employees in DC, and that means that if you work for the Federal government and live in the District, you didn't vote for Donald Trump.  I will concede that a lot of the 203,000 live in Virginia and Maryland, but you get the idea -- a huge percentage of the people working for Uncle Sam come to their job in the morning opposing the man at the top of their food chain.

There is something discomfiting about that.  President Trump is definitely a taxpayer-dollar protector, and he is going to be looking at whether we really, really need to have 500 expensive Ph.Ds over at the Department of Education creating policies, when he believes that education policy doesn't even belong being made in Washington.  So you have a lot of people wondering if their jobs are at risk from a guy that they didn't even vote for.

And for any of us who have ever dialed a government call-in number to get someone who knew little about what you were asking, or was so inarticulate or heavily-accented as to be incomprehensible, yet had a job giving answers to the public, well, I'm sure there are a lot of tweets going to the White House thinking that maybe that can get fixed.

For any of us who went through a needless but expensive IRS audit because the auditor didn't understand the law, well, we're hoping that some other government employees go off the public payroll.

They are the swamp, too, as I wrote yesterday.

And until they have leaders installed and ready to do the nation's bidding through their elected president, you can imagine that they are doing everything possible to save their jobs and subvert Mr. Trump's desires.  This has already taken place at EPA, which is why the president had to issue executive direction stopping any and all new EPA regulations and effectively gagging any announcements from EPA, as they would be made by people he did not put there.

They are the swamp.  Is it any wonder we voted for a man who pledged to drain it?

Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
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