So Strzok Is Gone

Peter Strzok was fired this week.

Or last week, I'm not sure.  He no longer works for the FBI, the institution that he disgraced by being grossly insubordinate and using government communication media to write foul things about the Commander-in-Chief.  It won't matter, because sycophants and other morons have been raising a half-million for his retirement as a parting gift on a GoFundMe page, showing that indeed, you can't fix stupid.

Now, exactly what he was fired for specifically is not known to me, possibly because I haven't taken the time to read the articles (it's hard to trust any news outlet's accuracy these days), and possibly because such disciplinary matters are not usually public record.  It doesn't matter, really -- if you want to fire someone, it is usually not too hard to come up with something, except in the government, where it is darn near impossible.

I've been trying to figure out the lessons we learned from all this, and as I cogitate on them, I mainly come up with the fact that he should have quit, or been fired, many, many months ago after Donald Trump became president.

We have a dozen or so Federal departments at the Cabinet level, plus a number of other agencies doing this or that.  Far too many, of course, but it is really hard to dissolve one -- Education should be first, followed by Energy, CFPC, ad nauseam, but that's not the point either.

These departments are the core of -- well, in fact they are the Executive Branch of the government, carrying out the policies of the Administration within the budgets and guidance provided by Congress.  As such, they should be following the leadership of the president, as implemented by the secretary or other Cabinet officer in charge.

But there are more.

Every agency has multiple undersecretaries or deputy secretaries or assistant secretaries, each of whom is in charge of a vital function within the department.  For example, Defense has undersecretaries for things like Policy, one for Research, one for Personnel, and so forth.  Those are often what we refer to as "political" appointees, in that most are required to be approved by Congress on their appointment.

They are normally members of the Senior Executive Service (SES), a civil service level that is roughly equivalent to a general officer in the military, except without the uniform and too often without specific experience in whatever they're supposed to be managing.  But they do know someone, which is how they got appointed in the first place.

All that, though, is as it has been for many decades.  What is a bit different is that it has become a lot harder to get those jobs.  Not because, you'd think, it is hard to find the people, but because political appointees are now buried in politics.

There are over a thousand of those senior-level, policy-implementing jobs to be filled, and when a new president comes in it should be his or her important responsibility to get the list of nominees to those jobs in front of Congress so they can be rubber-stamped and start doing their jobs in a matter of days.  This is important, since the president cannot do that job for them, and in order to get all that policy implemented, you need people to delegate that to.

Unfortunately, though, the Senate has rules about that sort of thing, and that grants the minority the right to force 30 hours of debate or hearings on each of those nominees.  Good old Chuck Schumer is doing just that in an effort to slow President Trump's electorate-given mandate.  When you have a thousand people to vote on, you can get deep into a president's second year with jobs unfilled while waiting for the Senate, dragged out and delayed by a minority that can keep a president from having his or her people in place.

The SES types from the previous administration, of course, are under no obligation to leave unless they are fired, at least until they are replaced.  The Cabinet secretaries themselves all resign after inauguration, of course, but they leave scads of deputy-under-this-or-thats still in their roles.  When the change in president entails a change in party, as was the case going from Obama to Trump, it means that a new president cannot get his own agenda moving, because the leadership in the executive departments is in opposition to their incoming boss's goals.

Peter Strzok was an Obama type, although a career FBI agent and official (as opposed to a political appointee).  He would not have been replaced by an incoming administration, but his loyalty was not to the incoming Trump agenda, so he is sort of an odd example of my point.  He should have been gone, but more because he could not do his job impartially -- and let's be fair; his "job" at that time was working on investigations in which he had a big political stake, the Hillary private-server-mishandling-classified-documents one and the phony-bologna-Russia-collusion one.

The USA is a curious place.  Unlike some other nations, an incoming president can't just get loyal people put in on Day One and start taking action.  President Trump was inaugurated, and the next day had the entire Executive Branch run by people appointed by his predecessor and utterly opposed to carrying out the will of their president.  In one case (at Justice), the acting Attorney General actually had to be fired, because she refused to carry out a specific order of the new president.

Can't we do better?  Must we have months of a new government run by the Strzoks of the world, the disloyal leftovers, or cannot we come up with a system by which individuals who are nominated to SES and Cabinet-leading positions can simply take their positions as interim appointees subject to Senate approval?

Anyway, at least Strzok is gone, off doing whatever he is left doing (the DNC might hire him, I suppose, or he can live off his GoFundMe income, assuming it isn't taxable) and no longer in a position to sabotage our government.

I'd be happy to try to figure a way to avoid that happening again.

Copyright 2018 by Robert Sutton
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