The government has grown to a behemoth that would be unrecognizable to the Founders.
In his book, You Report to Me, David L. Bernhardt gives a first person account of how the bureaucratic swamp works; an expose of the administrative state from the inside. Bernhardt, a seasoned veteran of the administrative state having served as Secretary of the Interior under Trump and as Solicitor of the Department of the Interior under GW Bush, is well versed in the problems “tenured” bureaucracy can cause the Republic.
The executive branch as a whole currently employs 2.2 million full-time, part-time, seasonal, and temporary staff. At the same time, federal laws and administrative regulations have become unmanageably tedious, wordy, twisted, confusing and complicated. The challenge to any administration is ensuring that this vast cadre of personnel follows applicable laws and executes the policy directives of the duly-elected President, regardless of which party wins. Unfortunately that is not always possible.
The prevailing political views in our nation’s capital, where many residents work for the government, skew markedly Democrat as shown by the 2016 election where voters favored Hillary over Trump by a margin of 91% to 4%. In the 2020 election, D.C. voters favored Biden over Trump by a margin of 92.1% to 5.4%. No major city in the US has an electorate as lopsidedly partisan.
These “tenured” staffers and D.C. voters that populate federal agencies wield power, even under Republican presidents, because numerous legal protections give them nearly iron-clad job security. The impact of which is to make firing one, no matter how incompetent or insubordinate, so difficult that few managers even try which explains why the bureaucracy is dominated by ideological liberals.
The degree of defiance by these left-leaning bureaucrats undermines the very foundation of representative self-government by foot-dragging investigations; refusal to enforce valid legal claims; by burying unfavorable data, documents and arguments; by deliberately misleading supervisors; by refusing to communicate with political appointees; by slow-walking the drafting of proposed rules; and even misstating legal arguments, etc. The upshot is that the federal bureaucracy is dominated by left-wing ideological liberals with an agenda.
Bernhardt’s solution to the problem is to hold subordinate civil servants accountable when they fail or refuse to do their jobs. He says that there needs to be specific reforms to our civil service system to streamline the process for disciplining and dismissing poor workers, by streamling the collective-bargaining process and eliminating taxpayer subsidies for union officers performing union business while being paid by taxpayers and by eliminating civil service protections for agency staff who serve in policy-influencing roles.
Civil service reform would provide a practical blueprint for draining the swamp. Personally, I believe that it should be illegal for all federal employees to become members of a union – any union. They should not be answerable to a union but answerable to the people who pay their salary.
Draining the Swamp is a dirty job but somebody has to do it.
Source: A Peek Inside the Undrained Swamp by Mark Pulliam, Law and Library
