Michael Walsh:
The feel-good story of the year so far:
Across the vast federal bureaucracy, Donald J. Trump’s arrival in the White House has spread anxiety, frustration, fear and resistance among many of the two million nonpolitical civil servants who say they work for the public, not a particular president.
At the Environmental Protection Agency, a group of scientists strategized this past week about how to slow-walk President Trump’s environmental orders without being fired. At the Treasury Department, civil servants are quietly gathering information about whistle-blower protections as they polish their résumés.
At the United States Digital Service — the youthful cadre of employees who left jobs at Google, Facebook or Microsoft to join the Obama administration — workers are debating how to stop Mr. Trump should he want to use the databases they made more efficient to target specific immigrant groups.
“It’s almost a sense of dread, as in, what will happen to us,” said Gabrielle Martin, a trial lawyer and 30-year veteran at the Denver office of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, where colleagues now share daily, grim predictions about the fate of their jobs under Mr. Trump’s leadership.
“It’s like the movie music when the shark is coming,” Ms. Martin said, referring to “Jaws,” the 1975 thriller. “People are just wary — is the shark going to come up out of the water?”
Gee, that’s too damn bad. The GOP is the party that created the civil service, as a reaction to the Democrats’ plundering patronage system. At first, the Dems kicked about it:
THIS civil service law is the biggest fraud of the age. It is the curse of the nation. There can’t be no real patriotism while it lasts. How are you goin’ to interest our young men in their country if you have no offices to give them when they work for their party? Just look at things in this city today. There are ten thousand good offices, but we can’t get at more than a few hundred of them. How are we goin’ to provide for the thousands of men who worked for the Tammany ticket? It can’t be done. These men were full of patriotism a short time ago. They expected to be servin’ their city, but when we tell them that we can’t place them, do you think their patriotism is goin’ to last? Not much. They say: What’s the use of workin’ for your country anyhow? There’s nothin’ in the game.” And what can they do? I don’t know, but I’ll tell you what I do know. I know more than one young man in past years who worked for the ticket and was just overflowin’ with patriotism, but when he was knocked out by the civil service humbug he got to hate his country and became an Anarchist.
There was once a bright young man in my district who tackled one of these examinations. The next I heard of him he had settled down in Herr Most’s saloon smokin’ and drinkin’ beer and talkin’ socialism all day. Before that time he had never drank anything but whisky. I knew what was comm’ when a young Irishman drops whisky and takes to beer and long pipes in a German saloon. That young man is today one of the wildest Anarchists in town. And just to think! He might be a patriot but for that cussed civil service.
But soon enough they learned to love it, realizing that by putting in good, unfireable Tammany men, they could control the Permanent Government forever.
The Times story lovingly recounts the ways the trolls and munchkins buried deep in the Washington bureaucracy are plotting to sabotage the new administration.
The entire EPA needs to be totaly cleared out of the eco-freak and deep ecologists that have run it for far too long defund the UN and cut off all funding for the various eco-wacko groups No More to GREENPEACE tell them to fuel their garbage scows RAINBOW WARRIOR II and ARCTIC SUNRISE on donations from their good buddy Leonardo DiCaprio the same for the NRDC,EDF,SIERRA CLUB and the rest of the eco-wacko groups
I suppose it never occurred to these spoiled little turds to just DO THEIR F**KING JOBS, like they are PAID to do?
Their job is not to determine for the President how the different departments should be used; their job is to carry out Presidential policy, within the legal realm. Obviously, based on much of their performance under Obama, legality was not a primary concern.
I am working in a civil service job. Can not wait for Trump to clean house. It has been needed for a long time.