In the short term, what stops Trump and his cabinet from reorganizing depts like Labor and declare that DOL needs a field office (w/o remote work) in every state to "support the states" and send the bad actors packing with a relocation package and zero portfolio to Pierre ND in January and Columbia SC in July? Just sideline these people until they "feel the trauma."
Dispersing federal agencies to more appropriate locations outside DC is a great idea. This would send good jobs out to states to help their local economies. The dc metro area has gotten too large
I’ve never understood the “move it to the country”idea. Seem to me it incentivises those areas to support growing the government, makes hiring harder, and separates the state from those who should be their bosses in the White House. Just get firing fixed is the only thing that can work, IMHO.
If agencies were capped in the way the legislature was you wont have to worry about 'growing the government'.
'separating from their bosses in the WH'. Whether an agency is 200 feet or 2000 miles from the WH doesnt matter. The President doesn't drive over to the Pentagon and see whats happening and who should be fired. We have the internet and telephones now.
An anecdote rather than data as such: During covid one of our kids got his first job (working remote for an international bank). As soon as borders reopened he was 'commanded' to work 'locally' (ie 2 to 3 days/week in the office).
"deregulating important industries like nuclear power"
Since the risks of any available or readily imaginable fission-based method of power generation as so great that such facilities cannot be conventionally insured, the Federal Government does so via the Price-Anderson Act.
As taxpayers are footing the bill, they have a right to demand Federal regulation of such facilities to mitigate the risks.
If someone believes overregulation is the result, there is a simple test of the assertion: demonstrate that the conventional insurance market would be willing to underwrite insurance indemnifying the public against the risk of accident or sabotage if the facilities were less regulated than they are today.
(Hint: you are not going to be able to do so, as every such facility is a pre-assembled, publically funded radiological terrorist weapon awaiting (for example) a drone strike with a shaped charge payload as its triggering method. )
Why do any countries have nuclear power plants if the insurance calculus never make sense.
And there is plenty of open land in the US, but I might just be wholly ignorant of what the potential blast radius would be as a consequence of a radiological terrorist attack
Fission power generation has a peculiar effect on some people; they have convinced themselves (despite several "near misses" and several major accidents) that since fission-based stationary power generation has been VERY safe in the past (at least in terms of fatalities), it will continue to be so in the future - despite the fact that, unlike the past, we now have to contend not only with design mistakes and operator errors but with deliberate sabotage via really foreseeable methods against which defense is very difficult.
For example. one such sort of attack that could be mounted near-term with a medium-lift commercial drone (for example, a DJI FlyCart 30) would involve a payload of 25-30Kg, enough to breach the containment structures surrounding typical US reactors and, depending on the kind of penetrator employed perhaps significantly damage the reactor itself, especially if the it breaching charge had been designed and fabricated by a national as opposed to a non-state actor.
The result would likely depend primarily on how badly the reactor’s control and safety mechanisms had been damaged and whether the structure of the reactor itself had been penetrated. There would NOT be a “nuclear explosion”, but at a minimum, the reactor would probably be a total loss, there is a high likelihood of the release of radiological materials, and, worst case, there might be a non-nuclear “explosive-like” event that lofted considerable amounts radioactive debris and fine particles that could potentially be carried well outside the site by winds.
Used fuel storage facilities are even softer targets.
If such materials were released beyond the site, as soon as the public realized the risk of such attacks existed, IMO, that would be the end of commercial fission reactor deployment in the US.
As for proximity to densely populated areas, judge for yourself:
There are numerous proposals for smaller-scale reactors intended to be sited near user demand. As best I can determine, NONE of these designs are intended to be adequately hardened against such attacks – probably because it’s extremely difficult to do so against a properly designed breaching charge. (Anti-tank rounds designed to defeat the frontal armor of a modern main battle tank typically contain 1-2kg of explosive; the breaching charge carried by a drone could easily contain 10x that much). And since since a drone can be precisely controlled, it’s practical to make repeated attacks at exactly the same location on a structure).
So EVERY ONE of these reactors, once deployed, would be a potentially pre-funded radiological weapon and a generous subsidy of terrorist activity because, by far, the hardest part of building such a weapon is obtaining the radioactive material.
Drone defense systems already guard power plants as well as airports, prisons, and military bases—especially bases safeguarding nuclear weapons. We cannot eliminate risk, but we can mitigate it and learn from past failures. Nuclear power is the cleanest, most efficient source of energy available; neglecting to utilize it out of fear of it being possibly employed to carry out terrorism would be a mistake.
One last thought: though you don't mention safety, it's an important part of this discussion.
The judgment that nuclear power is statistically very “safe” (or not) should be made in the context of relative risks.
For example, the total cumulative operating hours for US commercial reactors - around 32 million –without loss of life due to radiological release might initially be seen as a demonstration that such reactors are very safe.
However, that’s close to the cumulative hours flown by commercial passenger aircraft every two weeks.
Even if we define “very serious” events at US power plants as requiring at least a partial core meltdown, there have been two such accidents (Three Mile Island and Fermi 1).
Would we regard the safety of commercial aviation as “acceptable” if major structural airframe failures were detected every week?
I don’t think we would.
There’s also the other significant variable in the equation: the potential damage from an incompletely contained meltdown is, very conservatively, at least three orders of magnitude greater than from a catastrophic airframe failure over a densely populated area.
So, at least to me, viewed in the context of relative risks, two partial core meltdowns in 32 million hours of operation are anything but reassuring.
But unfortunatly, it's just a fact that allowing them easy access to significant quantities of radioactive material under conditions makes it vulnerable to readily foreseeable;e forms of attack and dispersal has a very good chance of being a very bad idea.
And wishing or pretending otherwise will not make it otherwise.
This squares with my anecdotal experience that fission stationary power generation has a strong attraction to a subset of posters, usually male and often with a professional background in engineering, who frequently make the argument that it's irrational to be distrustful of such a statistically benign power source, especially as it's easy to demonstrate that most of the alternatives are inflicting significant harm.
I’ve never been entirely convinced by what I view as the common (and weak) form of the argument, and I’ve never seen anyone make the strong one: that the worst reasonably foreseeable accidents occurring with reasonably foreseeable frequency still have a better cumulative result than “business as usual” outcomes from the alternatives.
I won’t argue the point, though, because the people making the weak form of the argument have generally convinced themselves that the reasonably foreseeable accidents serious enough to matter have a very low probability of occurring, and I can’t prove otherwise other than to point out that there have been several “near misses”, and that in general highly complex technologies that depend on modulating unstable conditions are inherently prone to fail in unforeseen ways.
And there’s also this: I’ve always harbored the suspension that technological complexity strongly attracts this sort of person and that “rational” argument masks “irrational” preference.
In the last few years, we have begun to put my suspicion to a helpful test: as the cost of reliable solar + wind + storage has reached near parity with alternatives in many cases and is already below their LCOEs in others, and the relative cost curves increasingly diverge, will the same people who are enamored of fission stationary power on the grounds of “rational analysis” now embrace a lower risk, lower cost alternative?
To paraphrase J.M. Keynes, “When the facts change, will they change their opinions?”
In my experience., the majority do not.
In fact, their ability to ignore the evidence is astounding even to someone with expectations as low as my own: they are about the most fact-resistant pack of circular-reasoning fools I have ever encountered. Evidence counts for nothing, and blind conviction trumps everything.
Now, I get this: for engineering minds that have spent a lifetime regarding instantaneously, dispatchable capacity matched to peak demand as the basis for rational planning, a curve that says that if your feedstock is free, then your optimum peak generating capacity is 2-3x times the average demand is DEEPLY counterintuitive.
But once you “get it”, it’s beautiful, elegant, and above all supremely practical, and they “logically” ought to embrace the concept.
Nope.
Instead, you get arguments that – in the face of evidence they literally REFUSE to look at – intermittency (for example) is an insurmountable barrier, or that “real soon now” a new generation of fission technology is going to drive that pesky cost curve back down below that of the emerging alternatives - despite that fact that even assuming only incremental progress the cost of the alternatives is going to decline to a minimum of a further 25-30% by the end of the decade.
This attraction remains mysterious to me. It’s not like this is fusion power, which has a very good chance of eventually supplanting all other sources of utility-scale power generation on the basis of cost and environmental considerations—this is FISSION power, which is to the 21st century what coal-fired power generation was to the 20th century.
So, in the end, I’m left with the conviction that this is some sort of hubristic attachment to taming the elemental forces of nature, partnered with an innate love of deviously ingenious complexity in the service of doing the same.
Great article. In the first paragraph of the ‘Civil Service Protections Favor Democrats and Stasis’ section you said “With that in mind, the aforementioned largely Democratic composition of the federal bureaucracy means Republicans are at an *advantage* when it comes to governing.” Is that a typo? Should it be disadvantage?
« Department of Labor regulatory staff intentionally delayed producing a departmental priority regulation. A competent private sector attorney could have produced a draft regulation in two to three weeks. The team of about a dozen career staff claimed they needed a year to do so—a pace that amounted to each attorney in the unit writing less than one line of text a day. »
So this doesn’t seem like a fair criticism. The time it takes to draft a federal regulation is not primarily writing time, it’s consultation. Sometimes consultation within the agency, which could be legally streamlined but that would be hard to do (and impossible for an individual or small group to do without buyin from the larger organization). Also legally mandated consultation with other State and federal agencies (environmental consultation, tribal consultation, historic preservation). Also public comment periods. Also opportunities for the public to file legal challenges. Also environmental reviews and opportunities to comment on or challenge the environmental review. Most of this is required by law that the DOL could not change.
All in all I consider a year to do a federal rulemaking quite fast. Unless there’s specific reason to assume these employees were *intentionally* slowing it down. A private sector attorney totally could write a regulation faster, but only by ignoring all these requirements.
There are some problems, but with employees that can (are) be trained to take advantage of any number of videoconferencing platforms remote doesn’t mean unconnected. Why should a worker drive into work only to videoconference with clients & coworkers all day?
The Republican Party suffers greatly from what Hanania calls the Elite Human Capital problem. Democrats are over represented in all positions in society requiring education, intelligence, and competence. Magnifying this problem is that successful conservatives tend towards business where the rewards are monetary and tangible, rather than feel good jobs like public service.
Trump will have to lean heavily on patriotic conservative Americans from the business sector who are willing to give up their lucrative career for a thankless job in public service. This problem will only be compounded if they “dread going to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.”
Where is Trump going to find the people to fill all these roles? It’s easy to say just fire all the disloyal or unproductive workers, but who will replace them? Perhaps a civil service that is greatly thinned in ranks will be able to produce the kind of transformational change Trump envisions but it is far more likely to just be a recipe for stasis.
We have to accept that in America, smart and good people will be in very short supply for government jobs. We don't have a civil service culture like Britain or France or India.
I agree with a lot of this, but I think that it is more productive to focus on radical deregulation. Firing federal workers does no good if the output (regulations) are still in effect.
I would rather have the same federal workforce and 50% less regulation, than the same regulations and 50% fewer federal workers or 50% better federal workers.
Focus on the output (regulation), not the input (federal employees).
You mentioned FDR as "a trusting and frequent delegator". As a non-American I'm curious what exactly happened between big, controversial reforms of the past like FDR's New Deal or LBJ's Great Society to now that has prevented new administrations from properly implementing their vision once coming to power? Any pointers are fine.
Presidents had a lot more leeway in what they could do within the realms of their powers prior to Watergate and the Warren and Burger Courts. FDR used the predecessor to the Fairness Doctrine to outright pull his critics on radio from the air.
Also, the Civil Rights Act wasn't a controversial reform. Johnson utterly destroyed Goldwater at the polls. It was only actually trying to implement and enforce the act that was controversial. People like "make white and black people equal", also think equality of outcome is merely a matter of the correct social policy, hate the awful ways in which equality of outcome is implemented, but are still resistant to the conclusion that the project itself was rotten from the start. This is why the proselytization and conversion of the élite to hereditarianism is such a vital project. They'll never get better otherwise.
The Civil Rights Act was bipartisan and had voter support. The problem was that it was administerered to be exactly the opposite of what its supporters said it would be: colorblind.
FDR was giving officials lots of power, and jobs were in short supply in business then. Thus, he had an easy time getting talented bureaucrats who liked his programs. And there did not exist old Republicans ones to block them.
"Firstly, a slim majority of non-political civil servants have been Democrats since Clinton. This has remained true despite changes in the party of the president. "
This is an astonishingly low percentage of Democrats. It appears to be about 50% Dem, 25% Repu, 25% Independent in terms of party registration. I'd want to look into that data more carefully. Maybe I'm just thinking of Fed employees in DC, though. Since DC votes about 90% Democrat for President, government employees would have to be about 250% as likely as the average voter there to be a Republican.
As I'm not a citizen of the USA I feel I can be somewhat dispassionate about your public service issues arising from partisan political preferences, which all (western/modern) public services face:
1) Schedule F is beguilingly dangerous. Without a prior pre-intention to remove it after say the next midterm elections it will increase authoritarian/command governance. This is the slippery slope to national socialism/communism/CCP social credit. Nations function poorly as businesses.
2) A better (long term) way to reduce partisan political bias from the public service is for certain public service employees (policy advisers and above) to forgo the right to vote in elections for the government they serve (ie if a federal employee, they can vote at State and local levels etc)
3) For a quicker impact, look to the incentives for civil service employment. Job security/patronage, in particular, selects for certain political traits and leanings (eg loyalty to your cause), while what is needed is more selection for conscientiousness (the civil service is a bureaucracy) and management competence (in achieving the outcomes designated by the governing politicians).
Department of Health and Human Services career staff circumvented President Trump’s hiring freeze issued soon after taking office by crossing out new hires’ start dates on their hiring paperwork. Staff used Sharpie pens to retroactively adjust the start dates to January 19, 2017—the day before President Trump took office.
That's a federal crime. Falsifying government documents is a felony charge. You can be arrested for it and put in jail if the President wants to charge them.
This is the most recent/updated version of the report, please link to this: https://americafirstpolicy.com/assets/uploads/files/Tales_from_the_Swamp-_How_Federal_Bureaucrats_Resisted_President_Trump_-_Revided_1.8.2025.pdf
Thanks, James! Keep up the great work.
You are welcome! I am giving it my best. You may also find this report enlightening: https://americafirstpolicy.com/assets/uploads/files/Research_Report_-_Union_Arbitrators_overturn_Most_Federal_Employee_Dismissals_1.pdf
In the short term, what stops Trump and his cabinet from reorganizing depts like Labor and declare that DOL needs a field office (w/o remote work) in every state to "support the states" and send the bad actors packing with a relocation package and zero portfolio to Pierre ND in January and Columbia SC in July? Just sideline these people until they "feel the trauma."
It's a great idea, but Pierre is in South Dakota. A better place would be Minot, ND.
Oops
Dispersing federal agencies to more appropriate locations outside DC is a great idea. This would send good jobs out to states to help their local economies. The dc metro area has gotten too large
I’ve never understood the “move it to the country”idea. Seem to me it incentivises those areas to support growing the government, makes hiring harder, and separates the state from those who should be their bosses in the White House. Just get firing fixed is the only thing that can work, IMHO.
If agencies were capped in the way the legislature was you wont have to worry about 'growing the government'.
'separating from their bosses in the WH'. Whether an agency is 200 feet or 2000 miles from the WH doesnt matter. The President doesn't drive over to the Pentagon and see whats happening and who should be fired. We have the internet and telephones now.
What stops him is probably a judge in Hawaii issuing a national injunction. Got to fix that , too.
Determining those employees who are supportive of the goals of the new administration will be easier if remote work is ended.
Yes, but remote 'work' should be ended regardless. Remote work is fraught with problems, and it was a stupid idea from the beginning.
Except you’re wrong. In office policies only benefit the elite at the expense of families
"Except you’re wrong. In office policies only benefit the elite at the expense of families."
I am not wrong. You have not supported that ridiculous statement with facts.
Agreed. Business seems to dislike remote work.
An anecdote rather than data as such: During covid one of our kids got his first job (working remote for an international bank). As soon as borders reopened he was 'commanded' to work 'locally' (ie 2 to 3 days/week in the office).
Have you heard of common sense? Are you able to intuit reality on your own or do you need a citation?
"Have you heard of common sense?"
Not from you.
You make a statement but can't back it up.
I'm sure there must be some reason, but why can't they just bring back the old civil service exam?
Whatever impediment is in their way can't possibly be more trouble to clear than the rewards are worth.
Lueavno consent decree. Disparate impact
This seems like a stretch to think that a civil service is judged primarily on its loyalty to Trump will be more competent!
"deregulating important industries like nuclear power"
Since the risks of any available or readily imaginable fission-based method of power generation as so great that such facilities cannot be conventionally insured, the Federal Government does so via the Price-Anderson Act.
As taxpayers are footing the bill, they have a right to demand Federal regulation of such facilities to mitigate the risks.
If someone believes overregulation is the result, there is a simple test of the assertion: demonstrate that the conventional insurance market would be willing to underwrite insurance indemnifying the public against the risk of accident or sabotage if the facilities were less regulated than they are today.
(Hint: you are not going to be able to do so, as every such facility is a pre-assembled, publically funded radiological terrorist weapon awaiting (for example) a drone strike with a shaped charge payload as its triggering method. )
Why do any countries have nuclear power plants if the insurance calculus never make sense.
And there is plenty of open land in the US, but I might just be wholly ignorant of what the potential blast radius would be as a consequence of a radiological terrorist attack
Fission power generation has a peculiar effect on some people; they have convinced themselves (despite several "near misses" and several major accidents) that since fission-based stationary power generation has been VERY safe in the past (at least in terms of fatalities), it will continue to be so in the future - despite the fact that, unlike the past, we now have to contend not only with design mistakes and operator errors but with deliberate sabotage via really foreseeable methods against which defense is very difficult.
For example. one such sort of attack that could be mounted near-term with a medium-lift commercial drone (for example, a DJI FlyCart 30) would involve a payload of 25-30Kg, enough to breach the containment structures surrounding typical US reactors and, depending on the kind of penetrator employed perhaps significantly damage the reactor itself, especially if the it breaching charge had been designed and fabricated by a national as opposed to a non-state actor.
The result would likely depend primarily on how badly the reactor’s control and safety mechanisms had been damaged and whether the structure of the reactor itself had been penetrated. There would NOT be a “nuclear explosion”, but at a minimum, the reactor would probably be a total loss, there is a high likelihood of the release of radiological materials, and, worst case, there might be a non-nuclear “explosive-like” event that lofted considerable amounts radioactive debris and fine particles that could potentially be carried well outside the site by winds.
Used fuel storage facilities are even softer targets.
If such materials were released beyond the site, as soon as the public realized the risk of such attacks existed, IMO, that would be the end of commercial fission reactor deployment in the US.
As for proximity to densely populated areas, judge for yourself:
https://www.nrc.gov/info-finder/reactors/index.html
And it gets worse.
There are numerous proposals for smaller-scale reactors intended to be sited near user demand. As best I can determine, NONE of these designs are intended to be adequately hardened against such attacks – probably because it’s extremely difficult to do so against a properly designed breaching charge. (Anti-tank rounds designed to defeat the frontal armor of a modern main battle tank typically contain 1-2kg of explosive; the breaching charge carried by a drone could easily contain 10x that much). And since since a drone can be precisely controlled, it’s practical to make repeated attacks at exactly the same location on a structure).
So EVERY ONE of these reactors, once deployed, would be a potentially pre-funded radiological weapon and a generous subsidy of terrorist activity because, by far, the hardest part of building such a weapon is obtaining the radioactive material.
Drone defense systems already guard power plants as well as airports, prisons, and military bases—especially bases safeguarding nuclear weapons. We cannot eliminate risk, but we can mitigate it and learn from past failures. Nuclear power is the cleanest, most efficient source of energy available; neglecting to utilize it out of fear of it being possibly employed to carry out terrorism would be a mistake.
One last thought: though you don't mention safety, it's an important part of this discussion.
The judgment that nuclear power is statistically very “safe” (or not) should be made in the context of relative risks.
For example, the total cumulative operating hours for US commercial reactors - around 32 million –without loss of life due to radiological release might initially be seen as a demonstration that such reactors are very safe.
However, that’s close to the cumulative hours flown by commercial passenger aircraft every two weeks.
Even if we define “very serious” events at US power plants as requiring at least a partial core meltdown, there have been two such accidents (Three Mile Island and Fermi 1).
Would we regard the safety of commercial aviation as “acceptable” if major structural airframe failures were detected every week?
I don’t think we would.
There’s also the other significant variable in the equation: the potential damage from an incompletely contained meltdown is, very conservatively, at least three orders of magnitude greater than from a catastrophic airframe failure over a densely populated area.
So, at least to me, viewed in the context of relative risks, two partial core meltdowns in 32 million hours of operation are anything but reassuring.
So, you are happy with terrorists dictating our energy production?
Not at all.
But unfortunatly, it's just a fact that allowing them easy access to significant quantities of radioactive material under conditions makes it vulnerable to readily foreseeable;e forms of attack and dispersal has a very good chance of being a very bad idea.
And wishing or pretending otherwise will not make it otherwise.
"Not at all."
Sure you are. Your 'solution' is to eliminate nuclear energy...not the terrorist threat.
"As taxpayers are footing the bill, they have a right to demand Federal regulation of such facilities to mitigate the risks."
But taxpayers are ignorant, especially of things that involve science.
https://www.emilkirkegaard.com/p/danish-women-also-dont-like-nuclear?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=521681&post_id=155194724&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=false&r=m4hsd&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
This squares with my anecdotal experience that fission stationary power generation has a strong attraction to a subset of posters, usually male and often with a professional background in engineering, who frequently make the argument that it's irrational to be distrustful of such a statistically benign power source, especially as it's easy to demonstrate that most of the alternatives are inflicting significant harm.
I’ve never been entirely convinced by what I view as the common (and weak) form of the argument, and I’ve never seen anyone make the strong one: that the worst reasonably foreseeable accidents occurring with reasonably foreseeable frequency still have a better cumulative result than “business as usual” outcomes from the alternatives.
I won’t argue the point, though, because the people making the weak form of the argument have generally convinced themselves that the reasonably foreseeable accidents serious enough to matter have a very low probability of occurring, and I can’t prove otherwise other than to point out that there have been several “near misses”, and that in general highly complex technologies that depend on modulating unstable conditions are inherently prone to fail in unforeseen ways.
And there’s also this: I’ve always harbored the suspension that technological complexity strongly attracts this sort of person and that “rational” argument masks “irrational” preference.
In the last few years, we have begun to put my suspicion to a helpful test: as the cost of reliable solar + wind + storage has reached near parity with alternatives in many cases and is already below their LCOEs in others, and the relative cost curves increasingly diverge, will the same people who are enamored of fission stationary power on the grounds of “rational analysis” now embrace a lower risk, lower cost alternative?
To paraphrase J.M. Keynes, “When the facts change, will they change their opinions?”
In my experience., the majority do not.
In fact, their ability to ignore the evidence is astounding even to someone with expectations as low as my own: they are about the most fact-resistant pack of circular-reasoning fools I have ever encountered. Evidence counts for nothing, and blind conviction trumps everything.
Now, I get this: for engineering minds that have spent a lifetime regarding instantaneously, dispatchable capacity matched to peak demand as the basis for rational planning, a curve that says that if your feedstock is free, then your optimum peak generating capacity is 2-3x times the average demand is DEEPLY counterintuitive.
But once you “get it”, it’s beautiful, elegant, and above all supremely practical, and they “logically” ought to embrace the concept.
Nope.
Instead, you get arguments that – in the face of evidence they literally REFUSE to look at – intermittency (for example) is an insurmountable barrier, or that “real soon now” a new generation of fission technology is going to drive that pesky cost curve back down below that of the emerging alternatives - despite that fact that even assuming only incremental progress the cost of the alternatives is going to decline to a minimum of a further 25-30% by the end of the decade.
This attraction remains mysterious to me. It’s not like this is fusion power, which has a very good chance of eventually supplanting all other sources of utility-scale power generation on the basis of cost and environmental considerations—this is FISSION power, which is to the 21st century what coal-fired power generation was to the 20th century.
So, in the end, I’m left with the conviction that this is some sort of hubristic attachment to taming the elemental forces of nature, partnered with an innate love of deviously ingenious complexity in the service of doing the same.
Great article. In the first paragraph of the ‘Civil Service Protections Favor Democrats and Stasis’ section you said “With that in mind, the aforementioned largely Democratic composition of the federal bureaucracy means Republicans are at an *advantage* when it comes to governing.” Is that a typo? Should it be disadvantage?
Yes, fixed. Thanks!
« Department of Labor regulatory staff intentionally delayed producing a departmental priority regulation. A competent private sector attorney could have produced a draft regulation in two to three weeks. The team of about a dozen career staff claimed they needed a year to do so—a pace that amounted to each attorney in the unit writing less than one line of text a day. »
So this doesn’t seem like a fair criticism. The time it takes to draft a federal regulation is not primarily writing time, it’s consultation. Sometimes consultation within the agency, which could be legally streamlined but that would be hard to do (and impossible for an individual or small group to do without buyin from the larger organization). Also legally mandated consultation with other State and federal agencies (environmental consultation, tribal consultation, historic preservation). Also public comment periods. Also opportunities for the public to file legal challenges. Also environmental reviews and opportunities to comment on or challenge the environmental review. Most of this is required by law that the DOL could not change.
All in all I consider a year to do a federal rulemaking quite fast. Unless there’s specific reason to assume these employees were *intentionally* slowing it down. A private sector attorney totally could write a regulation faster, but only by ignoring all these requirements.
There are some problems, but with employees that can (are) be trained to take advantage of any number of videoconferencing platforms remote doesn’t mean unconnected. Why should a worker drive into work only to videoconference with clients & coworkers all day?
The Republican Party suffers greatly from what Hanania calls the Elite Human Capital problem. Democrats are over represented in all positions in society requiring education, intelligence, and competence. Magnifying this problem is that successful conservatives tend towards business where the rewards are monetary and tangible, rather than feel good jobs like public service.
Trump will have to lean heavily on patriotic conservative Americans from the business sector who are willing to give up their lucrative career for a thankless job in public service. This problem will only be compounded if they “dread going to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.”
Where is Trump going to find the people to fill all these roles? It’s easy to say just fire all the disloyal or unproductive workers, but who will replace them? Perhaps a civil service that is greatly thinned in ranks will be able to produce the kind of transformational change Trump envisions but it is far more likely to just be a recipe for stasis.
We have to accept that in America, smart and good people will be in very short supply for government jobs. We don't have a civil service culture like Britain or France or India.
Han Fei had wise things to say about this.
I agree with a lot of this, but I think that it is more productive to focus on radical deregulation. Firing federal workers does no good if the output (regulations) are still in effect.
I would rather have the same federal workforce and 50% less regulation, than the same regulations and 50% fewer federal workers or 50% better federal workers.
Focus on the output (regulation), not the input (federal employees).
You mentioned FDR as "a trusting and frequent delegator". As a non-American I'm curious what exactly happened between big, controversial reforms of the past like FDR's New Deal or LBJ's Great Society to now that has prevented new administrations from properly implementing their vision once coming to power? Any pointers are fine.
Presidents had a lot more leeway in what they could do within the realms of their powers prior to Watergate and the Warren and Burger Courts. FDR used the predecessor to the Fairness Doctrine to outright pull his critics on radio from the air.
Also, the Civil Rights Act wasn't a controversial reform. Johnson utterly destroyed Goldwater at the polls. It was only actually trying to implement and enforce the act that was controversial. People like "make white and black people equal", also think equality of outcome is merely a matter of the correct social policy, hate the awful ways in which equality of outcome is implemented, but are still resistant to the conclusion that the project itself was rotten from the start. This is why the proselytization and conversion of the élite to hereditarianism is such a vital project. They'll never get better otherwise.
The Civil Rights Act was bipartisan and had voter support. The problem was that it was administerered to be exactly the opposite of what its supporters said it would be: colorblind.
To whatever extent the CRA is administered in colorblind fashion, it can NEVER deliver what a critical mass of its supporters want.
FDR was giving officials lots of power, and jobs were in short supply in business then. Thus, he had an easy time getting talented bureaucrats who liked his programs. And there did not exist old Republicans ones to block them.
The modern bureaucratic system was created by FDR and is large still operating by his dead hand.
How about if Trump fails we go full Helicopter 🚁?
Which is likely if we’re cheated of failed again.
Happy Liberation Day
"Firstly, a slim majority of non-political civil servants have been Democrats since Clinton. This has remained true despite changes in the party of the president. "
This is an astonishingly low percentage of Democrats. It appears to be about 50% Dem, 25% Repu, 25% Independent in terms of party registration. I'd want to look into that data more carefully. Maybe I'm just thinking of Fed employees in DC, though. Since DC votes about 90% Democrat for President, government employees would have to be about 250% as likely as the average voter there to be a Republican.
As I'm not a citizen of the USA I feel I can be somewhat dispassionate about your public service issues arising from partisan political preferences, which all (western/modern) public services face:
1) Schedule F is beguilingly dangerous. Without a prior pre-intention to remove it after say the next midterm elections it will increase authoritarian/command governance. This is the slippery slope to national socialism/communism/CCP social credit. Nations function poorly as businesses.
2) A better (long term) way to reduce partisan political bias from the public service is for certain public service employees (policy advisers and above) to forgo the right to vote in elections for the government they serve (ie if a federal employee, they can vote at State and local levels etc)
3) For a quicker impact, look to the incentives for civil service employment. Job security/patronage, in particular, selects for certain political traits and leanings (eg loyalty to your cause), while what is needed is more selection for conscientiousness (the civil service is a bureaucracy) and management competence (in achieving the outcomes designated by the governing politicians).
Department of Health and Human Services career staff circumvented President Trump’s hiring freeze issued soon after taking office by crossing out new hires’ start dates on their hiring paperwork. Staff used Sharpie pens to retroactively adjust the start dates to January 19, 2017—the day before President Trump took office.
That's a federal crime. Falsifying government documents is a felony charge. You can be arrested for it and put in jail if the President wants to charge them.