1 week Ago By Glenn H. Reynolds
One of President-elect Donald Trump’s first orders of business must be to de-weaponize the federal government. One episode from Florida illustrates why. Not long ago you might have charged me with paranoid conspiracy theorizing if I had told you that federal disaster relief workers were deliberately keeping Trump supporters from receiving government assistance.
But they were, and a FEMA supervisor has been fired for it. Marn’i Washington allegedly told FEMA workers in Florida to skip houses with Trump signs out front after Hurricane Helene. “Avoid homes advertising Trump,” she wrote in a “best practices” memo to employees, a copy of which was obtained by Daily Wire , reportedly reinforcing this with a verbal order.
When Donald Trump raised this issue, The New York Times accused him of spreading disinformation. According to The Times, Trump “falsely accused” the Biden administration of “neglecting areas that had voted for Republicans.” Er, except that it was true .
And The New York Times, as of this writing, had not corrected its false reporting, which itself constitutes disinformation. So does that mean the conspiracy theorists are right? Well, yes and no. If the “conspiracy” would involve a handful of big-shots in a smoke-filled room sending out orders to their minions, not really.
That happens in government sometimes — as with the federal campaign to quash dissent on social media over COVID policy and the disputed 2020 election — but usually it doesn’t work that way. Because it doesn’t have to. When you have a federal workforce that overwhelmingly favors the Democratic Party, coupled with nonstop media (and social media) accounts of how awful Republicans are and how it’s fair to do pretty much anything to stop them because they’re basically Hitler, you don’t need to issue orders.
People act on their own. I very much doubt that any FEMA higher-up told Marn’i Washington to skip over houses with Trump signs. She just knew that she hated President Trump and wanted to punish his supporters.
Then she took action. Democrats like to see themselves as vital soldiers, defending democracy — and, coincidentally, their party’s power — from opponents who are not merely different, but outright evil. This sense of self-importance is coupled with a self-esteem-boosting snobbery: They tell themselves they deserve to be in charge because they’re so much smarter and better and more moral than the hoi polloi.
And the allegedly high stakes justify even the most immoral actions because they’re in service of a higher cause — stopping Hitler! (An excuse that’s always available: Democrats characterize just about all of their GOP opponents as the next Hitler, going all the way back to Tom Dewey in 1948.) Trump has said he will fire bureaucrats who get in the way of his reforms, and plans to vastly thin the civil service in general. This will help.
In fact, you can make a good argument for eliminating the civil service altogether, in whole or in part. Under the Constitution, all executive power is vested in the president, and no one else. The president is accountable to the public via democratic election.
If federal bureaucrats, who aren’t accountable to the public, aren’t accountable to the president either, then the federal government isn’t democratic at all. It’s been a convenient set-up — for Washington, DC, at any rate. Federal bureaucrats can pursue their own agendas, and the democratically elected president and Congress can blame the bureaucrats when they fail to deliver on election promises.
But it’s not the only way to run our federal government. Under the old “spoils system” that predated the establishment of a job-protected civil service, any bureaucrat could be fired by the president, and everyone understood that the president was therefore responsible for what the bureaucracy did. Making the system responsive to electoral turnover also ensured political diversity.
Today, the federal workforce is a deep-blue monoculture, and people like Marn’i Washington fit right in. But a federal workforce that turned over regularly would end up with roughly equal representation for the parties, so shenanigans like hers would be much less likely. Especially if federal employees were easier to fire.
America has a runaway budget deficit and a huge national debt. Our bloated federal government has increasingly been prone to abusing its power in ways large and small. (Forget FEMA – don’t get me started on the Department of Justice, which was treating parents who protested at school board meetings as domestic terrorists.
) In his second term, President Trump should slash the bloat . Some of these bureaucrats shouldn’t have jobs at all, doing work that’s either unnecessary to the constitutional responsibilities of government or that’s outright harmful. The rest of them should have to worry more about being fired.
Make government responsible. Make government accountable. It’s time and past time.
Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a professor of law at the University of Tennessee and founder of the InstaPundit.com blog..
