Di Leo: The Deep State -- an Institutional Barrier Against Draining the Swamp

As the Trump Administration began, two terms took over our discourse, from keyboard warriors on social media to the formal political theorists of the mainstream media. These two terms are not exactly antonyms, as one is a verb and the other is a gerund, but they certainly are diametrically opposed to each other: Draining the Swamp on the one hand, and the Deep State on the other.

Draining the Swamp was easy to say, easy to understand, easy to cheer for. We all know there’s corruption in the federal government, both in regular terms (people breaking the law while holding a public trust) and in philosophical terms (people whose very roles are by definition destructive, such as a regulator whose job is to put good people out of work).

“Drain the Swamp!” is a great line to shout at a protest, or to chant during a march. It’s a wonderful exclamation with which to close a theme in a campaign speech, and it’s well worth doing. But actually doing it, when the time comes, is hard.

The Deep State is the reason that Draining the Swamp is so hard. When we talk about “the state” in this context, we’re not talking about one of the fifty, we’re talking about government in general. It’s made up of elected officials, and their political appointees, and all the civil servants, from newbie to career, who fill the massive government of the United States of America.

Our Founding Fathers intended a tiny state: lots of free citizens, very very few in government. But we went off the rails early in the 20th century, and government mushroomed. The Deep State is a reminder that much of government is huge, deep, distant, and apparently untouchable.

The Founding Fathers intended a government so small that each election could correct errors, if errors were made… but civil service reforms – well-intentioned, of course, always well-intentioned – minimized that ability to the point that it became almost impossible for elections to correct errors at all!

“The idea of an independent civil service – a totally well-intentioned concept, remember – has therefore caused the problem we have today.

If one administration appointed a few political appointees and tons of civil service appointees, then when a new administration comes in, only the political appointees are purged; the civil service appointees are protected for life.

What kind of appointees do you think Janet Reno’s, Eric Holder’s, and Loretta Lynch’s hiring authorities selected for those civil service positions?”

“If your staff disagrees with your direction, they can undermine it. So the Reagan administration tried, in the 1980s, to do what it could to staff up with good people. But thanks to the aforementioned civil service rules, they couldn’t force out the bad ones. We have therefore always had both good and bad – pro-American and anti-American – bureaucrats throughout our federal bureaucracy.

The Right has an institutional disadvantage in this struggle: as a general rule, conservatives don’t want to work for government; liberals do. So when liberals enter these agencies, especially at the outset, they are more likely to remain, safely Hatched, for their entire careers. When conservatives enter, they often to do so only to gain experience so they can move up in the private sector.

Any new administration is likely, therefore, to inherit a bureaucracy already naturally skewed in the favor of big government.”

12.27.2016
‘You’re fired’: How Trump can reduce the federal workforce and drain the swamp

Because there is another more practical, political problem for Trump, and that is that after 8 years, the current 1.3 million non-defense civilian federal workforce is currently staffed with loyalists to President Barack Obama, who may not wish to implement Trump administration policies and may even seek to undermine the President-elect.

On his way out, Obama created an avenue for a small number of political appointees to rehired on the career side to burrow them into the workforce — called conversions. He also changed civil service rules to make it easier to hire federal employees outside of the traditional http://USAjobs.gov system. So, how to drain the swamp?

Federal rules make it extremely difficult to fire anybody in the civil service, a process that can take up to two years, even when there is cause like, say, only showing up to work one-third of the time. The federal employee unions get involved, and the whole thing is a mess. That said, federal managers attempting to deal with problem employees had best get started on day one. But one additional step that could be taken would be to reform civil service laws to make it easier to fire career federal employees, legislation that would need to be taken up by Congress, such as proposed by U.S. Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) likely to cause a major fight.

Another idea is to incentivize early retirement through financially lucrative, limited-time-only buy-outs. This would be accomplished via a one-time appropriation by Congress in the next continuing resolution — due on April 28, 2017 — reducing the amount of time served and the eligible retirement age on a temporary basis. The program could be administered by the Office of Personnel Management, with enough funds to facilitate the buy-outs, which would need to be big enough to promote early retirement.

More immediately, in the next continuing resolution, Congress could simply defund the personnel budgets of non-defense civilian departments and agencies, forcing an immediate 10 to 20 percent reduction in the workforce. Specifically, this would be done by taking last year’s enacted full-time equivalent number for each department, agency and office, and then cutting it by 10 to 20 percent. Also, it would be necessary to defund existing preferences under federal rules being given to those laid off being later rehired on a first-in-line basis. This latter part is essential, because otherwise, the Obama personnel who were just laid off will be the first to be rehired when positions need to be filled.

Read at: http://netrightdaily.com/2016/12/youre-fired-trump-can-reduce-federal-workforce-drain-swamp/

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