Once you politicize the civil service, you have destroyed the Republic.
The really distubing part of the quote, involves the “people” in question. The civil sevice is people, who have been co-opted willingly at the expense of the Republic, and it’s people. One would think, there are not that many of them to sustain such a power play. Sort of like the teachers, during the Capitol power play in WI. Lots of noise and trash talk, but when it came to real power, to change an election, zip, zero, nada.
I’ll admit the election was closer than it should have been, and there are more Federal Civil Service than WI teachers union thugs. Where do we go from here. In WI there was an executive with ballocks, but at the Federal level...
The problem is that the public employee bureaucracies are not elected. They hold the real reins of power in the day to day implementation of the laws. They can delay and hinder the implementation of change even if the political appointees in charge want to reverse or change course.
As someone who worked for the federal government for 36 years, the bureaucrats can outlast their political "betters." What is changing now is that the bureaucrats have chosen sides for the Democrats and against the Reps. When the Reps are in charge, they can sabotage change efforts and undermine the Rep politicians by selectively leaking information or manipulating data. And they can aid the Dems similarly. It was no coincidence that the Department of Labor unemployment numbers went down unexpectedly just before the 2012 election.
The Obama administration has placed within the various agencies small groups of political commissars who can keep an eye on what is happening and shape the information coming out of them. We have every right to be skeptical of government data.
As government grows larger, so does the influence of the unelected government bureaucrat, who is almost impossible to fire.
Don't remember who said it, when or the other circumstances surrounding it. But it is more true today than it was then.