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Firing people is hard, but sometimes necessary. Downsizing, redirecting the organization, cutting ties with a horrible employee — all might result in the need for a pink slip.
Donald Trump knows this. In his first term he had to part ways with the likes of Jim Mattis (see: organizational redirect) and John Bolton (see: horrible employee), just to name a few.
But to be successful in his second term, he’ll have to dust off his old TV catchphrase: Beginning at noon on Jan. 20, Trump needs to start saying “You’re fired” to people.
A lot of them.
All of President Biden’s truly political apparatchiks — Cabinet secretaries and their leadership teams, White House staffers, ambassadors and the like — will go automatically at noon on Monday.
Then there are those in high-profile positions at Washington’s so-called “independent agencies,” who Trump is expected to kick to the curb as soon as legally possible: progressive true believers like Rohit Chopra at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau or Michael Hsu at Office of the Controller of the Currency.
But the real Deep State — and it is real — is manned by the literally thousands of career federal bureaucrats who think their job is to create policy, or oppose it, instead of implementing the policies of the elected officials they serve.
A good place for Trump to start: inspectors general.
Back in 2017, there was some early discussion about replacing these department watchdogs, nearly all of whom had been appointed by the previous Obama administration.
It certainly wasn’t a stretch to assume they would be hostile to the incoming team.
Some in the administration thought that was too aggressive, so Trump didn’t replace all of Obama’s IGs.
That was a mistake.
IGs serve a valuable purpose, but they can also be weaponized against an administration they don’t like.
When they allow their own politics to impact their decision-making, their investigations draw time, attention and resources away from the president’s agenda.
That’s an abuse of their office.
No one accused Obama, Biden or pretty much any Democratic president of anything untoward when they put “their” people into IG positions.
Trump should do exactly the same thing: Republican inspectors general can do just as good a job of ferreting out abuse and discouraging waste as Democratic ones.
Maybe better.
Another place to focus: new federal hires.
It seems widely accepted that Biden is taking his last days in office to “secure his legacy.”
We’re not surprised at his attempts to frustrate Trump’s efforts to “drill, baby, drill” by removing large swaths of American territory from energy production.
Similarly, Biden has poked Trump, Elon Musk, DOGE and common sense in the eye by trying to give federal workers the right to work from home until after the next presidential election.
So he’s likely taking the same attitude when it comes to his recent hires in the federal bureaucracy, stuffing it with leftist loyalists as much as possible.
But career staff have a probationary period: They can be fired within one year of hiring.
Trump should look very closely at anybody hired since Jan. 21 of last year. If there isn’t some really good reason to keep them, they need to go.
Lastly, Trump should seek out the Biden people who have “burrowed in” to the executive branch.
That’s a term for political appointees who transfer over to the ranks of the civil service, becoming permanent career staffers.
It’s a sneaky work-around of the civil service rules that potentially politicizes the federal bureaucracy.
That’s why the Office of Personnel Management has to specifically approve such moves — but the same Biden team that is now so intent on legacy-building has also been in charge of OPM for several years.
There are good bureaucrats in the federal government, lots of them. I worked with more than 500 of them at the Office of Management and Budget.
But I also worked with 1,700 people at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and I can tell you that probably 1,650 of them came to work every day trying to undermine what I — and the president — wanted to do.
If just one-half of one percent of the more than two million civilian federal workers think their job is to frustrate the agenda of the person the American people just elected, that means Donald Trump will have more than 10,000 people working against him from within his own executive branch every day.
“Independent agencies” are not mentioned in the Constitution.
Neither is lifetime employment for an executive assistant at the Department of Agriculture.
But elections are.
And the voters who picked a Republican president, a Republican House and a Republican Senate are entitled to a Republican administration.
To achieve that, Trump is going to need to start firing some people.
On Day 1.
Mick Mulvaney was White House chief of staff in President Trump’s first term.
