career civil servant

10/19 i forgot this cat

buffer expert, non-partisan

union

administrative state

gubmint

see sched F

see long term inst memory

see admin state

// deep state

anti-gubmint

~expertise

---

DOGE CUTS?

AN 12 25

The New York Times reports U.S. diplomacy is floundering with fully 98 percent of diplomats reporting plummeting workplace morale since the Trump administration took over in January.

“The Foreign Service is in crisis,” said John Dinkelman, president of the American Foreign Service Association, or A.F.S.A. “Damage is being done to America’s diplomatic service that we will be paying for for decades to come.”

An upcoming A.F.S.A. report warns that “America’s diplomatic capacity is being decimated from within” as seasoned diplomats are laid off or abandon their government roles. The Times reports findings are consistent with “countless anecdotal complaints from both Foreign Service officers, trained professionals who work in embassies and consulates abroad, and the civil servants who mainly staff the State Department’s headquarters in Washington.”

Likely fueling the dissatisfaction is a sense among current and former U.S. officials that, under Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the department has become more political and less relevant, despite Rubio initially assuring department workers that he valued their expertise and wanted the department to play a greater role in foreign policy.

Surveys show 86 percent of employees say it has become harder to carry out U.S. foreign policy. Just 1 percent reported an improvement.

Diplomats say their years of experience and input is not welcome, especially if it diverges from President Trump’s views.

“They have watched from the sidelines as much of America’s most sensitive diplomacy is conducted not by … Rubio but by Trump insiders such as Steve Witkoff, a real estate mogul with no prior diplomatic experience, and Mr. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, often acting with little or no assistance from career diplomats,” the Times reports.

Just this week Witkoff and Kushner traveled to Moscow to meet with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, just after leaked transcripts show Witkoff coached Putin apparatchik Yuri Ushakov on how to manipulate President Donald Trump with flattery.

Until this year, the Times reports the State Department had a strong ethos of nonpartisanship, and “many career officials have blanched at the appointments of relatively inexperienced ideological conservatives to senior positions.” A more politicized workplace has also led diplomats to self-censor their observations and advice, according to Dinkelman. Additionally, orientation training for new workers no longer informs them of the State Department’s “dissent channel,” which was created in 1971 in response to concerns that unwelcome opinions about the disastrous Vietnam War that proved accurate were ignored or suppressed.

“If I’m not telling you everything I know because I fear that you might not like the answer to the question, then what is the value of diplomacy?” Dinkelman said.

Read the New York Times report at this link.

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vulnerable bc potential deep state?

an 4 25 the conv

Trump, met with far-right activist Laura Loomer in the Oval Office last week. Loomer is a figure so extreme that she is shunned by many, even in Trump’s “make America great again” (Maga) movement.

Hours after their meeting, Trump fired a string of national security officials, including General Timothy D. Haugh, the head of the National Security Agency and US Cyber Command, apparently at Loomer’s request. Trump has said Loomer was not involved in the firings, but also praised her judgment.

Even for a president who has always listened to – and, indeed, echoed – fringe voices, the incident stood out. It served as a reminder that Trump is less constrained than ever before, and that his White House is responsive to his personal whims rather than any deliberative policy-making process.

Gone are the days of Trump’s first administration, when aides would at least try to block the most extreme conspiracy theorists from having access to the president. Now, apparently, even a four-star general (the highest officer rank) like Haugh serves only at the pleasure of figures such as Loomer.

So, who exactly is Loomer? She is, first and foremost, a media influencer – someone who made her name in far-right circles by spreading hate and conspiracy theories.

She calls herself a “proud Islamophobe” and “pro-white nationalism”. She has endorsed claims that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were an “inside job”, alleged that the “deep state” manipulates the weather to influence elections, and spread conspiracy theories implying that the FBI let school shootings happen in election years to help the Democrats push gun control.

Loomer’s claims, and her open racism, have sometimes proven too much even for other prominent Maga figures, who prefer to be slightly more subtle in their messaging.

When Loomer said in 2024 that if Kamala Harris won the election, the White House “will smell like curry” and speeches will be “facilitated via a call centre,” she drew push-back from the now vice-president, J.D. Vance, and far-right congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene.

But Trump seems to have appreciated Loomer’s commentary all the same. The president has repeatedly praised her in public and backed her unsuccessful run as a Republican candidate for a US House of Representatives seat in Florida in 2020.

Like many other Maga media figures, Loomer has realised that her antics give her direct exposure to a television-obsessed president, and that this exposure can be transformed into access and, ultimately, political power.

Loomer, who is only 31, is entirely a product of the Trump era. As an adult, practically the only conservatism she has known is the conservatism of Maga – openly prejudiced, vindictive, and more a stew of grievance and hatred than a coherent political platform.

Insofar as Loomer advocates for particular policies, they are a crude channeling of these impulses. She has campaigned for a ten-year immigration moratorium and has called for the death penalty for Democrats who oppose Trump.

On a podcast in June 2024 about whether Democrats should be prosecuted and jailed if Trump wins the election over alleged “unscrupulous behaviour,” Loomer said: “Not just jailed, they should get the death penalty. You know, we actually used to have the punishment for treason in this country.”

But the chief way in which Loomer personifies modern American conservatism is her single-minded loyalty to the president. Loyalty to Trump, and fury at the disloyalty of others, is the central component of her identity.

Deep loyalty

This loyalty seems to be both a deeply felt emotion and also a shrewd way of recommending herself to the president. And, more than anything else, it was what landed her in the Oval Office last week.

Loomer’s apparent recommendation that Trump fire a slew of national security officials had its roots in this obsession with loyalty. Many people serving in national security positions in the Trump administration are not card-carrying members of the Maga movement.

This reflects the fact that such positions require deep expertise developed over long apolitical careers in the civil service or military. As the product of a movement that disdains expertise and rationality, few Maga die-hards have the requisite knowledge to do these jobs.

For Loomer, such figures pose a threat. It ought to be emphasised that this is not because people like General Haugh have ever shown open disloyalty to Trump. It is merely that they are not, like Loomer, his fanatical adherents. In her worldview, anything less is unacceptable.

Trump seems to agree, which opens the way to more firings in the future. Sensing her opening, Loomer has declared that she will establish an organisation dedicated to investigating executive branch officials for suspected disloyalty to the president.

Government officials will have to live in fear of being targeted, creating a chilling atmosphere in which pushing back against Trump’s whims becomes impossible.

Loomer’s growing influence also suggests that the Trump White House is becoming more chaotic and unpredictable.

The president’s aides have long claimed that the White House would be run in a controlled fashion this time around, with clear chains of command and questionable outsiders kept away. Loomer’s presence in the Oval Office – at Trump’s personal request – blows that story away.

For her part, Loomer seems to have what she has always wanted: the president’s attention. Where might she direct it next?

Andrew Gawthorpe, Lecturer in History and International Studies, *Leiden University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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an 2 25

A secret group of government workers calling themselves #AltGov is trying to fight the Trump administration from within, the Guardian reported Wednesday.

The network is aiming to “expose harmful policies, defend public institutions and equip citizens with tools to push back against authoritarianism,” Lynn Stahl, a contractor for the Department of Veterans Affairs and member of the group, told the Guardian.

The workers have created 40 Bluesky accounts such as Rogue NASA and Alt DHS aiming to share information with the public and combat propaganda. “Promoting health and science and resistance against pseudoscience, disinformation, and fascism,” reads the bio for Alt Health and Human Services. Alt CDC (they/them) is the largest account with 96,000 followers.

“#AltGov dates from the firstTrump administration, but it’s even more needed now,” said an anonymous employee of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. She recently created an #AltGov FEMA account.

When the workers got the news that Elon Musk would be asking federal employees to list five things they did the week before, they met on an encrypted app to discuss next steps.

“Within hours the network had agreed on a recommended response: break up the oath federal employees take when hired into five bullet points and send them back in an email: ‘1. I supported and defended the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.’ ‘2. I bore true faith and allegiance to the same,’ and so on,” writes journalist Timothy Pratt.

“Every federal employee takes an oath,” the FEMA employee said. “When I did it, I teared up.” She decided to take part in the movement because “information [from the federal government] is so compromised right now. Everything is going on behind closed doors.”

The #AltGov movement began on Twitter during the first Trump administration. The original accounts worked on “sharing information about what was happening inside government – which usually doesn’t get covered as much, because it usually works,” said journalist Amanda Sturgill, author ofWe Are #AltGov: Social Media Resistance From the Inside.

She said they worked together to “provide services the government wasn’t providing,” such as organizing relief for people affected by hurricanes and distributing masks to help protect people from Covid.

The first iteration of #AltGov was “interesting … [because] it kind of stood up a different way of governing by putting it in direct contact with people – a ‘government with the people’. Whether this [version] can take it further depends on how much of the government is left,” Sturgill said.

The group has since moved from X, which is owned by Musk, to Bluesky. “It’s not safe to organize [on X] anymore,” Stahl said.

---

an 4 23

https://www.alternet.org/donald-trump-civil-service-test/

https://www.mediamatters.org/steve-bannon/rep-matt-gaetz-r-fl-and-former-trump-official-russ-vought-discuss-using-new-house

REP. MATT GAETZ (GUEST HOST): Let's start with the Holman Rule. Talk about what it means for any member of Congress to be able to get up and defund a particular bureaucrat.

RUSS VOUGHT (PRESIDENT, CENTER FOR RENEWING AMERICA; FORMER OMB DIRECTOR): It's huge. And so you know I come from the executive agency before this role, and we would have all of these career bureaucrats that we would be having to work with and the American people would largely not know their names, until Covid happened and now everyone knows who Tony Fauci is. But think about the ability to go to the House floor and have a debate about a particular bureaucrat. That is enormous. It changes the entire game right now.

I would have situations where our staff would do anything they possibly could not to necessarily give me what I needed, because they were worried about their own ability to stay anonymous. The Holman Rule makes sure that those career bureaucrats are no longer anonymous, and that they are put in the crosshairs to the same extent – in the arena – that you are. That I am.

So that is a game changer in having the appropriations debate. Also, not just what the message it sends, but the extent to which it itself focuses the appropriations process on the deep state, on theadministrative state that exists, that is now woke, and it's weaponized.And that has to be the biggest fiscal priority that we have, to go after the woke and weaponized bureaucracy.

GAETZ: Russ, if we'd have had this tool, we would have obviously directed it at Anthony Fauci, right? So, if you're comparing and contrasting, we would have had the ability – if we had the rules that we now have in place – if we'd have had those in place in the last Congress, you could actually force a vote on funding Fauci or not funding Fauci. As we look at a weaponized system across the apparatus of government, give us some examples or advice for who are some of the bureaucrats that enjoy their anonymity now? What are some of the agencies we should look at to target and take this tool out of the toolkit and actually put it to use?

VOUGHT: Well, there's all sorts of the types of people that you'd want to get in with Labor, HHS, and the COVID fascism that we've saw as a result of kind of lockdown-era policies. But we're going to want to use this in the Department of Justice. We're going to want to find those people that participated in the Russia hoax, that participated in going to FISA and lying to get warrants that are cooked up against the American people. So as you bring that aspect of what you negotiate, along with the Church-style committee that will sit within Judiciary, those are the kinds of things that you can say in real time that makes this enforcing.

The battle is certainly not over. We've got to show up at every stage, but it is self-enforcing.You enforce it, the 20 enforce it.And that was what makes this different than anything else that we've seen in recent memory, because not only is your voting no confidence in real speak – your motion to vacate present, but you also have the Rules Committee that is enforcing this on a bill-by-bill basis. So it's enormously successful and you've got a lot of potential to use it against thatbureaucrat that you'd identify that's standing in your way at NASA or the EPA – who's the EPA bureaucrat that put Joe Robertson, a 77-year-old Navy veteran in jail for building four ponds on his ranch to be able to fight wildfires. That's the person we want to use the Holman rule on.

aha pseudo-populism trashes expertise (of science and gubmint), free mkt says all gov't inept, the only real expert is pvt biz/accounting consultant, which lead to more hollowing out: mckinsey wants to keep all data proprietary so can sell to mult gov't agy

death spiral, pro pub 720:

Given that McKinsey consultants operate as advisers, with government officials charged with making final decisions, it can be hard to identify the firm’s responsibility for any given decision. But the firm’s government work has been steadily rising in the wake of a multidecade hollowing out of government (a trend McKinsey has promoted and ridden). Today, that increasingly means that if you examine the government’s response to the pandemic, you’re likely to find McKinsey’s fingerprints.

sched fneutralized public sector unions? note the bill does the opposite of what roy says it does; also thugswarm of action BS orgs c4??

Christian nationalist Russ Vought recently appeared on Turning Point USA co-founder Charlie Kirk’s radio show to discuss plans to purge at least 10% of federal career staffers under a new Trump administration. Vought described that portion of the federal workforce as “the roots of the problem” that prevented former President Donald Trump from fully implementing his agenda. During the interview, Kirk suggested that the next Republican administration subject civil servants to “ideological purity tests.”

Vought ran the powerful Office of Management and Budget under Trump and now heads up a right-wing think tank called the Center for Renewing America, whose mission is to “renew a consensus of America as a nation under God.” While at OMB, Vought helped develop a policy called “Schedule F” as a tool that would allow a new conservative administration to circumvent job protections typically enjoyed by federal workers who aren’t politically appointed.

Speaking on the September 23 edition of The Charlie Kirk Show, Vought claimed to have reclassified 90% of the workers in his own office under that job category

CitationFrom the September 23, 2022 edition of The Charlie Kirk Show, streamed on Rumble

“Schedule F is an authority that we discovered and developed at the end of the Trump administration to give the president the ability to reclassify career civil servants, who normally have permanency within the bureaucracy, to turn them into essentially at-will employees,” Vought told Kirk.

When asked by Kirk how many career employees he’d like to potentially sack using this authority, Vought set the floor at 10% of current workers, but suggested that he considers as much as 80% of the federal workforce to be ideological opponents.

“I would say that within my agency, we had, you know, 80% of it was left-leaning,” Vought said. “Their paradigms were all rooted in this permanent class, ruling class that defines the milieu of Washington, D.C.”

“And you can reason and work with that crowd, but there is about a 10% of activists that are animated by the wokeism, the anti-racist movement, to be able to come into these agencies and they're just activists,” Vought added.

Vought then told Kirk that someone in the human resources department at OMB described themselves and their colleagues as “committed anti-racists.”

Kirk responded by calling that person the leader of “a sleeper cell of a woke communist ideology who's just right there within our federal government.”

“You're going to have to figure out how to solve that, I don’t know,” Kirk continued. “But ideological purity tests are an interesting approach, but let's break up the federal government first and then we'll go from there.”

In July, Axios reported on discussions Trump allies were having about staffing their next administration, with the Schedule F being central to the framework. Vought reportedly has been a leader in these efforts: As Media Matters reported a week prior to Axios’ story, Vought stated publicly that he wants to build an “army” of hard-right activists with “Biblical worldview” to run the federal agencies that he can’t outright destroy. He’s been very clear that the goal is to get “ideologically committed individuals up and down the agencies,” and he’s been similarly clear that Schedule F is the way to do it.

Right-wing propagandist Christopher Rufo – known for launching bad-faith attacks on critical race theory and targeting children’s hospitals that provide care to trans youth – has pushed for a similar course of action.

“The idea is to centralize ideological control over the federal agencies in the White House and create a team at the Office of Management and Budget to enforce it,” Rufo said in an interview with conservative website IM-1776 in July.

In furtherance of those shared goals, Vought has attempted to turn the Center for Renewing America into a shadow government-in-waiting for Trump or another conservative president. In June, Vought brought on Jeffrey Clark, a former Department of Justice environmental lawyer and Trump’s top coup architect, as senior fellow at CRA. Kash Patel, another key figure in Trump’s attempt to subvert the 2020 election, is a CRA senior fellow as well.

In the recent interview with Kirk, Vought expressed a common regret among former Trump officials that the administration wasted precious time in its first years adjusting to the steep learning curve of running the government.

“My hope is that we don’t have to do that again because we're laying the groundwork now,” Vought said, later adding, “We want to make sure that can never happen again and make sure that from day one, we can ensure that the agenda is being done.”

A history lecturer is expressing concern about the Republican Party's agenda and how it could lay the foundation for a far more radicalized second term for former President Donald Trump.

In a new op-ed published by The Guardian, Andrew Gawthorpe, a history and international studies lecturer at Leiden University in the Netherlands, cited an Axios report as he detailed the political party's "core plan" as the 2022 midterm elections approach.

"At the core of the new plan, as reported by Axios, is theintention to strip away employment protections from thousands of senior civil servants, eliminating at a stroke a large chunk of the civil service’s expertise and institutional memory," Gawthorpe wrote. "This would allow them to be replaced with a ' cadre' loyal to Trump’s America First agenda,most of them likely to be 20- and 30-somethings with no experience in government who would owe their newfound prominence to Trump alone. Ideologically zealous and loyal to a fault, they would set about trying to reshape the government in Trump’s image."

He went on to note the distinct change in Trump's proposed agenda as he compared this situation to his first presidential term.

"What seems to have changed in the interim is Trump’s desire for revenge. According to the Axios report, Trump’s top priority in a new administration will be to “clean house” in the intelligence community, DoJ and FBI. Loyalists will be installed in the place of current leadership. Why these places? The standard conservative critique of the civil service is that everyone in it is a liberal, but that certainly isn’t true of these agencies. Rather, they’re the places you need to corrupt if you’re bent on breaking the law and persecuting your opponents. Trump – notoriously thin-skinned, impulsive, and vengeful – wants to do just that."

Gawthorpe also highlighted the bigger issue with the radicalized agenda.

"But this isn’t just a problem limited to Trump. The conservative movement as a whole increasingly dreams of turning the state against its enemies. The people at the heart of the movement today are more likely to idolize the Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orbán than they are Ronald Reagan," he said.

"They aren’t animated by the belief that the job of government is simply to get out of the way – instead, they want to use it to impose a radical agenda on American society," Gawthorpe wrote. "And the recent overturning of Roe v Wade provides a blueprint for how a compliant conservative judiciary can enable government officials to take away even the most fundamental of human rights."

He concluded with his perspective of what a future Republican presidency could look like given the current political climate of the party.

"Although Trump would bring his own particular set of grievances to the venture, any future Republican president is likely to follow a similar blueprint," he wrote. "Given the sheer scale of changes they want to impose on America, today’s conservatives act more like revolutionaries. And like all revolutionaries, they want to seize control of the state and launch an offensive on as many fronts as possible. If Trump’s first term isn’t to appear to future historians as a grim prelude to something far worse, they must never be allowed to do it."

an 7 22

Rep. Chip Roy's introduction Friday of a bill to make federal bureaucratic personnel at-will employees further stoked fears that marginalized workers will suffer discriminatory firings under a future Republican administration or even GOP-controlled Congress.

The Public Service Reform Act "will empower federal agencies to swiftly address misconduct and remove underperforming or ill-willed employees, creating a federal workforce focused on service to the American people," Roy (R-Texas) said in a statement.

The bill "would make all federal bureaucrats at-will employees—just like private sector workers—and claw back the inordinate protections some federal employees grossly abuse," he added.

The proposed legislation comes a week after reports that aides to former President Donald Trump are working to revive a plan to reclassify federal civil service personnel who worked under both Democratic and Republican administrations as at-will workers subject to easier termination.

Don Kettl, professor emeritus and former dean of the University of Maryland School of Public Policy, told Government Executive that "this is obviously a huge and major change, an effort to gear up a major assault on the federal employment system" that "is being helped and aided unquestionably by a set of groups likeAmerica First Works, Heritage Action for America, FreedomWorks, and Citizens for Renewing America, who have endorsed the bill."

"Much of the debate has largely been about if Trump is reelected," he added, "but what this makes clear is the efforts to try to change the civil service aren't just Trump necessarily, and if Republicans take control of Congress following the midterms, this may very well go from idea to specific action."

According to Government Executive:

Although the bill stands nearly zero chance of passing in the current Congress, experts say that it, combined with recent news that conservative political operatives with Trump's endorsement have devised plans to revive Schedule F, a proposal to strip the civil service protections from tens of thousands of federal employees in "policy-related" positions, indicates the civil service system as we have known it for the last 150 years will be under attack under the next Republican administration.

Although Roy says his bill "will provide justice to federal employees who are victims of discrimination or whistleblower retaliation," Kettl warned that the measure "dramatically limits the amount of whistleblowing activity that's possible," noting that "it creates a disincentive to blow the whistle because your retirement benefits could be reduced."

"When you put it together," he added, "it's a very big deal" and "would dramatically change the incentives for individuals who are being dismissed because of whistleblowing."

Author and transgender activist Brynn Tannehill worries that, should at-will employment become reality, "a purge of trans people from federal service" would follow a return of Trump or another Republican president to the White House.

Commenting on the mass firingof progressive staffers by San Francisco's new tougher-on-crime district attorney following Chesa Boudin's recall, socialist organizer Julian LaRosa recently argued for a codified employment termination standard similar to the one realized in the limited laws that labor activists led by Local 32BJ of theService Employees International Unionhelped enactin Philadelphia and New York.

"Can we just get universal just cause in the workplace already?" he asked.

Testifying before New York City Council members in support of that city's 2021 just-cause law, former Chipotle worker Melanie Walker said she was suddenly fired by her manager one day for not smiling, even though there were no customers in the store.

"Everyone who's working needs to have some type of stability in your life," she said. "You should be able to go to work without thinking you have to be on eggshells all day, thinking that you can be fired at any moment for any cause."

"I'm loyal to you as a worker and you should be loyal to me," Walker added. "People still have to feed their families."

===

an 722

no lnx twt

'Authoritarianism 101': Government watchdogs ring alarm bell over Trump plot to purge civil servants If reelected

Julia Conley July 24, 2022

Government watchdogs on Friday warned that a plan by former President Donald Trump to drastically remake the federal workforce should he win the presidency in 2024 would "utterly destroy" public service in the United States.

As Axios reported Friday, central to Trump's plans for a second term is the reinstatement of his executive order known as "Schedule F," which established a new category of federal employees.

Under the executive order, which Trump signed just days before losing the 2020 election, thousands of federal workers who have served under presidents from both major political parties could be reclassified as "Schedule F" employees, eliminating their employment protections.

Trump could purge as many as 50,000 members of the nonpartisan workforce who he deems to have influence over policy decisions, leaving them with no recourse, and fill their jobs with "loyalists to him and his 'America First' ideology," according to sources who spoke to Axios.

Max Berger of pro-labor media organization More Perfect Union suggested Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis would also be likely to reinstate Schedule F—which was quickly rescinded by President Joe Biden in January 2021—if he runs for president and wins.

The executive order amounts to "authoritarianism 101," Berger tweeted.

Schedule F "would effectively upend the modern civil service, triggering a shock wave across the bureaucracy," wrote Jonathan Swan at Axios. "The next president might then move to gut those pro-Trump ranks—and face the question of whether to replace them with her or his own loyalists, or revert to a traditional bureaucracy. Such pendulum swings and politicization could threaten the continuity and quality of service to taxpayers, the regulatory protections, the checks on executive power, and other aspects of American democracy."

The plan would go "beyond 'deconstructing the administrative state,'" said the Coalition for Sensible Safeguards, which advocates for regulatory protections for the economic system, public health, and other sectors. "It's a plan to utterly destroy it."

While pushing to reinstate Schedule F should he take office again, Swan reported, "Trump has reduced his circle of advisers and expunged nearly every former aide who refused to embrace his view that the 2020 election was 'stolen'"—suggesting he is likely to seek out government employees who share that view.

Although Biden rescinded Trump's order, U.S. Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) has remained concerned that Schedule F will be reintroduced in 2025 under a Republican administration. He authored an amendment to the defense spending bill that would prevent "any position in the competitive service from being reclassified to an excepted service schedule that was created after September 30, 2020, and limits federal employee reclassifications."

The House passed Connolly's amendment on July 14 in a 215-201 vote, but Republicans in the Senate plan to block its passage, Axios reported.

"Congress [must] codify protections against this evil plan to place political allies of Trump throughout the government," said Fred Wellman, host of the podcast On Democracy. "Do not underestimate the destruction this will cause."

Walter Shaub, senior ethics fellow at the Project on Government Oversight, called on the White House to go beyond simply halting Trump's executive order and work with Congress to ensure legislation is passed protecting federal employees regardless of their political beliefs.

"Administration officials are aware of the issue," said Shaub. "But as with every other needed democracy reform, this administration has time and again proven it is not up to this crucial moment in history."

The reinstatement of Schedule F would result in a "reckless, lawless administration," said Georgetown University professor Don Moynihan.

"How bad could Schedule F be? The people planning to use it to take control of the executive branch have shown themselves comfortable with breaking the law in ways that undermine American democracy," said Moynihan, pointing to Trump ally Jeffrey Clark, an attorney who is being investigated by the FBI and Congress and who the former president wanted to install as attorney general.

===

https://www.salon.com/**2020/02**/24/ginni-thomas-reportedly-leading-purge-of-disloyal-trump-aides/

igor salon

no lnx many

a group led by Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, is driving a White House effort to purge government officials seen as "disloyal" to President Donald Trump and replace them with vocal supporters who regularly appear on Fox News, according to Axios.

Trump recently rehired Johnny McEntee, a 29-year-old personal aide to Trump who was abruptly fired in 2018 amid an investigation over "serious financial crimes," to lead the presidential personnel office and purge officials believed to be "anti-Trump," Axios reported last week.

This effort has apparently been in the works since at least 2018, when Thomas' group Groundswell submitted a number of memos urging the firing of so-called "Never Trump" and "Deep State" officials as aides complained that the government was filled with "snakes," according to the report.

Thomas has spent a "significant amount of time and energy" urging White House officials to pursue the purge, the outlet reported.

Trump recently abruptly withdrew the nomination of Jessie Liu, the former U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, to a top Treasury Department role after a memo from Thomas' group alleged that she was "unfit for the job." The memo argued that Liu should be removed because she did not act on "criminal referrals of some of Justice Brett Kavanaugh's accusers," had signed a sentencing memo recommending prison time for former national security adviser Michael Flynn, and had not sought to indict former acting FBI director Andrew McCabe.

The memo was authored by Barbara Ledeen, a longtime Republican Senate staffer and close friend of Flynn. Ledeen was involved in the Trump campaign's efforts to obtain stolen Hillary Clinton emails and was named extensively throughout former special counsel Bob Mueller's report.

Another memo urged the firing of numerous State Department officials accused of undermining Trump, including top U.S. diplomat David Hale, who later testified in the impeachment inquiry.

The group also previously led a successful effort to oust former national security adviser H.R. McMaster, who replaced Flynn.

A third memo obtained by Axios showed that the group recommended the administration hire a number of Trump loyalists, including many who had touted his supposed accomplishments in appearances on Fox News.

The memo recommended former Milwaukee sheriff David Clarke, a frequent guest on the network, for a senior Department of Homeland Security position and suggested Fox News regular Dan Bongino, a former Secret Service agent who has repeatedly run for office without success, for a post as counterterrorism adviser or in Homeland Security.

The memo also urged the White House to add Derek Harvey, a longtime aide to Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., who was reportedly involved in efforts to discredit the Russia investigation, Trump's pressure campaign on Ukrainian officials and attempts to leak the Ukraine whistleblower's name, to the National Security Council. Indeed, Harvey briefly held a position there before he was ousted by McMaster. Groundswell also recommended Ben Weingarten, a Trump supporter who writes for the far-right Federalist, for the National Security Council.

Chris Plante, a right-wing radio host who has attacked women who have accused Trump of rape and sexual assault on Fox News, should be the White House press secretary,the memo argued.

The memos were written after conservative activists "funneled names" to Thomas during meetings at the offices of Judicial Watch, a conservative legal activist group headed by frequent Fox News guest Tom Fitton.

The group's meetings with Trump were first reported by The New York Times in January 2019, when the group complained that officials were blocking Trump supporters from jobs in the administration. Though the administration acted on some of the group's recommendations, efforts to purge the executive branch of officials seen as disloyal have apparently gained steam since Trump's acquittal in the Senate impeachment trial.

McEntee will report directly to the president and has already ordered a freeze on all political appointments while he identifies officials he feels should be removed. He also informed Cabinet secretaries that the White House would select all their deputies moving forward, according to the Times.

These moves come as Trump ousted the acting director of national intelligence, Joseph Maguire, over a dispute about an intelligence briefing warning that Russia would try to help Trump in the 2020 election. The ouster came after Trump purged dozens of experts from the National Security Council staff, including Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, who testified against Trump during the impeachment inquiry. Vindman was ousted on the same day as EU ambassador Gordon Sondland, who also testified in the probe. Other officials involved in the impeachment inquiry have similarly been ousted.

This purge comes in an administration which has already seen 82% more turnover in its first three years than any of the previous five presidents in their full first terms,according to data by the Brookings Institution's Kathryn Dunn Tenpas. With countless positions filled in an "acting" capacity, Trump is already on his third chief of staff, his fourth national security adviser and defense secretary, his fifth Homeland Security secretary, and his seventh communications director. Nearly 40% of senior administration positions have seen two or more replacements, according to the data.

"Trump appears to be launching the biggest assault on the nation's civil service system since the 1883 Pendleton Act ended the spoils system," New York University professor Paul Light told the Times.

"Many key departments and White House entities have been hollowed out," added Tenpas. "He seems completely unbothered. He claims that 'actings' give him flexibility, but fails to see that temporary leaders cannot advance his policies nearly as well as a Senate-confirmed appointee who has the stature and all the powers to do so."

===

azar hhs

swamp thing COI?

point man on covid 19 but got blindsided on podium by vp pick "alarmist"

apparently tried to get to djt on covid in jan? but blocked by aides? cuck-blocked?

cut pandemic team just ~ BO or eliminate buffer/expert?

yikes went after amb marie a

https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/trump-to-name-bombastic-loyalist-a-top-intel-chief-despite-lack-of-qualifications-report/

no lnx

Trump to name bombastic loyalist as top intel chief despite lack of qualifications: report

Ambassador Richard Grenell with California Wine Representative

Written by David Badash / The New Civil Rights Movement February 19, 2020

President Donald Trump is expected to install Richard Grenell, his current Ambassador to Germany, as his next Acting Director of National Intelligence, according to The New York Times. Grenell is known as a bombastic Trump loyalist who has not been well received in Berlin.

Some eyebrows are being raised, not due to Grenell’s harsh attitudes but his disturbing lack of qualifications for the job of Director of National Intelligence, also known as the DNI.

The DNI is a Cabinet-level official who sits at the very top of the entire Intelligence Community, serving as the head of the 17 federal agencies that comprise it. They also serve as the President’s chief advisor on national security, and produce the top-secret President’s Daily Brief (PDB).

Federal law states quite clearly, “Any individual nominated for appointment as Director of National Intelligence shall have extensive national security expertise.”

Ambassador to Germany does not qualify. Grenell previously has served as the spokesperson for the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. He has run a public affairs consultancy, has been a Fox News contributor, and for a few days was presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s national security spokesperson, but was forced to step down after conservatives blasted the former governor over Grenell’s sexual orientation.

In November the german magazine Der Spiegel ran a damning profile of Grenell titled, “Trump’s Ambassador Finds Few Friends in Germany.” (Ironically, one of the reasons Trump gave for firing his venerated Ambassador to Ukraine was that she was not well-liked in the country, which was false.)

“Since arriving in Berlin as U.S. ambassador to Germany, Richard Grenell has flouted diplomatic conventions and attempted to interfere in domestic politics. He has since become politically isolated in the German capital,” Der Spiegel reported.

In the extremely “unflattering” article, Grenell is compared to “a right-wing extremist colonial officer.”

“The powerful avoid him. Doors have been shut. Few politicians to the left of the right-wing populist Alternative for Germany (AFD) and the populist-conservative Christian Social Union (CSU), the Bavarian sister party of Merkel’s center-right Christian Democrats (CDU), want to be seen with him.”

It gets worse.

Der Spiegel writes they spoke with 30 sources before publishing their report.

“Almost all of these sources paint an unflattering portrait of the ambassador, one remarkably similar to Donald Trump, the man who sent him to Berlin. A majority of them describe Grenell as a vain, narcissistic person who dishes out aggressively, but can barely handle criticism. His brash demeanor, some claim, hides a deep insecurity, and they say he thirsts for the approval of others.”

All that aside, again, Grenell is not qualified, neither by law nor by common sense.

Some experts agree:

see pruitt 3 for lnx

https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/11/9/16619988/scott-pruitt-epa-dysfunction-staff

11/17 2x?

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt doesn’t hide his contempt for how the agency has been run, but he does profess to care about one of its key programs: Superfund, which oversees the cleanup of the nation’s worst toxic waste sites. In April, he toured a site in East Chicago, Indiana, contaminated with lead and arsenic, and told residents, “We are going to get this right.”

The following month, Pruitt — Oklahoma’s attorney general before he joined the EPA — tapped one of his former donors, banker Albert “Kell” Kelly, to find ways to accelerate and improve Superfund cleanups. Kelly started by consulting career staff members — often knowledgeable officials who work at the agency regardless of who holds the White House. But then Kelly closed off the process, conferring with Pruitt to produce a final plan that altered or excluded many of the staffers’ suggestions. Gone, for example, was the idea that EPA officials be identified early on to lead discussions with communities on how contaminated land should be used after cleanup.

“We’re missing a huge opportunity to do something new and different with Superfund,” said one of two EPA employees who described the process to the Center for Public Integrity on the condition of anonymity.

What happened with Superfund is hardly an anomaly. Today’s EPA is wracked with internal conflict and industry influence and is struggling to fulfill its mission, according to more than two dozen current and former agency employees.

A few dozen political appointees brought in under the Trump administration are driving policy. At least 16 of the 45 appointees worked for industries such as oil, coal and chemicals, as this CIP graphic shows.

Four of these people — and another 21 — worked for, or donated to, politicians who have questioned established climate science, such as Pruitt and Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK).

Career staff members — lawyers, scientists, analysts — are largely being frozen out of decision-making, current and former agency employees say. These staffers rarely get face time with Pruitt and frequently receive top-down orders from political appointees with little room for debate. They must sometimes force their way into conversations about subjects in which they have expertise.

Meet the fossil fuel all-stars Trump has appointed to his administration

And that is a big mistake, said one of Pruitt’s predecessors.

Career employees are “very dedicated to protecting human health and the environment, and they will change their ways of how they do that if they’re convinced you really want to accomplish that aim,” said Christine Todd Whitman, EPA administrator under President George W. Bush.

One such employee agreed. “I think it’s the fact that we’re not following regular procedures; we’re not sure of what the legal justification is for some of the things they’re asking us to do. We’re just kind of being told, ‘Do the opposite thing you did 18 months ago.’ That’s hard to swallow.”

The EPA staffers who spoke to the center say the isolation of Pruitt’s top staff from the rest of the agency limits the perspectives the administrator is exposed to before making decisions.

Two appointment calendars, covering a six-month period beginning in March, show that Pruitt hears overwhelmingly from industry. He was scheduled to meet 154 times during the period with officials from companies such as Exxon Mobil and trade associations such as the American Petroleum Institute, the oil industry’s biggest lobby group. API was among at least 17 donors to Pruitt when he ran for state or federal office or led theRepublican Attorneys General Association that have met with him as EPA administrator. Those same calendars indicate he saw only three groups representing environmental or public health interests, though an EPA press release says he met with two others.

EPA spokesperson Liz Bowman disputed claims that the roughly 15,000-person agency is riven with discord. Career employees are “vital” to the EPA’s work and meet regularly with political appointees and the administrator, she said, citing ongoing deliberations on a water pollution rule as an example. (Two career employees who spoke to the center at Bowman’s request confirmed that they routinely work with political appointees and did so on the water rule.)

“We talk to people throughout the regions, the states, the career staff, and a variety of different perspectives prior to making decisions,” Bowman said, adding in an email that “we follow the Administrative Procedure Act in our regulatory process, meaning taking into consideration comments submitted by ALL commenters, including environmental NGOs, the public, and other commenters.”

For the public, much is at stake. Under Pruitt, who sued the EPA 14 times as Oklahoma’s attorney general, the agency has already declined to ban a pesticide linked to neurological damage in children, frozen requirements to reduce water pollution from coal-fired power plants, and opened the door to loosening limits on toxic coal waste. The EPA most recently proposed eliminating the Clean Power Plan, an Obama administration rule aimed at reducing carbon emissions in the power sector.

“These rules [being rolled back] aren’t perfect by any stretch of the imagination. There are ways to improve things,” said Gordon Binder, who served as chief of staff for then-EPA Administrator William Reilly under President George H.W. Bush. "But Pruitt’s come in with a fly swatter and is slapping them down instead of laying out the problems with a rule and saying, ‘How can we fix it?’”

Who’s running the EPA?

There’s a striking absence of high-level leadership at the EPA. Only one of 13 positions requiring Senate confirmation — Pruitt’s — is filled. These positions — higher-ranking than those held by the 45 political appointees — include leaders of key agency offices that oversee air, water, and other programs. Six people have been nominated for the 12 open slots and are awaiting confirmation (although two of them have joined the EPA in the meantime as senior advisers).

Most major decisions are made on the third floor of the William Jefferson Clinton South Building on Pennsylvania Avenue, where Pruitt and his handful of confidants have their offices. Among those who most prominently have Pruitt’s ear: EPA Chief of Staff Ryan Jackson, who previously held the same position with Inhofe, and Samantha Dravis, who worked with Pruitt at the Republican Attorneys General Association and now leads the EPA’s Office of Policy.

Dravis, widely seen as Pruitt’s closest adviser, came to the agency with a background in law and politics but little environmental experience. That’s a departure from her two immediate predecessors, who were already at the EPA when they were tapped to lead the policy office.

The EPA is taking unprecedented steps to oust scientists who receive its grants]

Jackson helped Inhofe negotiate major bipartisan deals in the Senate, such as the passage of federal chemical policy reform. Still, emails released under the Freedom of Information Act to the New York Times show that Jackson directed career staff to deny a petition seeking to ban chlorpyrifos, a pesticide suspected of harming children’s brains, directly contradicting the recommendations of EPA scientists.

Bowman said in an email that career staff were “instrumental” in drafting the denial. The former acting head of the EPA’s chemicals office, a career employee who left the agency last month, told the Times she opposed the decision, even as she followed Jackson’s instructions.

Other influential political appointees include Sarah Greenwalt, senior adviser to the Office of the Administrator, who worked for Pruitt when he was Oklahoma’s attorney general; Bowman, head of public affairs, who came from the American Chemistry Council, a chemical industry trade group; and Mandy Gunasekara, a senior policy adviser who worked on the Republican staff of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.

Nine career staff members told the center their opinions seem to hold little weight. They are excluded from meetings, they say, and their advice on agency operations is often disregarded. Some believe this is because of the flurry of leaks that have come from inside the agency since Pruitt took office. Political appointees have lashed out at suspected leakers and relieved them of work assignments, even in the absence of proof, career employees said.

Why the head of the EPA built himself a secret phone booth

“They are terrified of career staff leaking,” one said. “And once they get an idea in their head [about] someone, they won’t change it.”

Bowman said, “Those concerns have not been brought to our attention. And if they are, we will do everything we can to address them.”

Pruitt has broken with tradition by forgoing many introductory briefings with career staff designed to help new administrators set priorities, several current and former employees said. Instead, he’s worked to roll back EPA rules, an effort that also diverges from common practice.

Political appointees are taking more of a hands-on role in tasks career employees previously would have handled. Take, for example, a recent notice announcing that the EPA plans to reconsider whether certain vehicle emission standards for greenhouse gases were too strict. Career staff had drafted a concise version of the notice, but appointees expanded the number of vehicles affected by the review and made the Department of Transportation the lead agency on the decision, despite the EPA’s legal obligations to control planet-warming emissions under the Clean Air Act.

“This was a much more major rewrite” than would have happened under previous administrations, said an EPA employee familiar with the matter. “At least one plausible outcome of this process,” the employee said, “is that the EPA would unilaterally abdicate its [legal] responsibility.”

“It looked like he was kind of checking the box to meet with us”

On the rare occasions when career employees are asked to brief Pruitt, he seems unwilling to change his anti-regulatory posture on major industry priorities, according to some career employees. Betsy Southerland, who headed an office within the EPA’s water program until August, said her team met with Pruitt twice about a rule designed to limit wastewater discharges from power plants as he considered weakening parts of it.

The team told Pruitt that industry arguments against the rule had already been considered and were found to be inaccurate. They offered more nuanced actions the administrator could take to address concerns expressed by the Small Business Administration, a separate federal agency; and the Utility Water Act Group, a lobbying organization. Pruitt was unmoved, she said. In August, the EPA announced it would reconsider key parts of the rule.

“You get the feeling that his mind was made up before we started the briefing process,” Southerland said. “It looked like he was kind of checking the box to meet with us.” The Times found similar behavior by Pruitt when the EPA declined to ban chlorpyrifos. Pruitt didn’t follow agency scientists’ advice, having “promised farming industry executives who wanted to keep using the pesticide that it is ‘a new day and a new future,’” the Times reported.

These episodes could simply reflect inexperience — appointees struggling to figure out the agency they lead. They also could reflect pressure placed on the EPA by executive orders and presidential memoranda to act quickly on big-ticket issues like the Clean Power Plan.

But Pruitt’s pro-industry bent has convinced some current and former employees that he and his like-minded advisers are aiming to destroy the EPA from the inside.

“Look, I think he does not support what the agency has been trying to do for 40 years,” said William Ruckelshaus, EPA administrator under Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. “He wants to dismantle — not improve or reform — the regulatory system for protecting public health and the environment.”

Rachel Leven is a reporter on the environment and workers' rights team at the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit investigative news organization in Washington, DC.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/inside-the-secret-deep-state-army-thats-quietly-uncovering-trumps-corruption/

no lnx

Inside the secret ‘deep state’ army that’s quietly uncovering Trump’s corruption

Written by Tom Buerkle / DC Report, Raw Story November 4, 2019

Our government’s Inspectors General pose one of the biggest threats to Donald Trump’s presidency. The IGs’ unique status as independent watchdogs that report both to their own agencies and to Congress make them a powerful tool to root out presidential abuse, fraud and corruption.

The Intelligence Community Inspector General triggered the House impeachment investigation by bringing forth the anonymous whistleblower complaint revealing that Trump pressured Ukraine’s new leader to publicly declare Kyiv was digging dirt on Joe Biden.

Multiple IG inquiries now bear down on Trump’s maladministration of our government, each gathering facts about Team Trump’s disregard for the rule of law.

Abuse of asylum seekers on our southern border is in the sights of the Department of Homeland Security’s IG. In a July report, he called on officials to take immediate action to alleviate “dangerous overcrowding and prolonged detention of children and adults” in the Rio Grande Valley.

Team Trump’s conduct makes clear they want to suppress or distract attention from critical inspector general reports

The number of people border patrol agents apprehended there more than doubled to 223,000 from October 2018 and May 2019, compared with the same period a year earlier.

‘Egregious Violations’ and Little Discipline

A separate report the previous month cited “egregious violations” of standards at Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facilities in California and New Jersey. Yet another reported on a lack of oversight of misconduct and discipline.

In an August report, the Pentagon’s inspector general warned that without American troops in Syria the combined forces of Iraq’s army and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces would be “unable to sustain long-term operations against ISIS militants” at a time when that Islamic group was increasing its attacks in the region.

That didn’t stop commander-in-chief Trump from abruptly tweeting a major change in Mideast policy on Oct, 7 that endangered both our national security and our elite troops in northern Syria. Trump tweeted without notifying the generals and blindsided even White House national security officials.

Turkey’s invasion forced our soldiers to flee so quickly that they left half-eaten meals, prompting Russian state television to mock our troops. American warplanes had to bomb our own nearby munitions dumps to keep the weapons from hostile hands.

Fierce criticism from Republicans led Trump to retreat and use American forces to prevent ISIS from gaining control of Syrian oil fields and perhaps seize them, which would be a crime under international law.

Curious Cloud Contract

The Defense Department Acting IG is investigating the Pentagon’s awarding of a $10 billion cloud computing contract to Microsoft. Amazon had long been considered the favorite to win the business because it provides cloud services to the CIA. Trump has long attacked Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, accusing his Washington Post of spreading fake news.

Even Trump’s trade wars are getting close scrutiny. The Commerce Department’s IG office late last month warned Secretary Wilbur Ross that lax procedures mean that favored companies and industries could improperly influence department officials to win exemptions from the Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs. And only days earlier IG Peggy Gustafson told Ross she lacked the staff to properly vet the huge increase in foreign investments into our country that the Trump administration is demanding to blunt China.

Team Trump’s conduct makes clear they want to suppress or distract attention from critical IG reports or even just making documents available to Congressional investigators. Last April Trump ordered his entire administration to largely ignore Congressional oversight, a core function of Congress under our Constitution’s system of checks and balances.

Inspectors General United

After Trump’s Justice Department tried to silence the Ukraine whistleblower in October, 67 of the 73 IGs rallied to the whistleblower’s defense.

The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel had tried to silence the intelligence whistleblower, whose complaint triggered the impeachment inquiry. That drew a sharp rebuke from the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency.

The IG’s letter warned that such suppression efforts “could seriously undermine the critical role whistleblowers play in coming forward to report waste, fraud, and abuse across the federal government.”

Brave Bureaucrats

Significantly, the first of 67 signatures on the Oct. 22 letter came from the Justice Department’s own IG, Michael Horowitz.

That united public defense was an act of “bureaucratic bravery,” John Hudak, deputy director of the Center for Effective Public Management at the Brookings Institution, told DCReport.

There’s no small irony in the activism of the IGs. Congress created these watchdogs in all cabinet departments and federal entities under a 1978 law, part of a wave of clean government legislation passed after the Watergate scandal forced Richard Nixon to resign rather than face impeachment.

The inspectors general are unlikely to thwart administration policy, at least in the short run.

To Trump they provide a convenient foil, embodying what he claims is a “deep state” of unelected bureaucrats, a claim that fuels conspiracy theorists and fringe elements who claim our federal government is a criminal organization.

And they can’t force change, but their reports can motivate Congress and the White House to act. The Office of Personnel Management IG’s calls for tighter data security went unheeded until 2015, when during the Obama administration OPM revealed that suspected Chinese hackers had stolen sensitive information including Social Security numbers of nearly 20 million people who applied for government background clearances.

IG Budget Cuts

IGs have a unique independent status, reporting both to their executive agencies as well as to Congress. They also deliver real value, generating $14 in cost savings and fraud recoveries for every dollar they spent in fiscal 2018. That gives them clout and allies on both sides of the political divide.

Team Trump has cut IG budgets, as did Obama. They declined more than 7 percent over six years, to $2.5 billion in fiscal 2018, even as overall federal spending rose by more than 16 percent, to $4.1 trillion. That may explain why IG induced savings and recoveries fell to $36.2 billion, down 22% from $46.3 billion.

Today nine cabinet departments lack a Senate-confirmed IG, including the CIA, the Pentagon, Education, and Health and Human Services. A president who knows that IGs dig up facts which he has tried to keep hidden is, predictably, in no hurry to plug that gap.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/the-deep-state-strikes-back-trump-spent-3-years-maligning-career-civil-servants-now-theyre-honorably-exposing-his-corruption/