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In his SOTU speech, President Trump, advocating civil service reform, would like Congress to “empower every cabinet secretary with the authority to reward good workers and to remove federal employees who undermine the public trust or fail the American people.” According to Inez Feltscher Stepman, a senior contributor to The Federalist, it can take up to 300 days to fire bureaucrats for incompetence or criminal behavior. (The IRS’s Lois Lerner comes quickly to mind. read more on her here, here, and here) The 2.8 million federal employees are “virtually unfireable” and are “completely insulated from democratic accountability.”
The rest of us don’t get those perks, so why should those who ostensibly work for us?
Civil service protections were supposed to make government administration less political. Instead, they have created a system that grows government and advances left-wing causes regardless of who the people elect. Even our most conservative presidents burn energy and political capital fighting their own departments to a standstill, while career bureaucrats undermine their policies and wait out their terms, ready to pick right back up again under the next administration. As then-candidate Trump said in his election campaign, the game is rigged.
Left-wing outlets will, of course, frantically oppose any effort to level the playing field. “Donald Trump Just Asked Congress to End the Rule of Law,” is the hysterical Slate headline in response to Trump’s mere mention of civil service reform. The truth, of course, is that making those who work in the executive branch accountable to elected officials—who are then accountable to We the People, as our Constitution intended—restores republican governance rather than undermines it.
Read more here.
Debbie Young
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