Here’s a bit of contextually good news:
President Trump’s last-ditch effort to remove civil service protections from tens of thousands of career federal employees appears to have lost steam, facing time constraints and legal hurdles as the administration prepares to leave office, officials said.
This was to have been the finishing blow in Trump’s and the GOP’s long attempted murder of the independent Federal civil service.
Instead, it collapsed in a broad spectrum display of gaffers.
The order gave agencies until Tuesday to review potentially affected jobs. But as of Monday night, no…federal agencies had delivered a list of affected employees to White House officials for review, with the exception of the Office of Personnel Management, which also rushed to reshuffle much of its staff of roughly 3,500 people into the new category.
My guess as to why? An administration whose baseline level of competence was never that high found itself embroiled in weeks of election denialism. Eyes flew off the ball. If Trump had won, this would have all sailed through sometime over the next month or so. Without that luxury of time, and with a fair amount of WH staff distracted or disengaged, and confronting a bureaucracy that had less than zero interest in complying with Trump’s command? Not a chance.
This is a big Biden deal. If the White House had managed to drive this through, and especially if they had then managed to salt the executive branch with the same kind of folks who peopled the Iraq occupation, the damage they’ve already done to functional governance would have been made damn near permanent.
Trump and his cabal have still managed to do plenty of damage in the last two and a half months, of course. But thank Dog for the small mercy that they just aren’t good enough to swing the wrecking ball as far and hard as they want.
