This, ladies and gentlemen, is the administrative state. Civil servants are supposed to be apolitical. Their job is to implement the policy of the executive. Due to their apolitical nature, they are shielded by the firing and hiring that occurs with political appointees for each new administration. If they are not going to do their jobs in an apolitical manner and they are not going to work hard to implement the policies of the executive, regardless of who the executive is, they should be treated like political appointees and forfeit the protections of the civil service.

It used to be that we didn’t think of government bureaucracy when we thought of America; the place seemed too dynamic for that. Nobody ever considered trying to create an American Yes Minister, probably because the following is more the typical US bureaucrat than the discreet Sir Humphrey.

That protest was the result of Trump firing thousands of State Department employees, which I have to say is likely the only way this can be dealt with since, as Truss and Stewart show in Britain, and as Roger Douglas understood, bureaucracies cannot reform themselves. Aside from Truss’s “procedures and processes”, plus “Moving somebody on is difficult and requires vast amounts of political capital.”) there are some basic strategies that any bureaucracy can deploy, even in the USA, where they’re not quite as powerful and arrogant as in Britain.

  1. Sabotage
  2. Malicious Compliance
  3. Enlisting the MSM
  4. Outsourcing the #Resistance
  5. State v Federal
  6. Lawfare and Judges
  7. The Whole Enchilada
Sabotage

More than a year ago the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), seeing that their current leader might lose, decided to start prepping for Trump:

In a notice published in the Federal Register, OPM effectively killed the concept of a “Schedule F” employee created by President Trump during his first term’s waning hours. That classification covering policy-related positions would have involuntarily reclassified tens of thousands of civil service employees from essentially tenured positions with significant employment protections to a new category of “at will” employment.

Thus copying the situation in Britain described by former PM Liz Truss, where you can’t fire civil servants even as they screw you and your policies over. The article points out that the OPM took three years of hoop jumping to get to this point, and that it will take Trump that long to unwind it, before he gets around to firing such people.

Even after the election the sabotage continued…

  • Preemptive pardons helped, although they likely were not extensive enough, as Brennan and Comey are about to discover.
  • Authorise Ukraine’s use of long-range U.S. missiles to strike inside Russia, to escalate the conflict and screw Trump’s plans for a negotiated settlement. Same for giving Ukraine anti-personnel landmines, another sudden reversal of Biden’s policy.
  • Simply announcing new rules is enough to screw an incoming Administration

A White House fact sheet dated November 26, 2024, “proposed a new rule that would make weight-loss drugs such as Wegovy or Ozempic free for obese Americans on Medicare or Medicaid”. That’s an extra $35 billion over the next decade, according to the CBO.

  • Back in February an intelligence officer, one Lisa Yates, gives suggestions on how to deal with the new Trump administration, much like the State Department employee at the start of the post, with one problem:
  • Department of Homeland Security DHS “Resistance Leader” details how they’ll fight new DHS head, Kristi Noem.

    Brandon Wright, Platform Services Manager for DHS, was recorded saying that the agency’s career bureaucrats do not allow political appointees to interfere with their operations. He told the undercover reporter, “Kristi Noem? I fucking hate her.”

    He was a GS-14 IT expert (GS-14 = lieutenant colonel level in the Army), but apparently not smart enough to avoid getting caught on undercover video by James O’Keefe (this has been happening a lot, recall Mr Gold Bars Off The Titanic).

Are you not filled with trust for the US Intelligence Agencies staffed with such people?

Malicious Compliance

This is far more subtle in that the bureaucrat agrees to implement the policy – and then does so perfectly. President Clinton, in his ever smart way, pioneered this technique during the first Federal government shutdown in 1995 as he fought with the Gingrich GOP on spending. Obama repeated it in 2013 as he battled with that year’s GOP House majority.

But by 2025 the Blob had learned how to do it themselves (read that whole article):

At California’s Yosemite National Park, the Trump administration fired the only locksmith on staff on Friday. [Nate Vince] was the sole employee with the keys and the institutional knowledge needed to rescue visitors from locked restrooms.

Really? The only locksmith in the whole of Yosemite! Wow. Sounds like shit management to me. Who did these assholes think they were fooling this time? In the winter, Yosemite has 451 people directly employed by the National Park Service, according to government records. In the summer, it has 741.

But they fired only the locksmith.

It turns out that such thinking extends from the National Park Service to the US military.

It wasn’t just the Tuskegee pilots and female pilots:

  • The Department of Defense (DoD) on Monday quietly restored a web page it had removed about Army Maj. Gen. Charles Rogers, a Black man who earned the Medal of Honor for his leadership during the Vietnam War. The removal of the 2021 article on Rogers stoked furious backlash on social media—particularly after critics realized the then-defunct URL had been changed to include “DEI medal.”
  • The US Naval Academy has returned photos and memorabilia of Jewish women graduates after they were “mistakenly removed” from a display to apparently comply with DEI directives

These people were not subtle.

There’s more than a few people in on this, as described by a former military Public Affairs Officer:

Several times recently I started to write a warning to the Pentagon’s new leadership that its biggest foe in communicating their message is the leftwing culture shared by a predominance of military communicators, known as the public affairs force. I didn’t finish until now because few among the department of defense care about public affairs, and the civilian world cares even less. Yet recent events demonstrate a continuing reality that one of the biggest obstacles facing the Pentagon’s new leadership in executing its mission is the entrenched left-wing culture of the military’s public affairs force.

By law, military public affairs (PA) personnel are tasked with keeping the institution honest with the public. Yet many among them are ideological activists intent on undermining efforts to restore the military’s focus on readiness and warfighting and acting as a resistance force against efforts to cleanse military culture of divisive, progressive social dogmas.

I wonder how many Right Wing politicians have any concept of this? It feeds straight into the aligned thinking of today’s MSM, where “Everyone was in a state of ‘confusion’ about Hegseth’s order” said NPR (National Public Radio).

Sure they were, and NPR also rely on taxpayer funding, which leads to…

Enlisting the MSM

Recall Liz Truss’s words…

This status quo is reinforced by a supine media which relies on officialdom for leaks and information. They shield this powerful cabal from public scrutiny with terrible reporting

Supine? They’re active in keeping out enemies of their cabal – like Pete Hegseth:

Pete was overwhelmingly supported by the veterans’ community. We know he is a dirty boots warrior who has the gumption to straighten out the mess that is the DoD, and collectively we have been his greatest voice of support. Who vehemently opposed his nomination?
-The senior generals, the senior admirals and the SESers in the Pentagon.
-The entire defense lobbyist community.
-The entire defense industry.
-The entire Democrat Party.
-Three “Republican” senators who receive massive campaign contributions from the defense industry.

There was actually a funny aspect to the smear job, in that one of the smears had to be pulled fast by one of the most Lefty US sources, ProPublica, as revealed by Hegseth’s lawyer; the reporter, one POS Justin Elliott, had based his questions/accusations on a single email and phone call… with West Point spokespeople:

“I’m reaching out with an urgent request for comment for your client Pete Hegseth. We’re moving quickly so please let me know if you or he would like to comment as soon as possible. Our deadline is in one hour,” the email reads….“Why did Mr. Hegseth say he got in to West Point when that is not true?” Elliott wrote. “How can Mr. Hegseth be Secretary of Defense given that he has made false statements about getting in to the military’s most prestigious academy?” he continued. “Is there anything else we should know?”

Luckily Hegseth had held on to his old written offer of admittance from West Point so the story died instantly. But having realised that they’d been lied to – by two West Point PR people no less – ProPublica just shrugged and dropped the story. They didn’t burn the sources who had lied to them.

Rinse and repeat across the MSM coverage of all the other nominees for Trump’s cabinet.

Outsourcing the

I’ve already covered a chunk of this in the posts, Fighting The Blob – NGO’s and Cut the NGO’s Off At Their Knees, but the swamp is vast and deep:

The Department of Justice is investigating the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, a $27 billion program that was part of Joe Biden’s $740 billion Inflation Reduction Act. Created in the spring of 2023, and managed by the Environmental Protection Agency, the fund was supposed to be a first-of-its-kind program to address the climate crisis while revitalizing communities that it considered “historically left behind.”

But it appears little of the $27 billion revitalized anything—except the coffers of a range of environmental nonprofits associated with former Obama and Biden administration officials.

Heh. The phrase “of course” should be added to this story.

State v Federal

Right up to today, as if the Democrat Party have learned nothing from 1861.

You can’t translate that any other way than that this communist POS (yes, she’s worshipped Cuba for decades) wants ICE agents to be harmed. In the last few days, we’ve had multiple incidents of left-wing “protesters” trying to kill federal immigration authorities. Yet, Bass wants to doxx them for no other reason than to help those assholes hunt them down. There’s no other logical explanation for doing what she’s doing in trying to unmask agents.

Sounds like an insurrection to me – or maybe even secession. Trump should go full Lincoln-Fort Sumter, call in the US Army and lay siege to LA City Hall.

Lawfare and Judges

There was a little of this in Trump’s 1st term, in one case a Federal judge in Hawaii placed an injunction on Trump booting illegal immigrants out of the country. The case eventually lost at SCOTUS level, where they called it an “abuse of discretion”, but by then the Democrats were back in charge of the House and able to stymie Trump in other ways, so it was “Mission Accomplished” on the lawfare front.

With that success it’s not surprising that they’ve tried it again in his 2nd term, but now on a vastly expanded scale.

The Whole Enchilada

The bottom line of all this is captured perfectly by a response to the Lisa Yates sabotage Tweet above:

TBF, back in April the head of the IRS and other IRS officials did quit after the agency struck a deal to share data with federal agents on migrants living illegally in the United States. But why would they object to that? And if that’s their attitude on that subject what were they like on others that the IRS affected?

It’s very difficult to get rid of these Leftist/Democrat ticks who are burrowed under the skin of government, but it can be done:

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth fired Pentagon advisory committee members after another ousted top official accused them of being the source of a series of embarrassing leaks. Former President Obama adviser Susan Rice, who sat on the Defense Policy Board, was among those sacked.

She was very angry about this, claiming that if you aren’t White and Christian, Trump won’t include you in his cabinet – because she’s fucking unhinged.

Having approved the illegally obtained FISA warrants on hundreds of Trump officials that got them wire tapped she should have been fired on January 20, 2025, and this story shows how tough a job it’s going to be winkle out of government all these fanatical “public servants”.

As an example of not being able to kill the beast, the following discussion about destroying USAID contained this warning – direct from the British experience:

At the same time, we should be rejoicing and cheering it on but can’t make the mistake that the Brexit movement did in June 2016 when everyone popped the champagne at the moment of the referendum, but Brexit, in fact, was thwarted, in terms of Brexit in practice, by all the layers of subsequent pushback and resistance that effectively 180’d the whole reason for Brexiting in the first place, and today the UK is run by the UK Labour Party, which is the most tyrannical government perhaps in the entire world right now. It’s arresting people for clicking the retweet button. The same thing could very well happen with the current reform of USAID if stewardship of it is not aggressive to the hilt, to the very, very end of this.

The same thing could happen to all of these reforms.