POLITICO
(“Ramaswamy’s future at DOGE is in doubt as he prepares to announce bid for Ohio governor“):
Vivek Ramaswamy could withdraw from working with the Department of Government Efficiency ahead of his bid for Ohio governor, which he intends to formally announce by the last week in January, according to a person close to the matter.
Ramaswamy’s potential exit could upend DOGE, which aims to reduce government spending by up to $2 trillion by July 4, 2026 — by which time his Ohio gubernatorial campaign will need to be well underway. Following the election, Ramaswamy informed members of the transition that he planned to run for governor, said a person familiar with the transition.
Ramaswamy’s decision accelerated when Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine passed over Ramaswamy to replace Vice President-elect JD Vance in the Senate on Friday, picking instead his own Lt. Gov. Jon Husted.
Multiple people who discussed Ramaswamy and the inner workings of DOGE were granted anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly and to freely discuss sensitive issues.
On Saturday, Ramaswamy showed up at an all-hands DOGE meeting at the SpaceX headquarters in Washington, according to two people familiar with the department’s inner workings. Musk was not present.
The breakdown of labor between Musk and Ramaswamy, according to one person familiar, was that Musk focused on the big picture while Ramaswamy focused on deregulation; the rest of the staff will focus on implementation. Steve Davis, Musk’s right hand man at SpaceX, functions as his DOGE lieutenant, while Brad Smith, a healthcare entrepreneur and Rhodes Scholar, is Ramaswamy’s main point of contact.
Privately, some in Trump’s world see Ramaswamy’s nascent gubernatorial campaign as a way to clear a path for Musk to do his own work at the agency without him.
“Elon basically runs the show,” said an informal adviser to Trump. This person added, “Time is their biggest enemy. We’ll see.”
A CBS News
report (“Vivek Ramaswamy expected to depart DOGE“) adds a twist:
People close to Musk have privately undercut Ramaswamy for weeks, frustrated with his lack of participation in the heavy lifting, according to sources familiar with the internal dynamics. There has been friction between the incoming rank and file DOGE staff and Ramaswamy, the sources said, and Ramaswamy has been subtly encouraged to exit.
“Vivek has worn out his welcome,” one person close to Trump said.
Ramaswamy recently met with the Ohio’s sitting governor, Mike DeWine, about the state’s Senate seat left vacant by Vice President-elect JD Vance. But on Friday, DeWine announced
he is appointing his lieutenant governor to the post.
Ramaswamy, who sought the GOP nomination in 2024, was at Mar-a-Lago, the president’s West Palm Beach, Florida, estate during the transition. Sources said he was spotted at the bar with Musk one day, scratching out plans for DOGE on a napkin. But the pair haven’t worked closely for a while, sources said.
I didn’t know Ramaswamy existed until his bizarre run for the Republican Presidential nomination last cycle. He made a ton of money speculating in the biotech and social media spaces and apparently doesn’t think he needs to know anything about governing before doing it. It’s not at all shocking that he’s an ideas guy rather than someone who’s going to do the hard work of actually combing through budgets and setting priorities.
Joe Biden will cease being President in less than two hours, but he issued this
before heading over to his successor’s inauguration:
Our nation relies on dedicated, selfless public servants every day. They are the lifeblood of our democracy.
Yet alarmingly, public servants have been subjected to ongoing threats and intimidation for faithfully discharging their duties.
In certain cases, some have even been threatened with criminal prosecutions, including General Mark A. Milley, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, and the members and staff of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol. These public servants have served our nation with honor and distinction and do not deserve to be the targets of unjustified and politically motivated prosecutions.
General Milley served our nation for more than 40 years, serving in multiple command and leadership posts and deploying to some of the most dangerous parts of the world to protect and defend democracy. As Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he guided our Armed Forces through complex global security threats and strengthened our existing alliances while forging new ones.
For more than half a century, Dr. Fauci served our country. He saved countless lives by managing the government’s response to pressing health crises, including HIV/AIDS, as well as the Ebola and Zika viruses. During his tenure as my Chief Medical Advisor, he helped the country tackle a once-in-a-century pandemic. The United States is safer and healthier because of him.
On January 6, 2021, American democracy was tested when a mob of insurrectionists attacked the Capitol in an attempt to overturn a fair and free election by force and violence. In light of the significance of that day, Congress established the bipartisan Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol to investigate and report upon the facts, circumstances, and causes of the insurrection. The Select Committee fulfilled this mission with integrity and a commitment to discovering the truth. Rather than accept accountability, those who perpetrated the January 6th attack have taken every opportunity to undermine and intimidate those who participated in the Select Committee in an attempt to rewrite history, erase the stain of January 6th for partisan gain, and seek revenge, including by threatening criminal prosecutions.
I believe in the rule of law, and I am optimistic that the strength of our legal institutions will ultimately prevail over politics. But these are exceptional circumstances, and I cannot in good conscience do nothing. Baseless and politically motivated investigations wreak havoc on the lives, safety, and financial security of targeted individuals and their families. Even when individuals have done nothing wrong—and in fact have done the right thing—and will ultimately be exonerated, the mere fact of being investigated or prosecuted can irreparably damage reputations and finances.
That is why I am exercising my authority under the Constitution to pardon General Mark A. Milley, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the Members of Congress and staff who served on the Select Committee, and the U.S. Capitol and D.C. Metropolitan police officers who testified before the Select Committee. The issuance of these pardons should not be mistaken as an acknowledgment that any individual engaged in any wrongdoing, nor should acceptance be misconstrued as an admission of guilt for any offense. Our nation owes these public servants a debt of gratitude for their tireless commitment to our country.
It’s not clear what it is they’re being pardoned for, since they have been charged with no crimes. Is this a blanket pardon for anything they might have done, ever, as was the case with the pardon of his wayward son, Hunter?
While unprecedented and unseemly, it is, alas, almost certainly the right thing to do. The incoming President has vowed revenge on these people and, as Biden implies, simply having to defend oneself against scurrilous charges can be ruinous. We live in strange times, indeed.
WaPo
(“Scores of career State Dept. diplomats resign before Trump’s inauguration“):
Scores of senior career diplomats are resigning from the State Department effective at noon on Monday after receiving instructions to do so from President-elect Donald Trump’s aides, three U.S. officials familiar with the matter said.
The forced departures, aimed at establishing a decisive break from the Biden administration, will result in an exodus of decorated veterans of the Foreign Service, including John Bass, the undersecretary for management and acting undersecretary for political affairs, and Geoff Pyatt, the assistant secretary for energy resources, said the officials, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss personnel decisions ahead of Monday’s inauguration.
Requesting the resignations, the prerogative of any incoming administration, indicates a desire to quickly shift the tone and makeup of the State Department as Trump seeks to upend the global diplomatic chessboard after four years of President Joe Biden. Key priorities for Trump include imposing sweeping tariffs
on allies and adversaries, ending the war in Ukraine
, solidifying the wobbly ceasefire
between Israel and Hamas
and deporting millions
of undocumented immigrants.
“It is entirely appropriate for the transition to seek officials who share President Trump’s vision for putting our nation and America’s working men and women first. We have a lot of failures to fix, and that requires a committed team focused on the same goals,” said a spokesperson for the transition team.
I’m a bit befuddled that the incoming administration even had to ask. It’s customary for all people in presidentially-appointed posts to offer their resignation at the start of a new presidential term. People with “Secretary” in their title certainly fill the bill.
What’s unclear is whether they have simply resigned their Plum Book posts and are going to be reassigned to non-appointed positions in the Senior Foreign Service or they are leaving government entirely. If they were coerced into the latter, it would be highly problematic. Career officials are entitled to Civil Service protections.
What is more unusual is this:
Some incoming presidents choose to keep a larger stable of career diplomats in senior roles until handpicked political appointees receive Senate confirmation. Instead, Trump has authorized the selection of more than 20 “senior bureau officials” to take over various divisions where leadership posts are being vacated this week. A number of those officials served in key roles in the State Department and the National Security Council during Trump’s first term, and some have been pulled out of retirement, officials familiar with the matter said.
That’s too murky to assess. Presidents are allowed to appoint people at the Deputy Assistant Secretary level and below without Senate confirmation and those people are allowed to serve in an Acting capacity in higher roles. But the highest roles are required to be filled by either Senate-confirmed personnel or career civil servants.
Trump campaigned on dismantling what he has called the “deep state” of federal bureaucrats whom he views as lacking loyalty and undermining his agenda. He has pledged to kill workforce protections for thousands of government employees in a move expected to face significant legal challenges.
As I’ve told our students in my introductory lecture on the US National Security decisionmaking process the last several years, what some call “the deep state” others call “national security professionals.”
Trump has the right to try to get the apparatus of state to bend to his policy will even if it offends their professional sensibilities. He’s the elected President and Chief Diplomat. But he’ll need Congress to go along to remove Civil Service protections. And President Biden has agreed to all manner of other protections for those in collective bargaining positions. Those will be very hard, if not impossible, to untangle.
His pick for secretary of state, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida), said the State Department needs to prioritize Trump’s “America First” agenda, and he vowed to make the department “relevant again.”
“What has happened over the last 20 years under multiple administrations is the influence of the State Department has declined,” Rubio said at his confirmation hearing
last week. “We have to be at that table when decisions are being made, and the State Department has to be a source of creative ideas and effective implementation.”
That’s really a wholly separate issue. When Congress created the National Security Council in 1947, President Truman thought it was an unconstitutional encroachment on his authority and largely shunted it aside, preferring to make foreign policy exclusively in conjunction with the Secretary of State.
The Korean War and the permanent national security posture of the Cold War changed that, greatly increasing the role of the Secretary of Defense, Director of Central Intelligence/Director of National Intelligence and, eventually, National Security Advisor and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. But, certainly, a President who wanted to rely more on the State Department has the ability to do so.
One senior official who was asked to resign said he was willing to serve longer to help bridge the gap but underscored that this is Trump’s call to make. “We should all wish the new team success,” the official said.
A second diplomat who was asked to resign said the Trump team handled the matter professionally and made clear the request wasn’t personal.
“They want to have people in place whom they’ve worked with before who are known quantities,” the official said.
That actually gives me some hope. It sounds like the matter was handled much more professionally than much of the first term would have led me to expect.
One such official is Lisa Kenna, who heads the State Department’s intelligence arm called the Bureau of Intelligence and Research. Kenna worked as the executive secretary for then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. She is expected to reprise that role and serve also as acting undersecretary for political affairs. The latter job is one of the most challenging in the building, overseeing regional bureaus from Asia to Latin America to Africa to Europe. “They’re both full-time jobs,” one official said.
Kenna is a career State Department employee
with the rank of Minister Counselor. Interestingly, she was appointed as Ambassador to Peru in May 2020, confirmed by the Senate in November of that year, and served in that role through September 2023—entirely during the Biden presidency—before returning to State in her current capacity.
But this is somewhat concerning:
Last week, Trump’s aides asked three senior career diplomats who oversee the department’s workforce and internal coordination to resign in a move reported by Reuters
. The career officials were Dereck Hogan, Marcia Bernicat and Alaina Teplitz.
The top diplomat for East Asia, Dan Kritenbrink, served his last day as assistant secretary on Friday and will retire Jan. 31. Kritenbrink, like Bass, Pyatt and other career officials, served in influential positions under both Democratic and Republican administrations.
Another career diplomat said the forced resignations are occurring “a little quicker” than in previous administrations but that it is common for a new administration to eventually pick new career diplomats for Senate-confirmed positions like those held by Bass and Pyatt. Other officials expressed frustration that the request to resign, on the Friday before the inauguration, came with little warning and that they have no indication whether they may apply for other jobs within the department.
The Senior Foreign Service—and, indeed, the Foreign Service, period—is a different animal than the Defense Department and I have considerably less expertise in its precise function. It would be unconscionable, indeed, if career SFS officials were simply kicked out of government because they happened to be appointed to senior posts by the outgoing administration.
Note that Kenna, who was not only confirmed to the ambassadorship after Trump’s election loss but served as Pompeo’s right hand was not only retained in the ambassadorship—an appointed post—but then assigned to another senior State post afterward. We don’t punish career officials for being seconded to posts that serve a presidential administration.
It’s unclear how far the Trump administration will go in rooting out perceived enemies at Foggy Bottom, which Trump often calls the “Deep State Department.”
The chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Rep. Brian Mast (R-Florida), has told reporters that pushing back against “woke” bureaucrats should be a priority.
Anyone “nefariously supporting a radical agenda … should be aware that we’ll be looking for them,” he said last week, “and we will be looking for creating authorities to make sure that their existence doesn’t continue in the State Department.”
That, of course, is a red flag. Presidents, and to a lesser extent oversight committee chairmen, have a right to insist that career officials carry out their policy aims. They do not have a right to fire those with policy preferences with which they disagree.
Jack Goldmith
, a former senior official in the George W. Bush Justice Department and currently the Learned Hand Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, is the conservative legal scholar I pay the most attention to. His takes are sober and well-reasoned. He has an op-ed in today’s NYT that editors headlined “Can Trump Be a Great President?” But’s only tangentially about that.
He begins with a completely uncontroversial premise:
Donald Trump enters his second presidency, as he did his first, pledging to wield executive power in novel and aggressive ways. This is neither new nor necessarily bad. “Presidents who go down in the history books as ‘great’ are those who reach for power, who assert their authority to the limit,” the presidential scholar Richard Pious noted
.
Goldsmith will flesh this point out later but he’s certainly right. All four of the Mount Rushmore presidents exercised power in ways that sparked controversy, if not outrage.
But pushing power to the limit does not guarantee presidential success, much less greatness, as Mr. Trump is about to discover.
One might think someone who served a full term as President, lost, and has had four years to reflect before getting a second term would have already had this discovery. But we’re talking about Trump here, a man not known for self-reflection.
Mr. Trump ran thrice and won twice on increasingly fervent claims that establishment institutions and practices were damaged, and on pledges to upend the way Washington does business. When he is inaugurated as president on Monday, he will have a second shot at fixing the institutions, policies and ideas that he has criticized: immigration, the “deep state,” wokeness, suppression of speech, government inefficiency, free trade, crime and education.
I don’t agree with many of Trump’s stated goals but he certainly has a right to pursue them, within limits. And Goldsmith argues those limits are broader than critics seem to think:
Some critics claim that Mr. Trump will be acting illegitimately in seeking to reimagine the nature and operations of the federal government, as if the way things have run traditionally, or during the post-Watergate period, are invariably good or set in stone. They are not.
Eminent presidents acting in new circumstances have since the founding taken a sledgehammer to the norms and constitutional principles thought to govern the executive branch and its relationship to other American institutions.
George Washington acted before there were executive branch precedents. But he unleashed controversy when he asserted an independent power to interpret the Constitution, unilaterally proclaimed America’s neutrality in the early wars of the French Revolution and denied the House of Representatives documents related to the Jay Treaty. Washington was widely accused of monarchical tendencies in his day.
As were his most distinguished successors. Thomas Jefferson changed the presidency to be openly (and effectively) partisan and agreed to the Louisiana Purchase even though he believed it was unconstitutional. Andrew Jackson deepened the spoils system and transformed the veto power. Abraham Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus, among his many constitutional violations.
Theodore Roosevelt converted the presidency to a “bully pulpit” and acted on the theory that the president can do anything not specifically restricted by the Constitution or Congress. Franklin Roosevelt intensified the president’s direct connection to Americans, broke the two-term norm and expanded the federal government and presidential prerogative in unprecedented ways.
In short, the rules governing the presidency have never been static. The Constitution created an independent office with vaguely specified powers and few overt constraints. The office evolved into an immensely powerful institution over the centuries because domestic and international society grew more complex, energetic presidents asserted new authorities to meet new challenges, and Congress and the American people — with occasional exceptions — acquiesced in the new arrangements.
It’s hard to put myself into history, in that my attitudes and instincts were developed in relation to the time and circumstances I was in. And someone born in my circumstances in those eras almost certainly wouldn’t have become an officer and a professor. But I may well have thought all of those actions illegitimate at the time.
So, how have we come to view these actions as proper uses of Presidential power and, indeed, redefined the Presidency itself because of that? I think it’s because we’ve come to see the purposes to which that power was used—safeguarding the Republic, expanding its power, greater prosperity for the common citizen–as justifying bulldozing dated institutions and norms. (And FDR is a better example than Jackson in that regard, as the spoils system and other manifestations of his power have not held up well.)
While I didn’t like President Obama and President Biden’s use of executive orders to pursue policies they couldn’t get through Congress, I didn’t see them outrageous in nearly the same way I did many of Trump’s first term abuses. Partly, it was about style, in that they displayed more normal temperaments and regard for procedural and institutional norms. Mostly, though, it was that Trump seemed much more motivated by personal gain, rewarding allies, and punishing enemies than about advancing his policy goals.
Goldsmith is coy but seems to agree:
There is nothing illegitimate in this pattern. Bold presidential leadership has always been needed to make American democracy overcome the “perennial gap between inherited institutions and beliefs and an environment forever in motion,” as the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. put it
.
The most successful presidents anticipated problems others did not see, understood the inadequacies of inherited institutions and prodded the nation to a new place in ways that defied prevailing practices and provoked enormous resistance. Think of Jackson and democracy, Lincoln and freedom, Franklin Roosevelt and equality.
“Owning the libs” just doesn’t have the same resonance.
But the heroic presidency runs the persistent danger of becoming craven or abusive, as Vietnam and Watergate taught. This is what so many critics worry about with Mr. Trump — that his transformations will be more resonate of Richard Nixon than of our most esteemed presidents.
At least Nixon did that thing only he could do, radically changing the Cold War balance of power in our favor. But both he and Trump tried to subvert democracy, Nixon by sending burglars into the Democratic headquarters to steal an election he was going to win in a landslide and Trump by trying to overturn an election he clearly lost, including by inciting an angry mob to disrupt the certification of the Electoral College vote. I don’t see how he can undo that in his second term.
Goldsmith skips past the elephant in the room, shifting gears completely:
But it takes extraordinary skill to wield executive power successfully throughout an administration. If past is prologue, Mr. Trump lacks the acumen to carry out his ambitious agenda.
The first problem is management style. In his first term, Mr. Trump was a poor administrator because of his mercurial, polarizing style and a general indifference to facts and the hard work of governance. There is no reason to think this will change in his second term. Mr. Trump also lacks the emotional intelligence that the great presidents had in various degrees — the self-awareness, self-control, empathy and ability to manage relationships that are so vital to steering the ship of state on the desired course.
Second is the question of whether Mr. Trump knows where he wants to go. “Great presidents possess, or are possessed by, a vision of an ideal America,” Mr. Schlesinger noted
. Mr. Trump has a powerful slogan, “America first,” a robust agenda, and many discrete and often insightful political instincts. But he lacks a coherent sense of the public ends for which he exercises power. This will make it hard over time for his administration to prioritize challenges, a vital prerequisite for presidential success. It will also make his administration susceptible to drift and reactiveness, especially once unexpected events start to crowd the presidential agenda.
With the exception of deporting illegal Latino immigrants, there has been no steady policy goal. Trump has no “public ends” in mind.
Third, personal gain was neither a priority of the great presidents nor a guide to their exercise of power. There is every reason to believe that Mr. Trump’s personally motivated first-term actions — his insistence on loyalty over other values, his preoccupation with proclaiming and securing his personal power, and his indifference to conflict-of-interest norms — will persist. These inclinations will invariably infect the credibility, and thus the success, of everything his administration does.
One would think.
Fourth, Mr. Trump is unlike any previous president, even Jackson, in broadly delegitimating American institutions — the courts, the military and intelligence communities, the Justice Department, the press, the electoral system and both political parties. This will do him no favors when he needs their support, as he will.
His appointees to the courts have helped delegitimate that institution, unfortunately. Even if they rule in his favor using sound reasoning, critics will assume that the fix is in.
Mr. Trump is especially focused on eroding the capacity
of federal agencies. At the same time, he has plans to regulate in areas including health, crime, energy and education, and to deport millions of people, all of which require a robust and supportive federal work force. Mr. Trump’s twin aims of incapacitating the bureaucracy and wielding it to serve his ends will very often conflict.
This will be the subject of several subsequent posts. He seems hell-bent on returning to Jackson’s spoils system, at least in some agencies. But this will require replacing competent people who slow walk his policy goals with sycophants who don’t understand how to navigate an intentionally complicated system.
Fifth, Mr. Trump’s obsession with hard executive power and an extreme version of the unitary executive theory will be self-defeating. If his stalwart subordinates carry out his every whim, as he hopes, bad policies will result. If the loyalists Mr. Trump is putting at the top of the Justice Department do not give him candid independent advice that he follows, he will violate the law and often lose in court, as happened
in his first term.
Trump, like the octogenarian owner of my favorite professional football thing, somehow thinks he’s smarter than all the professionals despite mountains of evidence to the contrary. Professionals with long-honed instincts telling him that his ideas are unworkable will be viewed as disloyal, not helpful.
The great presidents used coercive unilateral power when they needed to, but only when they needed to — none more so than Lincoln and Roosevelt, who faced the most serious crises in American history. But these presidents also understood that hard power could go only so far and that persuasion and consent were surer tools to achieving lasting presidential goals in our democracy. This idea is lost on Mr. Trump.
Despite his manifold faults, Trump is a dynamic personality. He has an instinct for showmanship and can work a crowd. But he has not managed to significantly expand his base of support despite eight plus years as the leader of his party. In his mind, those who disagree with him are disloyal, so coercion, not persuasion, is required.
Finally, as Mr. Schlesinger noted
, the great presidents all “took risks in pursuit of their ideals” and “provoked intense controversy.” And, except for Washington, they all “divided the nation before reuniting it on a new level of national understanding.”
Mr. Trump is a risk taker and a divider. But it is hard to see how his approach to the presidency ends in national reunion.
This is, to put it mildly, an understatement.
Reportedly, today’s inaugural address is reportedly
going to aim in that direction, taking a more uniting tack than the “American carnage” rhetoric of the first. But we heard that after the assassination attempt, too, and he soon became more mean-spirited than ever.
I recognize that there is some disagreement about the preemptive pardons amidst the readership of the site, but let me join in the chorus of concern over cleaving to norms rather than addressing reality.
I give you the 46th and 47th presidents:
“Welcome home!” President Biden says to Donald Trump as he arrives at the White House pic.twitter.com/LscmofqTB6
I understand, to a point, the degree to which a man of Biden’s age and temperament felt the need to not be an asshole (please excuse the technical language) towards the incoming president. But this bit of norm-indulgence was not necessary and sent a terrible signal to the broader population.
I am not at all convinced that having Trump over for tea was necessary, let along appropriate. I am certain, however, that greeting him with a friendly “welcome home” was an absurd thing to do given that Biden, and then Harris, campaigned against Trump on the predicate that he represented a threat to democracy.
Treating him as normal only makes it seem (or, perhaps even confirms) that all of that was just campaign rhetoric.
I get that Biden has to legally and constitutionally afford Trump legal access to the various levers of power within the executive branch. However, treating him as utterly normal was not only not needed, but undercuts his own campaign in 2020, the alleged goals of his administration, and Harris’ 2024 campaign against Trump.
And one didn’t have to catch much of Trump’s various utterances yesterday to note that he is in no way extending the outgoing administration any niceties nor fake politeness.
Part of what concerns me about the Biden pardons is that they do not uphold, in my view, his own stated fealty to democracy, justice, and the rule of law. His treatment of Trump has likewise undercut those positions.
And, of course, this is the least of the concerns raised by yesterday.
As promised, President Trump signed several Executive Orders on his first day in office aimed at, depending on who you believe, eroding the power of The Deep State, making government employment sufficiently miserable that hordes quit, or some combination of those things. Most notable among these are orders seeking to curtail Civil Service protections for those deemed to be in “policy-connected” positions; ending telework; and a hiring freeze.
WaPo
(“Trump reinstates plan to strip protections from federal workers“):
President Donald Trump on Monday reinstated a policy to strip employment protections from tens of thousands of federal workers, potentially allowing his administration to reshape agencies by stocking them with political loyalists.
The executive order was one of multiple first-day Trump directives aimed at overhauling the federal workforce of 2.3 million — including a hiring freeze, a strict return-to-office mandate, an update of hiring rules and changes designed to bring more accountability to career senior executives, in part by making them easier to dismiss.
The White House described the order stripping employment protections from agency employees as necessary to rein in what Trump and his allies have called a “deep state” of bureaucrats who resisted his plans during his first term.
“There have been numerous and well-documented cases of career Federal employees resisting and undermining the policies and directives of their executive leadership,” reads the order, signed by Trump around 9 p.m. on Monday. “Principles of good administration, therefore, necessitate action to restore accountability to the career civil service.”
Critics, though, have said the policy will upend the foundation of the modern civil service, where staffers are supposed to be hired based on merit and cannot be arbitrarily fired. Those in the new job category will have limited due process rights to appeal dismissals by the Trump administration.
“President Trump’s order is a blatant attempt to corrupt the federal government by eliminating employees’ due process rights so they can be fired for political reasons,” Everett Kelley, national president of the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents 750,000 civil servants, said in a statement. “This unprecedented assertion of executive power will create an army of sycophants beholden only to Donald Trump, not the Constitution or the American people.”
Which, of course, is a feature, not a bug, from Trump’s standpoint.
NPR
(“Trump seeks to end telework for federal workers“):
President Trump has signed an executive action directing federal agencies to order their workers back to the office full time.
“Heads of all departments and agencies in the executive branch of Government shall, as soon as practicable, take all necessary steps to terminate remote work arrangements and require employees to return to work in-person at their respective duty stations on a full-time basis, provided that the department and agency heads shall make exemptions they deem necessary,” the executive memo states
.
Having more federal employees work from the office has long been a focus of Republicans.
“Service backlogs and delays, unanswered phone calls and emails, and no-show appointments are harming the health, lives, and aspirations of Americans,” Iowa Senator Joni Ernst wrote in a report released late last year.
[…]
Many flexible work arrangements predate the pandemic, though the federal government, like many offices, greatly expanded telework during COVID.
A number of agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency and the Social Security Administration, agreed to long-term telework arrangements in their collective bargaining agreements.
The American Federation of Government Employees, which represents 800,000 federal and D.C. government employees, says it expects those agreements to be honored, given the Trump memo states that the directive “shall be implemented consistent with applicable law.”
Still, in a statement, AFGE president Everett Kelley called the directive a “backward action” and asked the Trump administration to rethink its approach.
“Providing eligible employees with the opportunity to work hybrid schedules is a key tool for recruiting and retaining workers in both the public and private sectors. Restricting the use of hybrid work arrangements will make it harder for federal agencies to compete for top talent,” he wrote in a statement.
He also warned that given the success federal agencies have had consolidating unused office space and selling off properties that were costly to maintain, there may no longer be enough office space to accommodate an influx of on-site workers.
In an opinion piece
in the Wall Street Journal last fall, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, whom Trump appointed to lead his Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, suggested that requiring federal employees to return to the office five days a week “would result in a wave of voluntary terminations that we welcome.”
“If federal employees don’t want to show up, American taxpayers shouldn’t pay them for the Covid-era privilege of staying home,” they wrote.
Government Executive
(“Trump will require agency plans to slash workforce as he lays out hiring freeze details“):
Federal agencies must develop plans to reduce the size of their workforces through efficiencies and attrition, President Trump announced on Monday, spelling out in a memorandum that they must roll out those proposals before lifting the hiring freeze he has put into place.
Trump froze federal hiring
on Monday in a presidential memorandum, following the practice he established when he took office in 2017. The federal workforce reduction plans also mirror those he required in order to lift the hiring moratorium he instituted in his first term. Most agencies in that instance never wound up producing definitive plans to slash their workforces and the White House later denied it ever asked for the blueprints for cuts
.
Trump’s latest hiring freeze is set to last 90 days, with the exception of the Internal Revenue Service where it will remain in effect until the Treasury Department and other officials agree it is “in the national interest” to lift it. Trump made clear that contracting out to circumvent the freeze was prohibited.
“In carrying out this memorandum, the heads of executive departments and agencies shall seek efficient use of existing personnel and funds to improve public services and the delivery of these services,” Trump wrote.
As expected, the freeze will not apply to the military or positions related to immigration enforcement, national security or public safety. The freeze will otherwise take effect regardless of the source of an agency’s funding stream. Political appointments under Schedule C the non-career Senior Executive Service will continue. The Office of Personnel Management on Monday issued new guidance
allowing for an unlimited number of appointees that Trump can temporarily deploy into agencies as his administration gets up and running, overriding more limited guidance the Biden administration had put forward
.
These orders were all foreshadowed in the campaign and will doubtless make a lot of people happy. Government employees are widely perceived to be lazy and overpaid.
There is already a suit filed to stop Schedule F
and I expect others to follow. But, even if they’re rolled back substantially by the courts, they’ll achieve some of their desired effects. First and foremost, Trump gets the performance impact of having carried out his promises here. Second, they will almost certainly cause some of the most marketable career employees to leave government service for a more hospitable environment. The telework prohibition alone will be devastating, as many people took their jobs precisely because it offered that flexibility, which enables juggling two-earner households with children whose school schedules don’t align with a standard workday. Third, and perhaps most problematic of all, those who stay will be fearful of getting crossways with the new administration.
University of Michigan professor of public policy Don Moynihan
observes,
This was better organized than before. Trump had his orders ready. Acting officials (usually career employees) were in key positions, and some of those officials had pre-drafted memos on hand. The reflects the fingerprints of the secret 180 Day Playbook
aspect of Project 2025, led by Russ Vought.
Which is odd, in that we were constantly told that Trump had no connection to Project 2025 and, indeed, had never heard of it.
As to the hiring freeze, it’s worse than the media reports. Moynihan:
A new OPM memo
also requires the creation of lists of federal employees still on their probationary period (usually 1 year) to be reported to OPM by January 24. This is because those officials do not have full civil service protections. The implication is that agencies will have to justify retaining those employees, or they will be fired. This is bad HR policy. The federal government has a bigger hiring than firing problem, and targeting the newest and youngest hires in an aging workforce is a terrible idea
, unless the goal is simply to cut people. Which it is.
The hiring freeze may indicate a policy of cost-cutting for civil servants, but in other ways efficiency is clearly not a concern. The same OPM memo encourages agencies to use paid leave to remove employees they want to get out of the way or fire in the future.
There’s also this:
For political appointees, there is no limit on hiring. Another new OPM memo
removes the traditional cap on Schedule C appointees for 240 days. As a reminder, the US government has about 4,000 political appointee positions, about 1,300 of whom are Senate-confirmed. This change could see the number of non-Senate confirmed appointees increase significantly. It fits with the broader pattern of politicization.
The same memo also created a back-door path for Senate-confirmed appointees to join the agency in an “advisory or consultative capacity.”
[…]
This effectively diminishes advise and consent power of the Senate. It puts nominees in de facto acting capacity from Day 1 of the administration, even if they cannot formally occupy the position they are nominated for. It is also a response to the Senate doing a woeful job
in confirming less visible appointees in a timely fashion, or simply putting holds on appointees for reasons completely unrelated to the candidate. While this is an executive branch aggrandizement, the Senate asked for it by its incompetence and pettiness when it comes to the conformation process.
As to the telework order:
As I’ve noted before
, I think this is a dumb, politics-of-resentment type of policy that Musk and Ramaswamy implied was there mainly to encourage people to quit. The federal government does not use telework at a different rate from the private sector, but it is now being told to give up on a tool that can help it hire and retain employees.
The process does allow for exemptions, and contracts with employees may make it difficult to extend this immediately or quickly, but the intent is clear. Trump also seeks to undermine collective bargaining rights, in a sprawling executive order
that undid many Biden initiatives, including on DEI.
Moynihan has quite a bit more, including an analysis of the backdoor method by which Trump has created “DOGE” by placing it inside the little-known US Digital Service.
We’ve written a lot about Presidential pardons the last 24 hours. President Biden issued a flurry of them on his last day, including of his immediate family members. And, as POLITICO
notes (“Biden said his pardon of family was meant to shield them from Trump. That’s not the full story.”), the pretext was dubious.
Joe Biden cast his last-minute pardons of family members merely as an effort to shield them from the retribution of Donald Trump.
In reality, his brother, serial entrepreneur Jim Biden, had already come under scrutiny from investigators in Biden’s own Justice Department.
In addition to calls from Republicans in Congress to prosecute him
for allegedly lying to congressional impeachment investigators, Jim Biden’s activities have been investigated in recent years in two federal criminal probes, as POLITICO previously reported
. Jim Biden, 75, has not been accused of criminal wrongdoing in those cases.
Both investigations deal with a now-bankrupt hospital operator
, Americore, that Jim Biden worked with in the years between his older brother’s vice presidency and presidency.
It is not clear where existing DOJ probes might have led before Monday’s pardons. Joe Biden’s 11th-hour issuance of a blanket pardon protects his brother not only from Trump’s revenge, but also from ordinary inquiries into his business activities.
In one case, the Justice Department has for years been investigating schemes to defraud Medicare and other government health care programs that occurred in part at an Americore hospital in Pennsylvania.
In a recording of a 2023 conversation reviewed by POLITICO
, one of Jim Biden’s associates, Mississippi health care executive Keaton Langston, said he misled Justice Department investigators when he was questioned about some of Jim Biden’s contacts with Americore.
Langston, then facing prosecution, said on the recording that he could have improved his own negotiating position with the government “If I’d have just told the truth about Jimmy Biden,” but did not explain how.
While this is hardly the most egregious abuse of the pardon power in American history up to that point, it’s highly problematic. I fully understand the instinct to protect one’s family from an incoming President who has promised to exact vengeance on his enemies but letting one under investigation by his own DOJ off the hook stinks to high heaven.
And, yes, it gives Trump cover.
WaPo
(“Biden started the day with pardons. Trump finished with many more.”):
When outgoing president Joe Biden issued preemptive pardons earlyMonday to an array of people who he said “do not deserve to be the targets of unjustified and politically motivated prosecutions,” he broke new ground in the depth and breadth of the pardon power, legal scholars said. He also opened up an avenue for future presidents — including his immediate successor — to do the same.
Just hours before Donald Trump’s inauguration, Biden pardoned retired Gen. Mark A. Milley, Anthony S. Fauci, members and staff of the Jan. 6
congressional committee, police officers who testified before that panel, and several members of his family. Together, the moves marked the first time a president has pardoned people neither charged with nor suspected by law enforcement authorities of wrongdoing.
Biden’s announcements Monday “are a valid exercise of pardon power. But that doesn’t answer whether they are a wise use of that power,” said Mark Osler, a law professor at the University of St. Thomas School of Law and an expert on clemency. “You can see the incoming administration will see this as an invitation to do the same.”
Trump did not need the invitation.
Later Monday, Trump issued a blanket pardon for virtually all of the Jan. 6, 2021,
Capitol riot defendants and commuted the sentences of the remaining 14 — a broad move that gives some form of clemency to all those charged or convicted in the violent attack.Taken together, “they reflect a wholesale rethinking of what pardoning means,” said Osler.
“Clemency is the soul of the Constitution, and it’s been used to show our highest principles of national reconciliation and mercy,” said Osler. “To see it used for political purposes and as a chess game does sully that history.”
On the one hand, I hold Biden, who campaigned in 2020 on restoring our norms and in 2024 on protecting democracy and the rule of law, to a higher standard than Trump, who has spent the last decade demonstrating that he cares not a whit about rules and norms. His feckless use of the pardon power absolutely gave Trump supports ammunition.
But, come on. Do we really believe that Trump had these orders prepared but was waiting to see if Biden would pardon Fauci, Milley, Cheny, and “the Biden Crime Family” before acting? That he wasn’t going to do this, anyway? It’s absurd. Of course he was.
To the extent Biden’s transgressions set precedent, it’s for the next normal President. Assuming we ever get one again.
And, so far as we know, the personally-connected* folks Biden pardoned committed no crimes. Except for Hunter Biden and Jim Biden, none have not even been accused of any crimes. Trump pardoned over a thousand people convicted of crimes, including some serving very long sentences for violent felonies. These are not equivalent transgressions.
*Biden did, of course, pardon and commute the sentences of various death row inmates, drug offenders, and cop killer Leonard Peltier. But, so far as I know, those were in the ordinary course of clemency processes, not to the benefit of Biden or his political allies.
Fox News
(“Coast Guard Commandant terminated over border lapses, recruitment, DEI focus: official“):
The Commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard has been terminated over concerns about the border, recruitment and an “erosion of trust,” a senior DHS official confirmed to Fox News.
Adm. Linda Lee Fagan, 61, has been terminated by the Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Benjamine Huffman, the official said.
Fagan has demonstrated leadership deficiencies, operational failures and an inability to advance the strategic objectives of the Coast Guard.
These include the failure to address border security threats, insufficient leadership in recruitment and retention, mismanagement in acquiring key acquisitions such as icebreakers and helicopters, excessive focus on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and an “erosion of trust” over the mishandling and cover-up of Operation Fouled Anchor, which was the Coast Guard’s internal investigation into sexual assault cases at the Coast Guard Academy.
Fagan also made DEI policies a priority, including at the Coast Guard Academy, which diverted resources and focus from operational essentials.
In Operation Fouled Anchor, the cover-up of sexual assaults at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy “deeply eroded trust” in the Coast Guard among the American public, the U.S. Congress and the military. The Coast Guard did not disclose the existence of Operation Fouled Anchor until 2023, despite its existence from 2014 to 2019.
The acting secretary of Homeland Security removed the Coast Guard commandant from her position, according to a message to the service reviewed by USNI News.
Adm. Linda Fagan was the first female commandant of the Coast Guard. She assumed duties as commandant on June 1, 2022.
Fox News first reported Fagan’s termination, citing issues with recruitment, operations concerns and a focus on diversity, equity and inclusion as the reasons for her relief. An ALCOAST
, which is a message to all members of the Coast Guard, announced the relief.
Vice Commandant Adm. Kevin Lunday will take over as acting commandant, according to the ALCOAST message.
“Under my statutory authority as the Acting Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security I have relieved Admiral Linda L. Fagan of her duties as Commandant of the United States Coast Guard. She served a long and illustrious career, and I thank her for her service to our nation,” reads the ALCOAST message.
This is a stunning move on the first full day of a new administration. And, while Acting Secretary Huffman
gave the order, there is simply no way that a career official, whose day job is Director of DHS Federal Law Enforcement Centers, did this without direct order from the President.
Coast Guard Commandant is a Presidentially-appointed, Senate-confirmed position and the new President has the authority to fire Fagan if he does not have confidence in her abilities. But it seems that she’s being ousted for carrying out his predecessor’s policy preferences, not any actual misfeasance. Politicizing the armed services in this way is, to use a description that I fear will become routine, simply shameful.
This is just one of those things that a person has to know what they are doing. And for anyone who wants to play, “it’s just a joke card,” I would point them to my post, “Just Joking
.”
One can say that this is just Musk “owning the libs” but it is no different than him walking out with a KKK hood on and then saying it was for the lulz. It should be unacceptable behavior.
Here’s broader context, which is weird enough insofar as he almost sounds like he won the election (which I guess he kind of did). The rhetoric is also waaaay over the top.
Here are the front pages of the three major national papers:
And one of the more prominent conservative-leaning papers:
The New York Post is not archived.
The Los Angeles Times, perhaps surprisingly, is focused entirely on the fires engulfing their community.
The degree to which both NYT and WaPo are underplaying what’s already happened, after years of warning about the threat to democracy a second Trump term posed, is . . . interesting.
