Tag: Schedule F

American Kakistocracy on steroids

stunningly unqualified

Back in 2017, Norm Ornstein wrote about the American Kakistocracy for The Atlantic. “There’s a case to be made that the United States is governed by the least scrupulous of its citizens.” And now we are an American Kakistocracy on steroids.
2017: “Kakistocracy is a term that was first used in the 17th century; derived from a Greek word, it means, literally, government by the worst and most unscrupulous people among us. More broadly, it can mean the most inept and cringeworthy kind of government. The term fell into disuse over the past century or more, and most highly informed people have never heard it before (but to kids familiar with the word “kaka” it might resonate).”

“As I wrote my new book with E.J. Dionne and Tom Mann, One Nation Under Trump, I kept returning to the term. Kakistocracy is back, and we are experiencing it firsthand in America. The unscrupulous element has come into sharp focus in recent weeks as a string of Trump Cabinet members and White House staffers have been caught spending staggering sums of taxpayer dollars to charter jets, at times to go small distances where cheap commercial transportation was readily available, at times to conveniently visit home areas or have lunch with family members.”

I use the term “on steroids” intentionally. This is a term that djt used to describe the embarrassing failed North Carolina Republican gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson. He was “like Martin Luther King on steroids.” This is an insult to both Martin Luther King and steroids.

What’s happening now, and it’s changing so rapidly that it’s difficult to encapsulate, is that any sense of guardrails or normalcy is out the window. As I used to say too often, though it’s still accurate, The trouble with normal is it always gets worse.

Another appropriate word for right now is ‘recrudescence’ (17th century): “the return of something terrible after a time of reprieve.”

Elon

Undoubtedly, you’ve heard how the Dems ran too far to the left or too far to the center or were too “woke,” or whatever. What I think is mostly true is that the Republicans were better able to define the Democrats than the Dems.

“Muslims in Michigan began seeing pro-Israel ads this fall praising Vice President Kamala Harris for marrying a Jewish man and backing the Jewish state. Jews in Pennsylvania, meanwhile, saw ads from the same group with the opposite message: Harris wanted to stop U.S. arms shipments to Israel.

“Another group promoted ‘Kamala’s bold progressive agenda’ to conservative-leaning Donald Trump voters, while a third filled the phones of young liberals with videos about how Harris had abandoned the progressive dream. Black voters in North Carolina were told Democrats wanted to take away their menthol cigarettes, while working-class White men in the Midwest were warned that Harris would support quotas for minorities and deny them Zyn nicotine pouches.

“What voters had no way of knowing at the time was that all of the ads were part of a single $45 million effort created by political advisers to Tesla founder Elon Musk.”

It doesn’t feel like just another election. The Hollywood Reporter, of all things, notes: “The results came as a shock to large swaths of the nation who had hoped that the election of… Harris would protect the United States from the kind of fascism sweeping across the world. But for some — communities of color and queer and trans people, for example— Trump’s re-election only reaffirmed nightmares about a country whose major civil rights gains are young when compared to its oppressive history.”

Cabinet

It appears there are two types of his Cabinet appointments: the totally unqualified and the merely unfortunate.

47 selected, for his Attorney General, a person who Ben Domenech, a “big noise in conservative circles [who is] a co-founder of The RedState group blog and The Federalist,” despises. The headline of his article, posted to Substack, left no doubt as to the tenor of the piece: “Matt Gaetz is a Vile Sex Pest, and Any Senator Who Votes For Him Owns That.” His selection triggers audible gasps from some Republicans.

Tom Homan

Pete Hegseth is a Fox News TV host who is way out of his league to run an operation as vast as the Defense Department. He had a role in djt’s controversial pardons of men accused of war crimes. He also is waging a war on “woke.”

Rep. Elise Stefanik, a Republican from New York, was picked as an ambassador to the United Nations but not because of her international expertise.

As governor of South Dakota, Kristi Noem has no background in Homeland Security.
The Atlantic called Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democratic member of Congress from Hawaii, “stunningly unqualified for almost any Cabinet post (as are some of Trump’s other picks), but especially for ODNI. She has no qualifications as an intelligence professional—literally none….  She has no significant experience directing or managing much of anything.”
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s message on vaccines is a medical crisis waiting to happen. And then he says stuff even nuttier.
(Off-topic, but LinkedIn wanted to know if I wanted to follow Vivek Ramaswamy, the “efficiency guy with Musk. “STAND for truth.” No, thank you. )
Here are observations by Common Dreams.
Day 1
Worse than that, Orange is Plotting To Skip The Senate Confirmation Process. He was serious when he said he’d be dictator only on Day 1. This involves the Senate allowing “him to make recess appointments that would skip the otherwise Constitutionally mandated Senate confirmation process.” Reportedly, he “is coordinating with House Speaker Johnson to allow [djt] to force Congress to adjourn under Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution so that he can freely make the recess appointments he wants.” 
The Senate could block this if it takes its role of ‘advise and consent’ seriously—otherwise, the extremely tenuous Senate integrity is shot altogether.

Meanwhile, per Red State: “Several conservative groups are currently in a campaign to identify federal employees who are partisan or possibly resistant to enacting Trump’s agenda, according to a CNN report. These groups include the Heritage Foundation Oversight Project and the American Accountability Foundation.

“The organizations have flooded federal agencies with tens of thousands of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests demanding access to emails, personnel records, and other communications between government employees. The effort is part of a comprehensive strategy to lay the groundwork for mass firings of civil servants under Trump’s Schedule F executive order issued in 2020, which was later revoked under President Joe Biden.” I wrote about Schedule F here. 

So, am I optimistic? Not really. But one needs to fight the fight anyway. I’m just not sure what that looks like yet.

Project 2025: Personnel and staffing

Christian nationalism

I have looked at Google Trends. Since the week of June 3, there has been a definite upward trend in the number of searches for the term Project 2025, “the extreme right-wing agenda for the next Republican administration.” That’s good. Maybe djt is one of them since he claimed he doesn’t know about it but is opposed to many of its aspects. How are both possible? 

Leading up to the election, I’ve decided to reiterate its tenets. Regarding Personnel and staffing, “Project 2025’s goals for staffing the next GOP presidency reflect Trump’s idea to gut civil service staff and replace them with potentially tens of thousands of MAGA loyalists. The New York Times describes this plot for a second Trump administration as an ‘expansion of presidential power over the machinery of government’ that would reshape “the structure of the executive branch to concentrate far greater authority directly in his hands.”

When I first searched for Schedule F, I discovered the IRS Form 1040 to report farm income and expenses. That’s not what we’re looking for.

Here’s an article from The Brookings Institute, a hardly liberal think tank, titled The Risks of Schedule F for Administrative Capacity and Government Accountability.

“Weeks before the 2020 election, President Trump unveiled an executive order that would have created a new class of political appointee, Schedule F. The order would have allowed a president to turn any career official with a policy advisory role into a political appointee, removing job protection and opening the door to vastly politicize the federal workforce.

“President Biden rescinded the order, but Trump has made it a central feature of his re-election campaign as part of his effort to take control of “the deep state…” 

“Deep state”

“First, let’s understand the scale of what is being proposed. Among developed countries, the U.S. is an outlier in terms of its existing level of politicization. We use about 4,000 political appointees to run the executive branch, an increase from about 3,000 in the early 1990s… 

“Supporters of Schedule F have proposed converting 50,000 career civil servants into political appointee status. That is a massive degree of additional politicization and the most fundamental change to the civil service system since its inception in 1883. Increasing the number of political appointees would create a new venue where political polarization would undermine the quality of governance by replacing moderates with extremists.”

Or, put another way, the cabal would replace people who know how to do their jobs with political hacks. Naturally, the National Federation of Federal Employees (NFFE) supports legislation to stop it. Unsurprisingly, it was introduced in the House in February 2023, where it languishes.   

Pushback

However, back in April 2024, the “Office of Personnel Management issued the final version of its regulation meant to safeguard the civil service from the return of a Trump-era policy that sought to convert most federal employees to at-will workers.”

In a statement, Joe Biden said, “‘My administration is announcing protections for 2.2 million career civil servants from political interference, to guarantee that they can carry out their responsibilities in the best interest of the American people’… Day in and day out, career civil servants provide the expertise and continuity necessary for our democracy to function.”

“The final rule states that an employee’s civil service protections cannot be taken away by an involuntary move from the competitive service to the excepted service; clarifies that the ’employees in confidential, policy-determining, policy-making or policy-advocating positions’ terminology used to define Schedule F employees means noncareer, political appointments and won’t be applied to career civil servants; and sets up an appeals process with the Merit Systems Protection Board for any employees involuntarily transferred from the competitive service to the excepted service and within the excepted service.”

So djt and his people could reinstate Schedule F, but implementing it would be more difficult.

Christian nationalism

Another tenet of Project 2025 is Christian nationalism. It claims that “centralized government ‘subverts’ families by working to ‘replace people’s natural loves and loyalties with unnatural ones,’ utilizing the biblical language of natural versus the unnatural.” 

More specifically, “Former Trump official Jonathan Berry’s chapter on the Department of Labor states that ‘the Judeo-Christian tradition, stretching back to Genesis, has always recognized fruitful work as integral to human dignity, as service to God, neighbor, and family’ and claims that Biden’s administration is ‘hostile to people of faith.'” 

As a person of faith, I trust my antipathy for Christian nationalism and Christofascism is abundantly clear. 

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