Scott Jennings cornered his CNN colleagues by pointing out that the Washington bureaucracy only resists Republican, especially Trump, administrations. Jennings accurately noted that the bureaucracy attempts to make its own rules and operate autonomously when Republicans take office.
“There’s an attempt when a Republican’s in the White House, Donald Trump or any other Republican, to argue that these federal agencies, federal workers, the bureaucracy sort of can act independently or autonomously from the political leadership of the country. And that’s what’s happening here. That’s why everyone is melting down.”
Jennings further explained how federal employees refused to respond to Musk’s email requesting them to share their weekly work engagements.
“That’s why the lady came on CNN today. They don’t want to answer the email because they don’t want to answer to the president. And the message from Trump and Musk is, we have political leaders in this country, and you’ve got to answer to them.”
However, CNN’s Newsweek host Abby Phillips defended the federal employees, claiming that “that’s not true.”
“No, I know it is 100% true that the bureaucracy is not aligned with, mostly not aligned with Republicans,” Jennings added.
We recently witnessed numerous instances of federal employees resigning rather than assist the Trump administration in implementing its policies, which is unusual when Democrats are in power.
On February 25, nearly two dozen digital employees quit to avoid assisting the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to uncover waste and fraud, which is one of the core Trump campaign promises.
Similarly, hundreds of Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) employees have contemplated quitting citing Trump’s environmental policies, while others have vowed to defy Trump’s orders to get themselves fired.
“Personally, it makes me want to hang on until I have the chance to do (or not do) something worth getting fired for,” one EPA employee told ProPublica.
“I’m going to stand up to them,” another stated. “I may lose the battle, but principally I will have won the war.”
However, Leftists have a problem with the administration hiring people who obey lawful orders. Should we remind them that American voters understand Trump’s policies and elected him to implement them?
“If he replaces EPA scientists and lawyers with people who just want to say yes to him, it will be the death knell for the EPA,” Kyla Bennett, director of science policy at Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility told the publication.
However, federal employees are hired to implement government policies while maintaining political neutrality and it is not their call to challenge the government on various issues.
Subsequently, Trump issued an executive order to reclassify 50,000 federal positions into political appointees who can be easily replaced with others who are willing to take orders from the executive.
Trump noted that “there have been numerous and well-documented cases of career Federal employees resisting and undermining the policies and directives of their executive leadership.”
Thus, the reclassification would affect “positions of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating character” to ensure that the elected government can exercise its executive leadership and restore accountability in the civil service, which is evidently lacking.
For instance, nearly half of federal supervisors are not confident they remove an insubordinate employee, while nearly a quarter cannot terminate a federal worker for poor performance. This leaves the government’s policy at the mercy of unelected activist federal employees.
As Jennings noted, these activist employees are unusually vocal during Republican administrations, but very silent when Democrats take over.
For example, there was no federal employee pushback when the Obama administration introduced race-based hiring or the Biden administration started releasing unvetted vetting illegal immigrants despite the obvious harm.
However, they will oppose almost every Trump policy, including ones with obvious benefits such as removing violent illegal aliens from the country. We witnessed FBI employees leaking operational information about impending illegal immigration raids to undermine Trump’s policy.
