Commentary by Jeffrey Tucker
We’ve all wondered if the fix is already in. Given the irregularities of the last election, and the manner in which the whole of the U.S. establishment rallied around one side, maybe a Biden victory in November is a foregone conclusion.
I’m guilty of believing this. I’ve doubted every prediction that Donald Trump or RFK, Jr. can win. This is not because they won’t get votes. It’s because those votes might not matter enough.
The power of haters is awesome and ubiquitous. The whole of legacy media, government, corporate tech, pharma, and both the administrative state and the deep state are dedicated to keeping them and their supporters from power.
We don’t even know if elections really work anymore. It’s entirely possible, in this view, that millions will slog to the polls in November and do their duty in what will only end up as theater. The regime controls the ballots, surely, and nothing can overcome that. A second Biden term, the most unpopular president in my lifetime, is inevitable, in this view. The system is too broken to generate any other outcome.
Admit it: you have been tempted by this outlook too.
Well, I’m here to bring you some good news. The deep state has blinked. I will present evidence to you that the bad guys are actually preparing for a full-blown assault on administrative state hegemony. They are working to protect themselves against a victory by someone other than Joe Biden.
Will it work? I don’t know but what’s super critical is that they are preparing. If it were not possible to win, they wouldn’t bother. In other words, this is very good news!
The evidence comes from a largely unnoticed press release (below) from the Office of Personnel Management. The legacy media did not report on this at all.
It reads as follows:
“The U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) today announced a final rule that clarifies and reinforces long-standing protections and merit system principles for career civil servants,” says the press release.
It goes on to explain that this rule change makes it much more difficult or even impossible for any new president to reclassify “civil servants” as being under the control of the president. Instead, their jobs are permanent and thus protected against any efforts by a future president to reclassify anyone working for the federal government. None can be fired.
In particular, the press release explains, this is designed to thwart another attempt to change their employment status, as happened in November 2020.
“In the first week of the Biden-Harris Administration, President Biden revoked an Executive Order issued by the previous Administration that risked altering our country’s long-standing merit-based civil service system, by creating a new excepted service schedule, known as ‘Schedule F,’ and directing agencies to move potentially large swathes of career employees into this new excepted service status. This attempt would have stripped career civil servants of their civil service protections that ensure that decisions to hire and fire are based on merit, not political considerations.”
The “previous administration” means of course the Trump White House, which issued the greatest executive order in a hundred years.
After four years of being subverted and thwarted by the civil service bureaucracy, the White House finally figured out the core problem. There are more than 2 million permanent bureaucrats, ensconced in 430 agencies, who imagine themselves to live outside the democratic system and the U.S. Constitution itself. They believe they are the state and the elected leaders are mere decoration.
Trump’s executive order insisted that every agency do an internal audit and ferret out any employee who has something to do with making or interpreting policy; that is, anyone whose work impacts on whether the president actually has control of the executive department. All those employees would be reclassified as Schedule F, meaning that they could be replaced if need be.
That’s it. That’s the whole order. Maybe it doesn’t seem like much but it was actually brilliant. Read the rest here.
