Tax-payers funding a sham of democracy

It's run by Democrats, even when voters elect Republicans.

Presidents come and go, but the permanent federal bureaucracy remains the same, and it has a distinct partisan tilt.

When Americans send a Republican to the Oval Office, they get a government still administered mostly by the other party.

Yes, that makes a sham of democracy.

But no president before Donald Trump was prepared to confront the problem.

Because the bias in the federal civilian workforce (which consists of more than 2 million employees) favors their side, the likes of Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe Biden were never going to fix it.

And earlier, when the parties were less ideologically polarized and there were still quite a few conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans, it wasn't as obvious as today that the bureaucracy's partisan slant meant a workforce opposed to the duly elected president — when he's not a Democrat.

But from Ronald Reagan onward, it's become clear that a Republican who tries to get the bureaucracy to carry out a conservative agenda will face a revolt from inside.

The Constitution's separation of powers doesn't provide for an executive branch divided against itself — it's the one branch that's meant to be united within and checked from the outside.

Originally, the partisan makeup of the federal workforce depended almost entirely on who won the White House:

Republicans would hire Republicans, Democrats hired Democrats, and every federal employee knew he stood to lose his job if the party in power changed.

Politicians on both sides saw government jobs as rewards to give their supporters, even if this meant hiring people who weren't the best qualified.

A nonpartisan, meritocratic civil service seemed like the solution to the inefficiency and you-scratch-my-back, I'll-scratch-yours corruption of this system.

Yet like many well-intended reforms, this one backfired.

Instead of a nonpartisan civil service, what we have now is a civil service whose partisanship no longer alternates based on elections — a perpetual liberal government, unanswerable to voters.

Guo Xu, an associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley's Haas School of Business, has studied the magnitude and effect of partisanship in the federal workforce.

Analyzing data from 1997 to 2019, he found roughly half of all federal employees were Democrats (compared to 41% of the public at large), while the percentage of Republicans in federal jobs slid from 32% to 26%, with independents gaining the difference.

That's an almost 2:1 ratio of Democrats to Republicans in the civil service.

The imbalance is even more pronounced in many departments and agencies, however, with Democrats making up some 70% of Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Education, and State Department employees.

The bias is also stronger in the highest reaches of the civil service, with Democrats amounting to 63% of top-level federal career executives.

Guo and his research colleagues found cost overruns on government contracts increase by some 8% when there's a partisan "misalignment" between the president and the bureaucrat overseeing the outlay.

"When we looked at HR surveys covering federal government workers, we also found that politically misaligned respondents were less motivated and less likely to identify with the overall mission of the agency," Guo said in an interview on the Berkeley Haas website.

Guo is no conservative critic of the system — he takes the lack of turnover in the federal workforce when party control of the White House changes to mean "civil service protections work, shielding career civil servants from political interference."

In truth, civil servants with partisan commitments of their own are being shielded from the consequences of elections — as if the American people have no right to "interfere" in their own government.

The result: When voters elect a Democratic president, they get a Democratic administration — but if they elect a Republican, they get a mixed administration weakened by partisan divisions between political appointees and the civil service.

This is one reason Republican efforts to scale back the federal government have failed for so long: In effect, there have only been semi-Republican administrations for decades, or one continuous Democratic administration with some temporary Republican heads.

It's time to reform the civil-service reforms that created this mess.

There's something to be said for returning to what older reformers got right, such as relying on standardized examinations for hiring and promotion in place of recent, highly politicized criteria such as "diversity, equity, and inclusion" (DEI).

Beyond that, though, it's necessary to admit that bureaucrats are partisans, too.

Trump's plan to reclassify many federal employees as Schedule F appointees, allowing him to remove them more easily, is a step toward making the bureaucracy more accountable to the democratic process.

By fighting the partisan bias of the permanent government, President Trump isn't endangering the Constitution — he's restoring its balance.

(COMMENT, BELOW)

Previously:
• 02/11/25: What Kind of a Populist Is Elon Musk?
• 02/03/25: Can Trump Win Trade Wars Before They Start?
• 01/21/25: Trump Inaugurates a New Era
• 01/14/25: Dems Aren't Democracy's Party
• 01/07/25: Donald Trump's Worldwide Election
• 12/31/24: Harmless self-deception?
• 12/17/24: Communism thriving, including HERE
• 12/10/24: Birthright Citizenship Is a Breach in the Border
• 12/03/24: Identity Politics, Not Biden, Cost Dems the Election
• 11/19/24: Why Dems Are Losing Tomorrow's Elections Today
• 11/12/24: Dems Are at a Dead End, Unless They Learn From Trump
• 10/29/24: Harris Targets Married Women
• 10/22/24: Vibes Turn Bad for Kamala Harris
• 10/15/24: Why Veterans Are Voting for Trump
• 10/08/24: How Donald Trump Can Win the Popular Vote
• 10/01/24: Iran Targets America's Elections -- and Trump
• 09/24/24: Trump's Would-Be Assassin's Explanation
• 09/17/24: When Character Assassination Becomes the Real Thing
• 09/10/24: Kamala Harris Runs Like a Republican -- and Misleads
• 09/04/24: Where Trump Is Moderate -- While Kam Is Maximalist
• 08/27/24: Donald Trump Is Reagan's Heir
• 08/20/24: Will Voters Settle for Joe Biden's Wing(wo)man?
• 08/13/24: Trump Has to Run Like It's 2016 Again
• 08/07/24: Is Trump Running Against Harris -- or Donald Trump?
• 07/30/24: Kamala Harris' 'Mean Girls' Election
• 07/23/24: Kamala Harris Is the Opponent Donald Trump Wants
• 07/16/24: Ready for Biden's Counterattack?
• 07/09/24: Biden Faces Richard Nixon's Choice
• 07/02/24: Should Biden Drop Out -- or Resign?
• 06/18/24: Separate Sexual Identity and State
• 06/18/24: Nigel Farage Makes the Trump Moment Permanent
• 06/04/24: State that's long eluded GOP turns toward Trump
• 05/21/24: Trump's Sun Belt Hopes and Rust Belt Needs
• 05/14/24: What Trump Sees in Doug Burgum
• 05/07/24: The Vietnam Era Never Ended for Biden's Party
• 05/06/24: Nationalists of the World, Unite?
• 04/25/24: Foreign Policy Splits
• 04/16/24: How pro-lifers stand to lose everything gained in overturning Roe
• 04/02/24: PBS Misremembers William F. Buckley Jr.
• 04/02/24: Who Wants to Be House Speaker?
• 03/26/24: Trump Hunts for a VP Close to Home
• 03/19/24: Princess Kate and Democracy's Discontents
• 03/12/24: Can Biden Buy the Voters?
• 03/05/24: Veepstakes Give Trump an Edge
• 02/20/24: Do Americans Trust Either Party?
• 02/13/24: Vladimir Putin -- A Passive Aggressor
• 01/23/24: Will 'Lawfare' Take Trump Off the Ballot?
• 01/16/24: Will Africa Save America?
• 01/09/24:'The Sopranos' at 25: A new world tragedy
• 01/02/24: Trump, Biden and a Fight for the Heart
• 12/12/23: What Happened to Ron DeSantis?
• 12/12/23: Biden Looks Doomed -- But Is He?
• 12/05/23: A Test for Trump and His Rivals
• 11/21/23: When Inequality Is Fatal for Men
• 11/14/23: Nevermind, The Battle's Over
• 11/07/23: War in the Dem Party -- and at the Opera
• 10/24/23: Israel's Lesson for 2024: A Lib Crackup
• 10/17/23: Libs' Dilemma: Immigration or Israel?
• 10/10/23: Why Bidenflation Defines Bidenomics
• 10/03/23: Will Gavin Newsom Copy Trump?
• 09/26/23: Biden's a Loser -- but Dems Can't Ditch Him
• 09/19/23: Do Sex Scandals Matter?
• 09/12/23: Cornel West Spells Doom for Biden
• 09/05/23: What Trump Does for Democracy
• 08/2/23: Ramaswamy: A Trump Versus Trump?
• 08/22/23: Take 'Rich Men North of Richmond' Seriously
• 08/16/23: How America Kills Its Own
• 08/08/23: The Biden Pardon That Can Spare America
• 08/01/23: Harding, a consevative for the ages
• 07/25/23: Demography Destiny, for Us and China
• 07/18/23: The Frontrunner Who Looks Like a Loser Is Biden
• 07/11/23: Britain's Bad Example for American Conservatives
• 07/05/23: Could We Still Win a Revolutionary War?
• 06/27/23: Civilizations Clash -- in Ukraine and at Home
• 06/20/23: China Comes for the Caribbean
• 06/13/23: Fertility, Family and Bio-Socialism
• 06/06/23: From American Dream to Orwell's Nightmare
• 05/23/23: Ukraine war is an existential struggle --- for the West
• 05/23/23: Learn the Right Midterm Lessons -- or Lose in 2024
• 05/16/23: Feinstein Today Is Biden Tomorrow
• 05/09/23: Trump, DeSantis and Political Courtship
• 05/02/23: RFK Jr.'s Threat to Biden
• 04/25/23: Biden's Lost Generation
• 04/25/23: Who's In Charge of Clarence Thomas?
• 04/11/23: Beyond AI, Our Cyborg Future
• 04/04/23: 2024: 3 Leaders, 1 Way to Win
• 03/28/23: Climate Science Makes a Bad Religion
• 03/21/23: All the Conspiracy That's Fit to Print