And there are tens of thousands of these people, all working to defeat their enemy: you

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Over at Instapundit, Ed Driscoll links to a cautionary — depressing? — report from one who’s been there.

Tales From the Swamp

Civil servants are nominally intended to operate in the interests of the United States rather than in the interests of president or party. But that is all too frequently not what they do. Many civil servants act in their own personal and ideological interests, at a cost to the nation, and in counterproductive defiance of presidents with whom they’re not ideologically aligned.

The first Trump administration (“Trump I”) was chronically frustrated by the difficulties it had staffing the government with loyal employees. As a result, disloyal civil servants exploited the opportunity to build up an impressive track record materially harming the operational integrity of Trump I. There are examples aplenty of how, but for this essay, a few James Sherk documented should suffice:

  • Career employees in the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division refused to prosecute cases they ideologically disagreed with, even when the facts showed clear legal violations. This included Civil Rights Division career staff refusing to work on cases charging Yale University for racial discrimination against Asian-Americans and protecting nurses from being forced to participate in abortions.

  • Career staff at the Department of Education assigned to work on politically sensitive regulations, including the Title IX due process regulations, would either produce legally unusable drafts that would never withstand judicial review or drafts that significantly diverged from the Department’s policy goals. As a result, political appointees had to draft the regulations primarily by themselves.

  • Department of Health and Human Services career staff circumvented President Trump’s hiring freeze issued soon after taking office by crossing out new hires’ start dates on their hiring paperwork. Staff used Sharpie pens to retroactively adjust the start dates to January 19, 2017—the day before President Trump took office.

  • Career lawyers at the National Labor Relations Board routinely gave political appointees misleading legal analyses. They would only cite cases supporting their preferred position and omit contrary precedents. Some career lawyers refused to draft documents whose positions they disagreed with.

  • Career attorneys in the Environmental Protection Agency did not inform political appointees about major cases the agency was involved in or the government’s positions in pending cases. Political appointees had to monitor public court filings to learn what the agency was doing.

  • Department of Labor regulatory staff intentionally delayed producing a departmental priority regulation. A competent private sector attorney could have produced a draft regulation in two to three weeks. The team of about a dozen career staff claimed they needed a year to do so—a pace that amounted to each attorney in the unit writing less than one line of text a day.

Further on in his report, Sherk* adds:

Career staff impeded Trump I by withholding information, refusing to implement policies, intentionally delaying and slow-walking orders, deliberately underperforming, leaking private information to Congress and members of the media, and acting in an outright insubordinate manner when the opportunity to harm the presidency presented itself.

* “The author of this report served on the White House Domestic Policy Council from 2017 to 2021. Agency appointees frequently described career staff resistance during his White House tenure. After leaving the White House, the author interviewed numerous political appointees about their time in government. This report documents their experiences with career staff.”

Driscoll adds this illustration of what Trump’s up against: