A little-noticed federal regulation was finalized last week that was a tacit admission by the Biden administration that the entrenched liberal bureaucracy in the federal government is real and must be protected at all costs.
Last week, the Office of Personnel Management, an executive branch agency that oversees the personnel that staff the federal government, finalized a rule that is aimed at preventing any future president or administration from reclassifying the thousands of bureaucrats who work in federal agencies to make them more accountable to the democratically elected president.
The regulation was drafted as a response to an executive order that was signed in the last few months of the Trump administration that would have reclassified thousands of federal employees who work in policy positions as political appointees and thus make them accountable to the president.
The executive order, which would have created a new category of federal employment called Schedule F, would have empowered the president to take control of a federal bureaucracy that is resistant to the directives and policy goals of a conservative president.
Biden withdrew the order shortly after taking office in January 2021 as Democrats decried the plan as an attack on the “expertise” of the federal workforce and tried to label any talk of an unaccountable deep state bureaucracy as a conspiracy theory.
But the new regulation is a tacit admission that the bureaucracy is unaccountable to the elected officials in the executive branch. Federal workforce protections have made it nearly impossible to fire incompetent or insubordinate federal employees. That may work for a Democratic president such as Biden, who finds all sorts of ideological and political allies in the ranks of the federal workforce, but for a Republican such as former President Donald Trump, it serves as a clear obstacle to the policymaking that the people voted for.
Nevertheless, while the Biden administration may try to forestall government accountability should Trump win the November election, Russ Vought, the former director of the Office of Management and Budget and the architect of Schedule F, tells me the regulation could be easily overcome.
“This expected move by the Biden administration to forestall accountability within the bureaucracy against poor performers merely reinforces what we already knew — Schedule F rests on a sound legal foundation, is going to succeed spectacularly, and the only chance to stop it is to install procedural roadblocks,” Vought, now the president of the Center for Renewing America, told me.
“Ultimately these efforts don’t change anything,” he said. “In fact, there are many rules and regulations passed by this administration aimed to go after the American people that they can expect to kiss goodbye.”
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In other words, as much as Biden and his operatives in the West Wing think they can protect their mindless army of zombie bureaucrats, the regulation served no purpose besides admitting to the entire nation that the executive branch agencies are only accountable to a Democratic president.
Once voters eject Biden from office in November, we can expect the new Trump administration to clear out that unaccountable bureaucracy and give the people the government and the policies that they voted for.
