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You are here: Home / Politics / Trumpery / Dolt 45 / Incompetence Is Its Own Reward

Incompetence Is Its Own Reward

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Here’s a bit of contextually good news:

President Trump’s last-ditch effort to remove civil service protections from tens of thousands of career federal employees appears to have lost steam, facing time constraints and legal hurdles as the administration prepares to leave office, officials said.

This was to have been the finishing blow in Trump’s and the GOP’s long attempted murder of the independent Federal civil service.

Incompetence Is Its Own Reward

Instead, it collapsed in a broad spectrum display of gaffers.

The order gave agencies until Tuesday to review potentially affected jobs. But as of Monday night, no…federal agencies had delivered a list of affected employees to White House officials for review, with the exception of the Office of Personnel Management, which also rushed to reshuffle much of its staff of roughly 3,500 people into the new category.

My guess as to why? An administration whose baseline level of competence was never that high found itself embroiled in weeks of election denialism. Eyes flew off the ball.  If Trump had won, this would have all sailed through sometime over the next month or so. Without that luxury of time, and with a fair amount of WH staff distracted or disengaged, and confronting a bureaucracy that had less than zero interest in complying with Trump’s command? Not a chance.

This is a big Biden deal. If the White House had managed to drive this through, and especially if they had then managed to salt the executive branch with the same kind of folks who peopled the Iraq occupation, the damage they’ve already done to functional governance would have been made damn near permanent.

Trump and his cabal have still managed to do plenty of damage in the last two and a half months, of course. But thank Dog for the small mercy that they just aren’t good enough to swing the wrecking ball as far and hard as they want.

Image: John William Waterhouse, The Remorse of Nero After the Murder of His Mother, 1878

Reader Interactions

77Comments

  2. 2.

    Shana

    Saw that in the Post this morning and thought how lucky we’ve been that these people are as incompetent as they are. There was also a sweetening article in Style about Hawley, about how he’s a more standard issue politician than Trump but no less crazy in his makeup. Sigh.

  3. 3.

    burnspbesq

    And at the same time they are trying to put a mole in the General Counsel’s job at NSA.

    Hypocisy is as natural as breathing to these jackal ones.

  6. 6.

    Brachiator

    This is a big Biden deal. If the White House had managed to drive this through, and especially if they had then managed to salt the executive branch with the same kind of folks who peopled the Iraq occupation, the damage they’ve already done to functional governance would have been made damn near permanent.

    And Trump was doing this with the full support of the  GOP leadership.

    The Republicans see no difference between running the federal government more efficiently and a stupid, spiteful, corrupt dismantling of government operations.

    You could not even say that this was running the government like a business.

    For the GOP, short-sighted rhetoric is matched with shameful, short-sighted practice.

  7. 7.

    DCA

    Lets hope that getting this done for OPM (which manages/vets for a lot of agencies) does not mean a more widespread problem. I think of Stalin being Party Secretary (to start with) since that is who produces the agenda for meetings. But otherwise, good news. Having Monday and Wednesday as holidays definitely limits how much “midnight X” could get done.

  8. 8.

    rjm

    I suppose it would be bad policy, but using that executive order to reclassify and remove every single recently burrowed, toxic appointee and then rescinding the order would feel pretty satisfying.  I’m feeling very pleased that they failed.

  10. 10.

    Ceci n est pas mon nym

    I feel bad for those 3500 OPM employees. But wonder how many of them are rabid Trump voters.

  11. 11.

    ET

    I wasn’t as worried about this because they waited until too late to introducing it and all it took was agencies to slow roll it for a few days.  I am not sure who left in the WH as pushing this because tRump doesn’t care about rank and file federal workers (sure I suppose they are “deep state” on some level but that seems to apply more to certain agencies and not others). With that said, glad it failed.

  15. 15.

    Mary G

    I’ve been saving this fine art tweet for one of your threads, Mr. Levenson, and it is perfecto for pardon day:

    “The Flatterers” — Pieter Brueghel the Younger, (1592) pic.twitter.com/XAJwOfKpOO— Whores of Yore (@WhoresofYore) January 2, 2021

    And Mitch McConnell will do everything to throw Twitler under the world’s largest bus, because he took away his precious – Senate Majority Dictator. It is one of the most delicious heel turns I’ve ever seen.

  16. 16.

    mrmoshpotato

    Not sure if this has been reported yet.

    The @NBCNews Hill team reports that 3 new Democratic senators will be sworn in “late afternoon” on Jan 20 by VP Kamala Harris: 1) GA Senator-elect Jon Ossoff2) GA Senator-elect Raphael Warnock3) Appointed CA Senator Alex Padilla— Doug Adams (@DougNBC) January 19, 2021

  18. 18.

    Matt McIrvin

    The logical time to do this would have been at the beginning of Trump’s administration, so he could turf out the entire civil service and replace them with Trump loyalists. Doing it at the end would just mean Biden could reverse any damage he did, right? Of course it would take time.

    This is something Newt Gingrich has been keen on for a long time–I recall he was excited about it during the 2016 transition.

  21. 21.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Mary G: I’ve heard that we’ve returned to having no black women in the Senate… but it was because the one we had is becoming Vice-President. (And, by extension, President of the Senate.)

  23. 23.

    Amir Khalid

    I simply cannot pass up this golden opportunity:

    it collapsed in a broad spectrum display of gaffers.

    A gaffer is head of a movie production’s electrical and lighting department. The word you want is gaffes.

    Thank you for making me a happy pedant.

  24. 24.

    Mary G

    Look at this beautiful firefighter!

    Firefighter Andrea M. Hall was the first Black woman to be promoted to captain in her dept. She'll recite the Pledge of Allegiance at tomorrow's inauguration.On being first: "You are becoming the torch-bearer for everybody that’s coming behind you"t.co/cxfeEDdOPU— Chabeli Carrazana (@ChabeliH) January 19, 2021

  27. 27.

    Roger Moore

    This is a big Biden deal. If the White House had managed to drive this through, and especially if they had then managed to salt the executive branch with the same kind of folks who peopled the Iraq occupation, the damage they’ve already done to functional governance would have been made damn near permanent.

    Yeah, I don’t understand why they left this until the last minute.  If they really wanted to push it through, they should have started working on it early in the term so they could make the whole process stand up in court.  Instead, they waited until it was too late.  OTOH, it’s not as if this is the only time they messed something up by rushing it through too quickly.  They managed to screw up plenty of stuff by not going through all the correct bureaucratic steps even when they weren’t under time pressure from the end of the term.

  29. 29.

    jonas

    @JoyceH:  Annnnnd – McConnell underbusses Trump!

    Whooooo boy! Wait until he sees the broadside of hysterical tweets Trump will unleash against him…. Oh. Wait.

    Lol.

  31. 31.

    jeffreyw

    @Amir Khalid:

    I’m sure I read somewhere that a mistake once made by a gaffer was so egregious that ever after these mistakes were known as gaffes.  Tesla included the “Mistake” in several of his demonstrations.

  32. 32.

    Redshift

    Incompetent and lazy. Their actions get overturned because they all want to give orders but can’t be bothered to learn the process, and because they only care about getting credit for a splashy announcement. A government of people who all think they’re CEOs.

  33. 33.

    Kent

    @Roger Moore:

    This is a big Biden deal. If the White House had managed to drive this through, and especially if they had then managed to salt the executive branch with the same kind of folks who peopled the Iraq occupation, the damage they’ve already done to functional governance would have been made damn near permanent.

    Yeah, I don’t understand why they left this until the last minute.  If they really wanted to push it through, they should have started working on it early in the term so they could make the whole process stand up in court.  Instead, they waited until it was too late.  OTOH, it’s not as if this is the only time they messed something up by rushing it through too quickly.  They managed to screw up plenty of stuff by not going through all the correct bureaucratic steps even when they weren’t under time pressure from the end of the term.

    It is because they are stupid and the GOP has spent 20 years ignoring how policy actually gets made.  They thought they could just drop a few inexperienced political hacks into the top jobs of every agency and just bend them to their will.  But too many good Civil Service employees said “We really can’t do that.  the law requires that we go through X, Y, and Z process, prepare economic and environmental analyses, solicit public comment, and consult with all of these other stakeholders before we can just change regulations.  And because you haven’t bothered to staff up this agency, you don’t actually have enough staff to do all of those things”  It took them 3 years to finally get frustrated enough to want to just fire everyone who stood in their way.

  34. 34.

    Roger Moore

    @Shana:

    Saw that in the Post this morning and thought how lucky we’ve been that these people are as incompetent as they are.

    I don’t think the incompetence is entirely luck.  The hatred for government that drives them is the same thing that makes them disdainful toward the kind of bureaucratic details they keep failing at.  If they were the kinds of people who were capable of understanding bureaucracy and making it work for them instead of against them, they wouldn’t be trying to destroy the bureaucratic state.

  35. 35.

    jonas

    @burnspbesq: I was reading earlier today that Trump remains convinced that the NSA and CIA are sitting on all this damning secret intelligence on Clinton, Biden, and Obama and that he can expose everything in the next 24 hours if he has some toadie in there to threaten the Deep State traitors concealing it. That’s what was also supposedly behind that line in the papers the MyPillow guy was holding outside the Oval Office about dumping Gina Haspel at CIA.

    Mel Brooks on acid couldn’t come up with a storyline this corny.

  36. 36.

    Roger Moore

    @cain:

    So how do we prevent it happening when the next inevitable Republican administration comes in? Maybe we should do it ourselves first?

    The best way of keeping the Republicans from being able to do this is to strengthen the civil service protections rather than trying to take advantage of the situation ourselves.  It might require an update to the relevant statute, but stronger civil service protections are something we should be looking at anyway as part of the general effort to implement the norms Trump crushed as laws.

  38. 38.

    TomatoQueen

    A gaffer is a football manager, as in Rafa the Gaffa (although he wasn’t called that at TOON as far as I can make out). I’d like to call Steve Bruce a taxi.

    The politicization of the career-service decision making positions was introduced somewhat stealthily, but my union was onto it and only OPM complied with the position review in the end. It was the idea of Stephen Miller’s evil chum whose name always escapes me but he came from the Heritage Foundation and often got away with much of the evil that Miller didn’t mind being blamed for. He is a rat bastard and needs to be found in a Milan gas station

  39. 39.

    Roger Moore

    @Redshift:

    I think a big part of it is that Trump has spent his whole career in a business where he could make a lot more things happen just by ordering them.  CEOs in general have a lot more power within their organizations than the President does in the government, and that’s especially true in business like the Trump Organization.  He just didn’t know how to deal with a bureaucracy that could stymie a lot of his goals by refusing to go along enthusiastically.

  40. 40.

    Redshift

    If the White House had managed to drive this through, … the damage they’ve already done to functional governance would have been made damn near permanent.

    This is the part I don’t get. There are various Trumpie actions, not just this one, that get described in dire terms as being practically irreversible, and I don’t understand why. I know there’s a rulemaking process, and some things can’t just be cancelled right away, but other than delays, how much can one administration really lock in the next?

  41. 41.

    Steeplejack

    @Amir Khalid:

    I think Levenson was going for the person committing a gaffe, but gaffer is infelicitous.

    @jeffreyw:

    Interesting, because the Oxford English Dictionary offers this citation from the Pall Mall Gazette in 1909: “These two gentlemen, whose weather predictions are still listened to with some deference, have made a bad ‘gaffe,’ to use a popular slang expression.”

    Its origin is obscure but thought to be related to the older noun gaff, for “humbug, ‘stuff and nonsense.’”

    And gaffer for a foreman or overseer of a group of workers goes back at least to 1841.

  43. 43.

    Fair Economist

    @rjm: I’d rather it went thru, got used by Biden to dump all the toxic Republican appointees, and then got fixed by legislation. Maybe Biden can push it thru to force the Republicans to go along with a legislative fix.

  48. 48.

    Roger Moore

    @Redshift:

    The real damage Trump would do with this kind of executive order isn’t to put his cronies in positions of power; that would indeed be relatively easy to undo.  But to put his people in, he would have first fired all the competent long-term staff, and there would be no guarantee we could hire all those people back.  Undoing civil service protections isn’t just an attack on the bureaucracy as an apolitical part of the government.  It’s an attack on civil service as a long-term career, which is necessary to have any hope of hiring good people to staff the government.

  49. 49.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @JoyceH:

    McConnell underbusses Trump!

    I’ve been saying that McConnell felt his own life was in danger on the 6th and he is not going to forgive that.

    @jonas:

    Trump remains convinced that the NSA and CIA are sitting on all this damning secret intelligence on Clinton, Biden, and Obama

    He thought Pence could overturn the election, and has been seethingly angry at Pence for not doing it.  He demanded Ukraine turn over Hillary’s server containing the magical 30,000 deleted emails that prove Trump is innocent and Hillary and Obama are the ones who was colluding with Russia to frame him.  The man is absolutely bugfuck nuts and believes things that he knows from direct experience cannot be true.  It’s a narcissist trait, but Trump really takes it to the next level.

  50. 50.

    Kent

    @Redshift: This is the part I don’t get. There are various Trumpie actions, not just this one, that get described in dire terms as being practically irreversible, and I don’t understand why. I know there’s a rulemaking process, and some things can’t just be cancelled right away, but other than delays, how much can one administration really lock in the next?

    It is hyperbole.  The only thing Biden can’t reverse on his own is statutory changes.  And the only one passed in the past 4 years was the Trump tax cuts.

    But done properly, this stuff not only takes time, it takes staff time and they have a bazillion other competing priorities.  So finding both the staff and the time to reverse all this bullshit is no small task.

  51. 51.

    MisterForkbeard

    @Roger Moore: As always, the answer is basically incompetence.

    An inability to plan further than 3 months out, and they couldn’t even rush this after Nov4 because they had to be publicly convinced that Trump had actually won the election.

  53. 53.

    JoyceH

    @Frankensteinbeck:

    The man is absolutely bugfuck nuts and believes things that he knows from direct experience cannot be true. It’s a narcissist trait, but Trump really takes it to the next level.

    I recall he said something months ago that made it clear that he thought that when Amazon listed something with ‘free shipping’, he didn’t realize that meant free to the BUYER and the shipper paid, he thought it meant it was absolutely free, and the Post Office delivered the package for no charge! Which of course made him furious, because he hates Amazon because Jeff Bezos owns it, and Bezos also owns the Washington Post, so Amazon is his Enemy – getting stuff shipped for FREE!

  57. 57.

    Miss Bianca

    @jonas: Maybe it’s because now Trump *can’t* tweet that McConnell suddenly finds himself able to stand up to him. Well, maybe that plus all those right-wing donors deciding to turn off the money spigots to Republican PACs.

  60. 60.

    randy khan

    @DCA:

    It sounds like OPM sent the list to the White House but it hasn’t been approved, so it easily can be disapproved (or the executive order can be reversed so the list becomes just a historical footnote, which is my bet).

  62. 62.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @Miss Bianca: I suspect it has more to do the GA and the assault on the Capitol (and the subsequent damage to fund-raising you mention) than twitter. All Republicans’ relationship with trump has been to some degree transactional, I think especially in the Senate he was despised, and McConnell in particular was never afraid of him– I’m guessing MM’s hold on his state party is strong enough to have held off a primary. Now he’s in office for at least six more years, he’d rather have the majority (hence his anger about GA), but I think McConnell may have been, and probably counts on being, the most successful minority leader in Senate history.

  66. 66.

    VOR

    @MisterForkbeard: another problem is the agencies are understaffed. My understanding is Trump hasn’t filled a lot of appointments because his #1 criteria is personal loyalty to Trump. Looking good on Fox News appears to also be a criteria, sometimes expressed as “Central Casting”. Then there are agencies like State and USDA where the Trump administration has actively tried to push out people with expertise. How many “acting” Cabinet secretaries do we have right now?

  68. 68.

    Geoboy

    @jonas: “You have to remember.  These are simple farmers.  People of the land.  The common clay of the new West.   You know…morons.”

  69. 69.

    VOR

    @VOR: answered my own question. We have 3 acting secretaries right now, at unimportant agencies like Defense, Justice, and Homeland Security. I thought the number would be higher.

  70. 70.

    What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?

    @Roger Moore:  I don’t know for a fact that Civil Service protections even need to be strengthened to protect against this. Those protections are written into statutory law. The EO was basically saying that “we can overturn statutory law by executive order because of arglebargle and that’s what this executive order does” and I have serious doubts the federal judiciary would be down with that. An EO can tinker around the edges of the law but can’t reverse it. I could be wrong about this because I’m not a lawyer. Doing it now…there’s no way they could hire replacements in time so Biden would get to hire the replacements which is the opposite of what they seem to have planned.

  73. 73.

    Bill Arnold

    @jonas:

    I was reading earlier today that Trump remains convinced that the NSA and CIA are sitting on all this damning secret intelligence on Clinton, Biden, and Obama..

    OK, I found this (axios). Did you see anything elsewhere?
    Trump had also become convinced that there were still all kinds of classified documents lying around, inside the CIA, that would harm his enemies — former President Obama, Hillary Clinton, former CIA Director John Brennan and others. He regarded Patel as somebody he could trust to do whatever he asked without challenging, slow-walking, questioning his judgment, or asking too many annoying questions.
    Does Trump know how little effort it would take to destroy him by releasing documents/recordings? And how much fun many government employees would have curating such a release for maximal effectiveness?

  74. 74.

    Geminid

    @Bill Arnold: I expect the CIA has a pretty thick file on trump, beginning with his 1985 trip to Russia if not before. NSA too. People like John Brennan and Michael Hayden aren’t supposed to talk about such things, but they give the impression that they know stuff about trump they won’t say, and they never seemed the least bit fazed by legal threats made to them by trump’s goons.

  75. 75.

    What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?

    @Steve in the ATL: LOL yes. Though one could also say “I could be wrong about this because I am a lawyer.” It’s not like they’re omniscient.

  76. 76.

    Yutsano

    @Timill: Yes, but in this case the acting personnel they were supposed to have in the first place. It should (for transition) go to the highest ranked SES person until the permanent secretary has been appointed. The acting secretary appointments under the previous administration really should have been challenged in court.

  77. 77.

    No One You Know

    @Brachiator: 
    It’s running it like a predatory capitalist who wants to sell it for parts. There was a name for that, in Michael Milken’s day.

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