Wednesday, July 20, 2016

TRUMP PROPOSAL: TRAVELGATE, BUT FOR EVERY AGENCY

Gosh, this doesn't sound extreme at all:
If he wins the presidency, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump would seek to purge the federal government of officials appointed by Democratic President Barack Obama and could ask Congress to pass legislation making it easier to fire public workers, Trump ally, Chris Christie, said on Tuesday....

“As you know from his other career, Donald likes to fire people,” Christie told a closed-door meeting with dozens of donors at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, according to an audio recording obtained by Reuters and two participants in the meeting.
Remember, the administration of Bill Clinton fired seven people -- seven -- in the White House Travel Office in 1993, employees the president was legally entitled to fire. But because the move was seen as an attempt to give jobs to cronies, this became a massive pseudo-scandal that led to investigations by the FBI, the Justice Department, the General Accounting Office, the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee, the Whitewater Independent Counsel's office, and the White House itself. The books were closed on the final investigation only after seven years. Trump apparently wants to do this across all agencies. I guess if you're going to do something like this, do it in a big and brazen way, and boast about it. Or just be a Republican. Nothing will happen to you.

More:
... Trump's transition advisers fear that Obama may convert these appointees to civil servants, who have more job security than officials who have been politically appointed. This would allow officials to keep their jobs in a new, possibly Republican, administration, Christie said....

"One of the things I have suggested to Donald is that we have to immediately ask the Republican Congress to change the civil service laws. Because if they do, it will make it a lot easier to fire those people," Christie said.

He said firing civil servants was "cumbersome" and "time-consuming."
Civil service, schmivil service. We want an all-crony government, dammit!

Oh, and:
Christie added that the Trump team wants to let businesspeople serve in government part time without having to give up their jobs in the private sector.
As Vox's Dylan Matthews notes:
... the problems with this idea are pretty clear. Regulatory capture -- in which regulatory structures are dominated by people sympathetic to or with ties to the industry they’re regulating -- is a major problem in federal agencies, particularly with financial and environmental regulators, and most analysts place some of the blame on the ease with which, say, oil company employees can get jobs regulating the oil sector and then go right back to oil companies after their time in government is over. The Christie/Trump proposal would allow that kind of revolving-door to take place without actual revolving. Regulators could be working for the companies they’re regulating as they’re regulating them.
According to a mass delusion in the mainstream media, Donald Trump is a new kind of Republican, one who isn't trying to custom-tailor laws and regulations on behalf of big business. But here you go -- this is the plan. No continuity, ideological purity, and maximal cronyism.