THAT NICE NIKKI HALEY WOULD ALSO DESTROY THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT

There's a lot going on today -- George Santos has been expelled from the House, Sandra Day O'Connor has died, The New York Times has published a report asserting that Israeli officials knew about Hamas's October 7 attack plan well in advance and were warned in July by a female signals intelligence analyst that Hamas soldiers were conducting training exercises that matched the attack plan. (I'm sufficiently familiar with women's frequent complaints about workplace disrespect to wonder whether this warning would have been taken more seriously if the sigint analyst were a man, though that's just speculation on my part.)

But I want to talk about Catherine Rampell's latest Washington Post column, which I don't expect to get a lot of attention.

Rampell points out that Donald Trump isn't the only Republican candidate who wants to fire large numbers of career civil servants in the federal government if elected president. It's no surprise that Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy want to do this -- but until I read Rampell's column, I didn't realize that that nice Nikki Haley wants to do it too:

... Haley, who’s supposed to be the grown-up, “moderate” alternative to these histrionic boys, has offered her own more genteel-sounding version of the proposal. She has pledged to impose a “term limit” on all civil servants, so that every public worker would be fired after a maximum of five years.

Not just elected officials in Congress or the Senate. Everyone in federal government.

This sounds like a clever idea until you think about it for, oh, two seconds. It means we’d have to purge and replace every single air traffic controller every five years. Also all the nuclear physicists working for the Energy Department and rocket scientists at NASA, whose depth of expertise can’t easily be recreated on a five-year deadline.

Add to this list food-safety inspectors, who assess sanitary conditions at slaughterhouses. Statisticians who tabulate labor-market data. Epidemiologists who track outbreaks. Arabic and Farsi speakers throughout our intelligence services.

If Haley were to be elected president -- or, far more likely, were to sign on as Trump's running mate and then be elevated to the presidency because Trump could no longer serve -- I don't believe she'd put term limits on every federal employee. She'd probably leave the air traffic controllers and (most) scientists alone. Her focus would be on federal employees who do the work Republicans don't want done: regulating business, collecting rich people's taxes, ensuring that the country has clean air and clean water. Republican presidents have traditionally sabotaged agencies focused on these goals through a practice known as "regulatory capture" -- choosing agency heads who've worked for the industries they're supposed to regulate. This would be an expanded form of regulatory capture, because there wouldn't be any underlings dedicated to the intended goals of these agencies. There'd just be opponents of regulation all the way down.

Oh, and Rampell tells us that Haley has another totally moderate idea:

Haley wants to have Congress vote on every federal rule and regulation. Once again, this has the gloss of thoughtfulness, until you do the briefest of homework about its likely consequences.

Congress ... can barely get its act together to keep the lights on. Do you really want to require lawmakers to vote on every bit of minutiae usually left to subject-matter experts, such as aviation safety standards or the technical specs for mammography equipment? There are thousands of these rules issued each year.

Many of these ideas come are part of the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025. Today, Axios reports that Haley is very much aware of this plan:

We're told Project 2025 officials have briefed the Republican campaigns of Trump, Ron DeSantis, Nikki Halley and Vivek Ramaswamy — and even the independent campaign of Robert Kennedy Jr.

This is why the Koch network endorsed Haley. It's why Jamie Dimon wants Democrats to rally around her.

I'm not persuaded that Trump as president will remake America as thoroughly as pessimists like Robert Kagan fear -- I think he'll be too focused on ending his own legal troubles and exacting revenge on individual enemies. But while Haley probably won't suspend elections or throw politcal enemies in prison, she might finish the GOP project of repealing the Great Society, the New Deal, and the Progressive Era. She's not a moderate, and we shouldn't feel reassured if she agrees to run with Trump.