Donald Trump, Bureaucracy Apprentice NYT Edit.
'Every election year, politicians of both parties portray Washington as a Gomorrah of influence peddling, goldbricking and waste, funded by hardworking taxpayers. But to the civil servants who process Social Security payments, hunt tax cheats, track terrorists, enforce environmental laws, maintain national parks or test experimental drugs, the federal government is not just the source of a reliable paycheck but an honorable mission.
Republicans especially delight in belittling the bureaucracy and complaining about what they call federal workers’ “lifetime tenure,” the Civil Service rules that help shield them from political interference. President-elect Donald Trump has no governing experience, arriving in Washington with so little understanding of the federal government that he thought he would inherit President Obama’s White House staff. This naïveté, combined with his advisers’ and his party’s ideological hostility to government, has led to bizarre moves that have unnerved the federal work force.
Mr. Trump has declared, with evident hallucination, that he can pay off the $19 trillion national debt by targeting federal agency “waste, fraud and abuse.” The best measure of such savings, in the form of “improper payments,” such as Social Security paid to dead people, maxes out at about $125 billion, and the government is already working to recoup that.
He has promised a blanket hiring freeze, even though the size of the civilian federal work force has been declining over the last 50 years. Mr. Trump has said that having 10 percent fewer workers would make it easier to police them for corruption, as if they were the housekeeping staff in one of his hotels instead of a labor force of 2.5 million. . .
In time, Mr. Trump may want to take a broad look at the bureaucracy, seeking ways to make the overall machinery more effective, much as President Bill Clinton asked Vice President Al Gore to do. There are knowledgeable people in the Civil Service eager to help in this task. But the way to engage them is not to target them for their views and belittle the mission of their agencies. That approach invites certain failure.'
http://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/02/opinion/donald-trump-bureaucracy-apprentice.html?
