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by diogocp 487 days ago
Well, the problem is that they are not "largely apolitical".

They should be, but if they aren't, and if they are incapable of faithfully executing orders that go against their political preferences, they should be fired.

The loss of institutional knowledge is unfortunate, but the loss of democratic control over the bureaucracy is unacceptable.
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alistairSH 487 days ago
Except that's largely not true - government agencies always (with very rare exception) implement the will of Congress, as directed by the President.

Never (in modern times) have rank-and-file government employees been required to pledge fealty to the president (vs the Constitution). That's happening now.

Never (in modern times) has the President purged massive swaths of agencies with whom he's had run-ins in the past (DoJ, FBI, etc). Or, in the case of USAID, it's Musk taking revenge because they had the nerve to investigate Starling outages over Ukraine.

Much of what we're seeing today is petty revenge.

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diogocp 487 days ago
> Except that's largely not true - government agencies always (with very rare exception) implement the will of Congress, as directed by the President.

That was indeed the norm. When Trump became President in 2017, things changed. It became politically acceptable to be political. [1]

I don't know why things changed. It coincided with a period of increasing political polarization, but some of it can only be described as Trump derangement syndrome.

What is clear is that things did change, and dramatically so. Unelected bureaucrats came to believe that their understanding of "the national interest" superseeded that of the elected President, and that that justified not just dissent, but insubordination and sabotage. Democracy cannot work like this.

What is happening now is the logical consequence of the short-sighted actions of these people 4-8 years ago.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/05/opinion/trump-white-house... / archived: https://archive.ph/jROnq

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ModernMech 486 days ago
> It became politically acceptable to be political. [1]

Miles Taylor was a political appointee, not a nonpartisan career federal employee.

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