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Nine months later, Politico published an eye-popping account about these new appointees. Its reporter Jenny Hopkinson obtained the curricula vitae of the new Trump people. Into U.S.D.A. jobs, some of which paid nearly $80,000 a year, the Trump team had inserted a long-haul truck driver, a clerk at AT&T, a gas-company meter reader, a country-club cabana attendant, a Republican National Committee intern, and the owner of a scented-candle company, with skills like “pleasant demeanor” listed on their résumés. “In many cases [the new appointees] demonstrated little to no experience with federal policy, let alone deep roots in agriculture,” wrote Hopkinson. “Some of those appointees appear to lack the credentials, such as a college degree, required to qualify for higher government salaries.”
What these people had in common, she pointed out, was loyalty to Donald Trump.
Nine months after they’d arrived a man I’d been told was the best informed of all the department’s career employees about the haphazard transition couldn’t tell me how many of these people were still roaming the halls. And what fingerprints they left were characteristically bizarre. They sent certified letters to several senior career civil servants, for instance, telling them they were being reassigned—from jobs they were good at to jobs they knew little about. “Too close to the Obama administration is what people are saying,” noted one U.S.D.A. career staffer. They instructed the staff to stop using the phrase “climate change.” They removed the inspection reports on businesses that abused animals—roadside circuses, puppy mills, research labs—from the department’s Web site. When reporters from National Geographic contacted the U.S.D.A. to ask what was going on with animal-abuse issues, “they told us all of this information was public, except now you had to FOIA it,” said Rachael Bale. “We asked for the files, and they sent us 1,700 completely blacked-out pages.”
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Comments
It's perhaps even more shocking than the USDA one because it deals with nukes and national security.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-other-huge-scandal-mueller-brought-to-light-this-week/2017/11/01/5e05a458-bf4c-11e7-959c-fe2b598d8c00_story.html
Nice catch by Mueller & Co. on Clovis. Anyone who pays attention to science, consumer, conservation or similar news knows how ridiculous that nomination was, and likely sent a "don't confirm the know-nothing" message to their senator, but I'd never heard about his connection to the campaign and the investigation.
What could be more of an outsider to the scientific community than a non-scientist? Put Clovis in a room filled with with scientists and he'll be clearly distinguished, er, distinguishable.
Makes perfect sense to me.
https://mutualfundobserver.com/discuss/discussion/34654/michael-lewis-on-what-disasters-await-because-doe-may-be-de-funded
I take it as a given that the Trump administration is a mess. One needs a little more of a teaser than that to entice.
To address your thought that the ramifications will outlive Trump, I agree, but for a different reason. I'm not as concerned about the people he's bringing in as the people that are fleeing. The new people are so unqualified/incompetent that while they may have some success in impeding the government, they appear much less capable of remaking the government. Especially as it remains understaffed.
But the highly competent, knowledgeable and experienced staffers who are leaving are irreplaceable. Linda Greenhouse frets about this almost as an afterthought in her NYTimes column about the DOJ and abortion rights:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/09/opinion/trump-judges-courts.html
@davidrmoran. Good articles. There is also something remarkably totalitarian about these sorts of appointments that again goes beyond left or right-wing ideology. Dictators always put personal loyalty above competence in their administration. This has been true in right-wing and left-wing dictatorships. Regardless what one may think of Obama, he was very much a technocrat, and I don't think he would ever have replaced a skilled employee deeply embedded in the bureaucracy of these agencies for purely political or spiteful ends. What would be the point in doing so as these people are not the public face of these agencies and their jobs in many cases are largely apolitical? I think for instance most people regardless of political party would agree that having competent people running the agency that makes sure our nuclear weapons and facilities are safe is vital. Putting personal loyalty to the president above that competence is utterly bizarre.