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This week’s unprecedented FBI raid on former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home is just one more reason Republicans must fight harder to reform a politicized and powerful bureaucracy.
For three years, the bogus Russia-collusion conspiracy theory helped derail Trump’s presidency, but the problem wasn’t just the lies of his Democratic foes and their media cheerleaders. The willingness of FBI agents and Department of Justice officials to pursue that partisan plot demonstrated that the idea these agencies are staffed by apolitical civil servants is a myth.
Though Attorney General Merrick Garland probably ordered the banana-republic-style effort to treat a former president and likely future political foe like a criminal, the willingness of civil servants to go along with it made it possible.
The travesty demonstrates anew the importance of reforming the civil service. Laws that were intended to ensure those who hold government jobs aren’t playing politics are instead protecting a status quo in which Democrats can count on bureaucrats to aid them and sabotage Republicans.
The “deep state” is no right-wing myth. While administrations come and go, the more than 2 million people who work for the federal government are largely immovable objects who cannot be fired except for cause and, as the Obama-era IRS scandal (among other incidents) indicated, not always then either.
Lois Lerner and other federal civil-service employees targeting conservative nonprofits exposed just how tight the Democrats’ grip on the administrative state is.
