For many years, I’ve been describing what my first act would be should I ever be elected President of the United States. Granted that’s unlikely in the extreme; as someone once said, “If nominated, I will not run, if elected, I will not serve.” I don’t want the job, but were I somehow thrust into it, my first act would be this:
Visit every office, every agency, every anteroom that contained employees that report to the Executive Branch. I would ask every employee therein, from directors to janitors, two questions:
“What is your purpose here?”
“What are you doing right now?”
Anyone who could not answer those questions to my satisfaction would be dismissed on the spot.
Now, cometh the DOGE. Granted they can only recommend; Elon and Vivek can’t go in and start firing people. But at least one Democrat congressman, Seth Moulton of Massachusetts, thinks that some federal employees may be heading for the exits already, perhaps anticipating their dismissal.
Democratic Massachusetts Rep. Seth Moulton said Wednesday on CNN that he believes “thousands” of federal employees could submit their resignations by January due to President-elect Donald Trump’s victory in November.
Since his win with both the Electoral College and the popular vote, Trump has steadily been announcing his nominations, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as the director of the Department of Health and Human Services, Pete Hegseth as secretary of defense, and Kash Patel as FBI director. On “CNN News Central,” host Brianna Keilar questioned the Massachusetts lawmaker about whether he has concerns about the FBI becoming politicized following reports that current FBI Director Christopher Wray resigned from his position Wednesday.
Yeah, not really seeing any downside here.
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Rep. Moulton, of course, thinks this is an awful thing. Of course, he does; he’s a Democrat, and there are few Democrats who won’t support any expansion of any level of government for any reason, world without end, amen. The same goes for taxation and spending.
But if these employees, as Moulton claims, feel so upset about Donald Trump’s winning a second term that they need to resign, well, they didn’t sign on to serve the country anyway. We can do without them. We don’t need partisanship in the civil service; we’ve seen enough of that in recent years with the Justice Department. Moulton continues, while speaking to host Brianna Keilar:
“Brianna, that’s exactly the word for it. Trump wants to politicize the FBI, to turn it back to the days of J. Edgar Hoover, where the FBI has its own really lawless agenda, where the FBI is a tool of the state to persecute Americans, not to actually uphold the law for everybody in our land. So it is very dangerous. The calculation that Chris Wray made when he decided to resign is a calculation that hundreds, thousands of federal employees are making right now all across Washington and all across the country,” Moulton said.
Oh, the irony! Christopher Wray faced a choice: Resign or be fired, and he faced that choice because he was part of the overt weaponization of the Justice Department, and that weaponization was aimed primarily at Donald Trump. Well, Donald Trump is back in office, and we can hardly blame him for not trusting people like Wray – and wanting to see them gone from government service.
This is a head start on the DOGE’s tasks, and if you ask me, that’s an unalloyed good thing. “Thousands” of federal employees would be what I would call “a good start.”
Furthermore, if anyone doesn’t think the federal government doesn’t need to be pared back, I’ve got 36 trillion compelling reasons to do so.
