As El Cheato’s transition teams move into federal agencies, thousands of civil servants are scrambling to insulate themselves from the new administration’s promised purge. Via the Washington Post:
Federal employees are scrubbing their Facebook and X accounts for any negative posts about Trump. Some, including at least one prominent official who testified in Trump’s first impeachment inquiry, are weighing putting in retirement papers, while others maneuver to transfer to seemingly safer agencies. D.C. recruiting firms are seeing booming business from those looking for private-sector work.
Meanwhile, some agencies have moved to reclassify jobs with titles that could clash with Trump’s agenda, especially those promoting Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, boosting environmental justice and fighting the effects of climate change. For the first time, some civil servants are taking out liability insurance to cover lawyers if they’re demoted or fired. And in a rare alliance, outgoing Biden administration appointees are joining forces with labor unions to extend collective bargaining agreements, locking in benefits before the incoming administration can seek to undo them.
Before Trump takes office Jan. 20, career staffers are racing to outmaneuver his plans to gut and radically reshape the nonpartisan bureaucracy of 2.3 million. The president-elect has promised to fire thousands of professionals and replace them with political loyalists, slash trillions of dollars from the federal budget, eliminate departments and relocate others away from what he derides as the “deep state” of intransigent bureaucrats in the capital. Russ Vought, Trump’s pick to run the Office of Management and Budget, told supporters earlier this year that Trump’s second term would “put the bureaucrats in trauma.”
Employees are afraid of retribution. What an inspiring leader King Bongo Brains will be!
