LawGov.net
Quickly after his election, Jen Psaki, then a transition advisor, said career civil servants were “the heart and soul of government” and it was a priority for Biden to rebuild federal agencies that “wouldn't function without the thousands of people who have served for decades.”
Ten careerists in the Homeland Security Department were listed on a “watchlist” of “America’s most subversive immigration bureaucrats.” Individual employees are finding themselves called out by name in an effort to “putthem in trauma.”
After an extended standoff in which Trump refused to sign memoranda of understanding with various parts of the Biden administration, the former and future president last week reached an agreement with the White House that will allow his landing teams to physically enter federal offices.
There remains a significant hurdle to that process, however: Trump has still not signed an agreement with the Biden White House, nor the General Services Administration, the federal agency that manages the presidential transition, that would allow those landing teams to deploy.
Designed to accommodate clerks processing forms, and then amended in the 1960s to appease federal unions, the civil service system is a rusty industrial age machine disconnected from performance and repellant to highly qualified people.
Trump skirted a question about whether he would’ve done anything differently on Jan. 6, 2021, when a mob of his supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol where lawmakers were certifying Joe Biden’s election win.