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There are two million people in the civil service, but how many of those actually need to be sidelined?
To start with, there’s lots of janitors, low level auditors, air traffic controllers, secretaries, etc. employed by the federal government. Obviously these people don’t generate policy, and they don’t really enforce it either.
Then on the enforcement wing, you’ve got lots of cops who are mostly not resistance libs. Yes, there’s EPA permitting officers and DOJ lawyers, but you can tell a lot of them to sit in a corner by the simple expedient of not assigning them any work. Ken Paxton as attorney general brings with him an inner circle which can take over most of the DOJ lawyers’ jobs at the cost of some mild corruption- and the rest of it can be assigned to the compliant dozen or so. It’s a very small portion of people which need to be moved to rubber rooms, and there are already people listed to replace them.
I have worked in a federal government agency for about ten years which employs over 5,000 people. It is possible to strongarm policymakers with enough political will. But it’s not easy. This is how you might do it within one presidential administration:
Identify those individuals in charge of policymaking within the agency. At my agency it’s a small department within a small division, constituting about 25 people. Fire them all. Also, fire every high-ranking attorney in each of the major offices as well as headquarters. This would be another 50-100 people. Don’t fire the executive leadership—they got there because they follow orders well. All you need to do is rewrite the orders and they might grumble but they know well how to fall in line.
Immediately abolish the public sector union associated with the agency. Do not negotiate, strip employees of all collective bargaining rights and grievance processes. Every single federal government agency’s union is captured by the PMC Left. The only exception is perhaps for those representing law enforcement and border patrol, because those are Red Tribe heavy. (I suspect this is why some people want to reclassify agency employees as contractors.) The unions have long been captured, they must be destroyed.
Loosen hiring procedures to de-emphasize college degrees as a requirement to apply for federal government jobs. These are just credentials designed to benefit academia, which is also hopelessly captured by the PMC Left. Do this on day one. After four years the effects on employee hiring and attrition will be evident.
Identify all agency employees who have ever donated to establishment Democratic or Republican political campaigns. Fire them all. Thankfully it’s easy to do this courtesy of the FEC and ActBlue and other PACs that publish donor information no matter how small.
I can attest that more federal government employees than you think are Republicans, perhaps even conservative/MAGA types. Problem is they don’t hold the power. A lot of it depends on where the agency offices are located. People who work in DC are much more likely to be Blue Tribe than people who work in Texas. That’s why the Trump administration briefly floated the idea of relocating headquarter offices outside the DC beltway. The power centers of these agencies—the headquarters—are in DC, and it takes a certain kind of slug bureaucrat to live in DC or choose to work there. Move the headquarters to Billings or Pensacola or Nashville and you’ll get a different crop of loyalists for sure.
And critically, we know that Trump's people are actually preparing to do this - Schedule F removes civil service protection from policy-making civil servants across the Government, and during the last 3 months of the Trump administration the system appeared to be co-operating with the process of drawing up a list of affected posts. And Project 2025 is drawing up a list of reliable MAGA Republicans to replace anyone who needs firing.
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This has long been one of my favorite reform proposal, but it's hard to make it stick. Every agency out there feels like their highest imperative is to ensure that their overlords "understand" what they're trying to do, finds value in their organization, and keeps the resource train flowing. So it is not uncommon that even when the bulk of an agency is actually located elsewhere, their leadership either all have offices in DC or spend significant amounts of time "traveling" there. So, one likely immediate consequence is that this "travel" to DC will ramp up even more, such that agency leadership essentially all have "temporary offices" there that become less and less temporary. They'll delegate more internal power down the chain as their jobs become more "externally-focused". The result may be a bit of a rift between agency upper/lower-upper management. In the balance, how does this actually affect the day-to-day operation of the agency? It probably depends a lot on agency specifics and how much their upper/upper-middle layers cohere through the process.
In sum, I sort of thing that just firing and turning management into political appointees accomplishes a certain amount, while relocation sort of severs upper management from agency operations, which may actually reduce the effectiveness of turning those folks into political appointees. The permanent bureaucracy already does a lot to isolate political appointees to make sure they can't "stir up too much trouble", and that may actually be a bit easier to do if they can just ship them all off to DC all the time, while they take the real reins of power over day-to-day agency operations.
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Thank you, AACQ’d. The main thing I want to add is that from connections to Texas state politics, I’m pretty sure that at least the border patrol union is solidly pro-red tribe. IIRC local/state level law enforcement unions frequently are as well, it would stand to reason that at least some other federal law enforcement unions are red tribe/Republican.
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There are two million people in the civil service, but how many of those actually need to be sidelined?
Pretty much all of them, given that AIUI they are > 95% solidly left-wing.
Disagree, at least at the Federal level — and even if they aren't all resistance libs, most of the rest are the sort who will follow whatever orders given because they've got bills to pay and can't lose their precious, precious pension.
And when they refuse to do so? Or even refuse to acknowledge the one doing the assigning or lack thereof?
And when the DOJ collectively refuse to recognize Paxton's appointment or authority, have him and his "inner circle" locked out of the building, and proceed on without them?
Did you read my comment? Lots of these people are irrelevant. TSA agents, janitors, receptionists, the payroll lady, air traffic controllers- their political leans don’t matter very much at all. Most federal employees are doing perfectly standard average jobs that don’t involve making policy.
When the people giving the orders are trump appointees, this works in favor of trump.
The national guard breaks the building down and they’re all fired like Reagan did air traffic controllers in the eighties, plus lots of them are arrested for wildcat striking. Trump raises millions off of calling it a ‘socialist coup’.
I know, you’re going to say ‘but what if the national guard refuses’ at that point you’re talking about an actual civil war in which the US probably Balkanizes and believe me, the successor states are probably not paragons of shittlibery, nor does the Virginia federal civil servant class retain the ability to pay their mortgages in this scenario.
No, it won't be a war, because one side has pretty much all the power. The Trump side will just be a bunch of disorganized randos engaging in uncoordinated, aimless attempts at lone-wolf terrorism, and so ordinary civilian law enforcement, the FBI and the ATF and so on, will be quite sufficient to win this "civil war" and put down any and all "rebellion," no F-15s or nuclear weapons needed.
Aside from what @hydroacetylene says below, I find it simultaneously adorable and vaguely terrifying (because they might just be stupid enough to try it) that blues seem to think that forcibly occupying Montana or Texas would be easier than occupying Afghanistan.
Forcibly occupying anything in the USA is basically impossible because we have lots of disaffected males and also more guns than people.
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Ordinary civilian law enforcement is incapable of handling the serious militia groups(and let’s remember that the vast majority of the federal law enforcement apparatus is actually red DHS and not blue DOJ) and the realistic outcome of military backing in such an endeavor is that the chain of command collapses. Plus the bigger red states actually stand to benefit from a federal government with no state capacity to speak of, and have resources on par with average European countries.
I’ll believe that if the situation is out of control enough, the DC national guard mutinies and refuses to obey trump’s orders. Do you think a red state national guard won’t just take their place? If trump faces an actual mutiny do you expect the troops deployed to operation lone star to remain there when he needs them? You realize that the marine corps is pretty red, and trump would literally be their legal commander, right? ‘Team red’s resources during the American version of the auspicious incident’ are not zero.
You mean the "militia groups" created, run, and staffed by undercover FBI as a sting/entrapment/false flag operation (to meet the unrealized demand for a "domestic terror threat" to justify their budgets)? Or the club of a handful of forty-somethings with beer guts and too much tacti-cool gear who shoot guns together some weekends? Because they're all one or the other.
Plus, I'm old enough to remember Waco. People will occasionally point out the lack of similar incidents more recently as evidence that the government is less capable of such suppression, but they've got it backwards. AIUI, there were several prior points where local law enforcement could have arrested Koresh and various other members of the Branch Davidians on outstanding warrants or local charges — and wanted to — but the Feds kept holding them back. Because Reno et al wanted to round up the whole group in one fell swoop as a big show for the media. And what they learned from the resulting incident was not to do that part. The reason you don't see Waco standoffs is because our government successfully nips such groups in the bud long before they get to the "build a compound" stage.
The average American, thanks to pop culture and lousy history classes, totally misunderstands how revolts work. As I once saw it put, a revolution is not going from one government to zero governments to one, but from one government to two governments to one. Every successful rebellion is a set of parallel governing institutions. And see the likes of the German Peasants' Rebellion for when angry civilians, no matter how numerous, fail to organize sufficiently.
My parents, for example, are firmly convinced that the American Revolution consisted in its entirety of random disorganized colonial civilians each, on their own, grabbing their hunting rifles and running willy-nilly to pick off Redcoats, who did absolutely nothing in response but stand there in their nice ranks in open fields waiting to die while impotently protesting about how "this just isn't cricket" until there were none left. Notwithstanding that the Continental Army was indeed a real, organized army — particularly after von Steuben got done whipping them into shape — and the local militias, even as part-time citizen-soldiers, were not just disorganized "lone wolves" running off and doing their own thing.
Then try reading what gets written at places like Sarah Hoyt's blog comments section. They'll talk about how Biden stole the election, "the Marxists" want to gulag us all, and the need for the Second Amendment… and about how "we're the people that when someone orders us to breathe, we suffocate to death" and "that's our superpower" How when SHTF, everyone just needs to independently hunker down in their own homesteads waiting to shoot the "jack-booted Commies" when they come to pick us off one-by-one, "because that's how we win." When one person pointed out the eventual need in such a scenario to eventually begin organizing, everyone pounced, one responding about how it didn't matter how much they might be in agreement, 'if anyone shows up at my door talking about "joining up," it doesn't matter how close of a friend they are, I'll shoot them dead on the spot, because anyone who says something like that is The Enemy.' "We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately" and "Join, or die"? That's pinko glowie talk! Red-blooded Real Americans will never organize, never join together, never obey any sort of chain of command, never recognize any superior officer or commander but Christ Himself.
Except, again, why would the 2 million plus lose any "state capacity" from ditching the 535 ever-rotating, merely-temporary warm bodies in Congress and the handful of similar at 1600 Pennsylvania?
At which ranks, though? I've seen people talk about why coups are usually carried out by colonels, with respect to why it's not anyone of higher rank (namely, generals are political creatures), but there are also reasons why it's not anyone lower in rank.
And who is more important to obey, a distant boss all the way up the chain and hundreds or thousands of miles away… or your immediate superior who is right there face-to-face (with MPs and a sidearm)?
Disobeying an order you think is unlawful is the right thing to do… if the inevitable court-martial agrees with you. If they don't, then have fun at Leavenworth. If you're a tip-of-the-spear "grunt," and you and the rest of your unit all disobey your immediate superior so as to obey a distant Commander-in-Chief, that's one thing with regards to your chances. But if it's just you and a couple of other guys while the rest of the base refuses to join your "mutiny in support of a would-be dictator's auto-coup against Our Democracy," well, then it's either Leavenworth or a coffin. So you better be sure that you've got enough of your fellows on your side before you risk it… but you can't be sure, because this isn't the sort of thing you can talk about. And soldiers are not immune to propaganda, either. If every media report is that only a few malcontent traitors have joined the Trumpist coup while the bulk of our brave men, women, and non-binary people in uniform hold true to their sacred oaths to defend Our Democracy from this domestic enemy…
I've read plenty of online discussions about "Civil War II" and coup/counter-coup scenarios. And many a time, an active or former serviceman has chimed in to talk about how, while this sort of thing might happen in other countries in this hemisphere, It Can Never Happen Here, because the American soldier is a different breed, a nobler class of warrior who will always put his duty ahead of his personal political allegiances and opinions, and for whom the military's absolute non-intervention in domestic politics is eternally sacrosanct. And on talk of state/local allegiances, with comparisons to the past civil war, you'll get more responses about how things are different now, how the Army learned from that war and made immediate changes to ensure that nothing like General Lee will ever happen again.
But "Team blue's" resources are so much more vast that they might as well be.
As for the perennial Afghanistan comparisons, it's one thing to fight halfassedly for ambitious-but-vague non-military goals, with your troops restrained by unworkable RoEs put in place by lawyers and by a State Department for whom the real enemy is the Pentagon, when you're halfway around the world, and can safely call it quits and go back home at any time without anybody near the top suffering even the tiniest of career consequences. It's another when "home" is where you're fighting. The consequences for losing a civil war/revolution are generally a lot more severe and lethal ("you win or you die" and all that).
While trying to turn clannish medieval Muslim goat-herders into modern, WEIRD liberal democrats isn't exactly a task soldiers are well-equipped to carry out (or anybody, for that matter), "suppressing domestic revolt" has been a core competency of standing armies for as long as there's been standing armies. It's like the main reason the Founding Fathers didn't want one.
Of modern wars, better comparison to hypothetical Second American Revolution/Civil War would be Syria.
Place where pious and traditional rural red rebels rose against godless coastal urbanite blue oppressors (and lost very badly).
It is one of best documented conflicts of history, but few people want to study and learn from this immensely depressing story.
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The Bundy's won. The oath keepers have pushed around state governments, and won, semiregularly. Civilian law enforcement regularly claims they couldn't handle these groups when SHTF, and not always in the context of making budget requests. Everything we know about oathkeepers and 3%ers is that it would take calling out the actual army to stop them if they got frisky, and ordinary law enforcement would just give up.
Marine field-grade officers are probably not as red as marine NCO's, but still pretty red. That graph of political contributions by profession showed Marines to be literally one of the reddest jobs in the country, on par with "housewife"(this is probably an effect of conservative couples routing paying bills through the woman). Officers are usually more politically active than enlisted, so we can assume that this points to marine officers(the majority of whom, for mathematical reasons, are company and field grade officers who would be making the actual decisions in this kind of countercoup scenario) being a very red grouping.
The most likely scenario of an actual literal civil war being about to break out is team blue panicking, the red state coalition national guard army(that's what operation Lonestar is) on the Texas-Mexico border being readied for rapid deployment against coup attempts, mass capital flight to Texas and Florida, individual field grade officers picking sides, and the west coast states' hinterlands slipping out of government control(which is already tenuous). If you expect risk averse bureaucrats in NoVa suburbs to call this bluff, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you. The simple fact of the matter is that a civil war would be a lot worse for the blues than the reds. If the federal government collapses in infighting Texas and Florida can go "heads I win, tails you lose", California would suddenly have to invade its neighbors while fighting an insurgency against their main recruiting population.
And don't give me "but the two million can make their own laws! we're already a dictatorship!". Laws are words on paper and most of those two million are, like, mailmen. The actual hard power capabilities of the two teams are pretty even, team red can probably replenish a lot better and is 1,000x as geographically cohesive, and besides, how do you expect a straight fight between cops and diversity coordinators to go? "But the girl answering the phones at IRS office #498 is gonna do whatever she can to support the rule of the experts!!!" No she fucking won't, she'll go back to work the second Trump makes an announcement about #resistance striking being an illegal wildcat action, she got bills to pay.
Fed trap operation. Astroturf false-flag fake opposition.
If colonels lead coups, then make colonels as political as the generals. Then lieutenant colonels. Grunt trigger-pullers may be Red, but you don't get promoted to field-grade officer rank without being Blue.
But it won't break out. The military will follow over a century and a half of tradition of non-involvement, and law enforcement will mop up the disorganized civilian resistance. It will be over well before it gets near such a stage.
Again, not a coup attempt, but our brave civil servants lawfully defending Our Sacred Democracy against a would-be Fascist takeover.
Except they won't, because my whole point is that they're all on one side, save for a few merely-elected revolving door figureheads so deluded as to think what the civics textbook says about how our government works bears any resemblance to how DC actually works, and thus failing to do their job being the Washington Generals to the left's Globetrotters.
No, they're not. We on the right are utterly, hopelessly outmatched. We lost the fight completely a long time ago. "Team Red" is totally, utterly doomed.
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You are grossly overestimating how politically motivated and left-wing the average fed is. Federal employees organizations are overwhelming Democratic (unsurprisingly, given the GOP's traditional hostility to organized labor and the Democrats' favorability); actual federal employees are nowhere near as unanimous. Here is a Gallup poll surveying the partisan alignment of Federal employees (among other things). It's older than I'd like, but it illustrates the point. If anti-Trump civil servants tried to coordinate a strike against his administration they'd just fail.
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