I read extensively writers arguing their points of view from the left of center. Any experienced reader of mine knows that I believe you must understand what the people believe who occupy the opposing domain to your personal policy beliefs. You must attempt to understand their positions. If you can gain clarity in those positions and still disagree, you are typically in a much better position to argue against them. Recently, their beliefs were unmasked by a noted columnist on a central policy discussion in the public arena. Rare clarity has been provided.
As you may know, I don’t think for the most part the Left is evil. I think they are sadly misguided in their analysis of public policy positions. I believe quite often they either omit facts because of their unwillingness to engage people with opposing opinions or their logic is deeply flawed. That is what leads to them expressing their views in nonsensical manners, ala Kammy Harris.
On this occasion a major opinion writer at a significant publication explained his thinking regarding Trump’s method of auditing the expenditures at a variety of government agencies and conclusions that were offered by his team headed by Elon Musk. The gentleman is Perry Bacon Jr. of the Washington Post. Bacon authored a column entitled Trump’s War on the Civil Service https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/02/04/trump-war-civil-service-federal-workers/.
Bacon starts with this statement, “Why do we need a nonpartisan civil service? First of all, and most importantly, it helps ensure we have great workers doing important jobs. The idea of working for their country appeals to many scientists, engineers, lawyers, and others who could probably make much more money in the private sector.”
We will delve into the nonsense of nonpartisanship later in the column but let’s address the fallacy of this idea first. The vast majority of government workers today make more money than private industry employees, particularly if you include the value of the fringe benefits — including lifetime healthcare benefits and government funded pension plans that are in contrast to the private industry pension plans which are employee funded. Yes, there are good people who work for the government at lower wages than they can get in private industry, but often they are doing this work for limited periods to gain experience which allows them to leverage that to a higher income in the private sector.
Bacon apparently still lives in the delusion that is quite often just an out-and-out lie that government employees are underpaid.
There is the moment of clarity. Bacon writes, “Nonpartisan civil servants are an important policy check on presidents — and not just Republican presidents or Trump. In a country of 50 states, thousands of cities and more than 340 million people, Congress can’t write laws that exactly specify what should happen in any given situation. So, the implementation of laws is always contested. Civil servants aren’t explicitly tied to a particular party or president. So, though I don’t think civil servants (or anyone else) are fully objective, career government employees often have more useful biases than political appointees.”
Bacon clarifies two things. One, that Congress writes these laws in ambiguous ways and with indefinite funding directions. He believes that our unelected civil servants should be making decisions as to how to apply the law and direct the funds. That is the essence of the discussion of the argument against DOGE.
Members of Congress are out on the streets howling about the fact it is not Trump’s right to define where the money goes. The Constitution defines it as Congress, but when Congress passes a law and defines the funding in broad strokes, it is left to the Executive branch to administer the allocations.
The essence of Bacon’s communication is his second clarification. He clearly states the career public employees are better equipped to handle the decisions about where the funds should be allocated than our elected President and his hand-selected representatives. He then states they have a new classification of bias – useful biases (his italics).
Which leads us to the discussion of biases and nonpartisanship. This was amplified by a concurrent column in the New York Times by five former Treasury Secretaries https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/10/opinion/treasure-secretaries-doge-musk.html. Other than the inflammatory headline they had to endorse that “Our Democracy is Under Siege” they were unable to draft one former Republican Treasury Secretary. If our democracy were truly under siege, one would think they would be able to convince one, just one, Republican to go along with them.
They make an amazingly stupid statement, and I don’t use that word lightly. I hardly ever call someone stupid. Most of the time people are just ignorant of the facts which is wholly different than being stupid. Their stupid statement is this, “The nation’s payment system has historically been operated by a very small group of nonpartisan career civil servants.” This echoes Bacon use of the word “nonpartisan.” These five should know better. Bacon is just a poorly educated person who graduated from Yale and lives in a bubble. These five actually ran the financial arm of our federal government. If they thought that every career employee they supervised did not come to the table with their own biases (serious biases), they are dangerously stupid and should never again hold a government position of responsibility.
One could easily state that the subjects of this column are all people of the Left. Since the vast majority of federal government employees hold similar views to theirs then those people are just enlightened and not biased. Which is the focal point of the problem in the first place? Every person comes to the table from a partisan point of view.
The only people who should be allowed to express those partisan points of view are the duly elected President and his hand-picked individuals. If you don’t like those views as a federal employee, you should resign your position but not complain or undermine the decisions of the people empowered by the American citizens to make those decisions.
Yes, we have a constitutional crisis. It is the elected officials (members of Congress) trying to undermine Executive branch individuals under direction of the President and the partisan federal employees attempting to express their own views through stalling the actions of the President.
We now know what the opposition thinks in their own words. If anyone is a danger to our democracy it is them.
