The word “insurrection” has been liberally applied in the press to describe the January 6, 2021, Capitol Hill riot that ended with intrusion by demonstrators into the Capitol Building. If the word “insurrection” can be applied there, then how about to the current efforts of federal bureaucrats to insulate themselves and their chosen policies from the control of newly re-elected President Trump?

In this post on October 1 (title: “The Greater ‘Threat To Democracy’ — Part III: Democrats Rule Even If Republicans Win”), I discussed multiple instances of efforts within the Biden administration to insulate its policies from getting changed by a new administration elected by the voters. Examples discussed in that post included efforts at NIH and EPA to entrench the idea that “The Science” somehow requires continuation of the policies of the current administration on things like Covid and climate change. In that post, I promised more examples to come. Here is a small roundup:

Ability to fire federal workers in “policy-making” positions

During his first term, President Trump continually struggled with a hostile bureaucracy that resisted implementation of his policies. After almost four years of this struggle, Trump ultimately came up with a strategy for dealing with the resistance; but unfortunately the strategy finally crystallized just days before Trump was defeated for re-election in November 2020.

It was on October 21, 2020 that Trump issued an Executive Order titled “Executive Order on Creating Schedule F in the Excepted Service.” The idea was to designate people in the Executive branch “in positions of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating character.” The list of such people would be called “Schedule F.” The Executive Order states that the President must have “appropriate management oversight regarding this select cadre of professionals” in order to carry out his constitutional duty of “[f]aithful execution of the law.” Therefore, these workers would not be subject to so-called “civil service” protection and could be fired at will.

This Executive Order came so late in Trump’s first term that it was not fully implemented before he left office. Of course, Biden reversed this Executive Order promptly upon taking office. But the federal bureaucrats have had little doubt that this time around Trump (or any other Republican winner) would re-implement Schedule F, or something very close to it, at the outset of his term. Thus, efforts to thwart any potential incoming Republican President on this subject have been underway within the Biden administration for a year and more.

A publication oriented to federal employees called Government Executive has reports on some of these efforts from September 15, 2023, and from April 4 and October 28, 2024. From the September 2023 piece:

The Office of Personnel Management on Friday announced that it is proposing new regulations aimed at hamstringing future administrations from reviving a controversial plan to strip tens of thousands of federal workers of their civil service protections. . . . OPM’s newly proposed regulations, which will be published Monday in the Federal Register, seek to at least slow down a future administration from reviving Schedule F. It stipulates that when a federal employee’s job is converted from the competitive service to the excepted service, the employee retains “the status and civil service protections they had already accrued,” unless they voluntarily transfer into an excepted service position.

By late October 2024, Government Executive was reporting that the Bidenauts were issuing new “guidance” under these regulations to fine tune their efforts to stop a new administration from changing government policy:

The Office of Personnel Management last week issued new guidance to agencies as they implement regulations finalized earlier this year strengthening guard rails on the conversion of career federal workers out of the competitive service and into or across categories of the excepted service. . . . [The guidance furthers] the Biden administration’s efforts to rescind Schedule F and insulate the federal workforce from future efforts to erode the nonpartisan merit system. . . .

The business about the “nonpartisan merit system” is particularly rich. A good indicator of the extent of “non-partisan-ness” among federal employees is that in the recent election Kamala Harris won 92% of the vote in the District of Columbia.

To its credit, Government Executive expresses doubt that these regulatory efforts can succeed in thwarting a renewed implementation of Schedule F. Nevertheless, you can be sure that the affected government employees will fight to the death to keep their prerogatives to defeat the will of the voters.

Ginning up press reports of “terror and fear” in the federal workforce

Readers are undoubtedly aware that President-elect Trump has announced the naming of Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to chair a new Department of Government Efficiency, charged with identifying areas of federal waste that can be cut. In the weeks since that announcement, Musk has used his widely-followed X account to give some specific examples of ridiculous government waste, including naming names of federal offices and employees in question. The names of the agencies and of the bureaucrats are already public, if relatively obscure. Musk’s highlighting them on his X account shines a spotlight. This has prompted employees in question to run to sympathetic outlets, like CNN, claiming that Musk is “sowing terror and fear” and putting people “in harm’s way.”

For example, here is a CNN piece from November 27 with the headline “Elon Musk publicized the names of government employees he wants to cut. It’s terrifying federal workers.” In the piece CNN gives some examples of Musk calling out ridiculous government waste on his X account:

One of the posts reads: “I don’t think the US taxpayers should pay for the employment of a ’Director of Climate Diversification (she/her)’ at the US International Development Finance Corporation,” with a partial screengrab of an employee and her location. . . . Another woman, who serves as senior advisor on environmental justice and climate change at the Department of Health and Human Services, was another Musk target. . . . The office first launched at Health and Human Services under the Biden administration in 2022.

CNN does not provide dates or links for the Musk tweets. But it does provide this reaction from the president of a government-employees’ labor union:

“These tactics are aimed at sowing terror and fear at federal employees,” said Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents more than 800,000 of the 2.3 million civilian federal employees. “It’s intended to make them fearful that they will become afraid to speak up.”

And CNN offers this comment of its own:

Musk has done this kind of thing before – and it’s led to real danger for the people named.

Here’s my comment: federal employees work for the public, and the names of senior federal employees are already public. They are not entitled to have their names and functions hidden from the people they work for on a claim of “fear” or “danger.” The public nature comes with the job. The people are allowed to know who you are and what you are up to, most especially if what you do is ridiculous and wasteful.

Pentagon officials discussing disobeying Trump orders

Another piece from CNN, this one from November 8, has the headline “Pentagon officials discussing how to respond if Trump issues controversial orders.” The subject of the piece is various Pentagon officials “strategizing” and “gaming” about what to do if the new administration does something they don’t like. Excerpt:

Officials are now gaming out various scenarios as they prepare for an overhaul of the Pentagon. “We are all preparing and planning for the worst-case scenario, but the reality is that we don’t know how this is going to play out yet,” one defense official said. Trump’s election has also raised questions inside the Pentagon about what would happen if the president issued an unlawful order, particularly if his political appointees inside the department don’t push back. “Troops are compelled by law to disobey unlawful orders,” said another defense official.

The CNN piece and others of similar ilk prompted a letter from Senator Tom Cotton to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin on November 25. John Hinderaker at PowerLine on November 28 has the full text of the letter. Here is an excerpt from Cotton’s letter:

I write to express my concern that Pentagon officials are seeking to undermine President Trump’s incoming administration. It appears that partisans and obstructionists inside the Department of Defense are laying groundwork to defy or circumvent President Trump’s plans for both military and civil-service reform. . . . You . . . issued a message to the department the day after the election commenting that the military will follow “lawful orders” from the new president—a thinly veiled and baseless insinuation that President Trump will issue unlawful orders. . . . Similarly, the department has also attempted to preemptively obstruct President Trump’s plans for (badly needed) defense civil-service reform.

Hinderaker uses the word “insurrection” to describe what Austin and senior Pentagon officials are up to:

Efforts by military personnel to frustrate the president’s defense policies certainly threaten to undermine the principle of civilian control over the military. But one could go further: don’t such actions smack of insurrection?

You might think that the word “insurrection” is going a bit far, at least as to what has occurred so far here. But then, it’s certainly no more inappropriate use of the word than in its application to January 6.