{"id":176885,"date":"2020-02-27T19:29:00","date_gmt":"2020-02-28T00:29:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2020\/02\/27\/because-it-worked-so-well-for-president-garfield\/"},"modified":"2020-02-27T19:29:00","modified_gmt":"2020-02-28T00:29:00","slug":"because-it-worked-so-well-for-president-garfield","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2020\/02\/27\/because-it-worked-so-well-for-president-garfield\/","title":{"rendered":"Because it Worked SO Well for President Garfield"},"content":{"rendered":"
It looks like the Trump administration is planning to subvert the civil service system in order to pursue perceived “disloyalty” bureaucrats<\/a>.<\/div>\n

Someone seems to forget that the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act<\/a> was passed in response to the assassination of James A. Garfield by a disgruntled office seeker.<\/p>\n

This is not a good precedent:<\/p>\n

The White House this week confirmed it is combing through federal agencies to identify employees not sufficiently loyal to President Trump to facilitate their ouster, sparking concerns the administration could run afoul of long-established civil service laws. <\/p>\n

The administration is examining employees throughout the government to find anyone taking action officials decide represents an effort to undermine Trump, White House spokesman Hogan Gidley said<\/a> on Fox News Monday. Gidley did not specifically mention career employees, who are statutorily protected against political retaliation, but did note the \u201cmillions\u201d of individuals agencies employ. By contrast, there are only about 4,000 political appointees in government. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not a secret that we want people in positions that work with this president, not against him, and too often we have people in this government\u2014I mean the federal government is massive, with millions of people\u2014and there are a lot people out there taking action against this president and when we find them we will take appropriate action,\u201d Gidley said.<\/p>\n

His comments followed reports<\/a> in Axios that the administration maintains \u201cdeep state\u201d hit lists of employees to fire and the president has tasked the head of the Presidential Personnel Office, Johnny McEntee, to purge<\/a> \u201cbad people\u201d who are not loyal to him. The latter report mentioned only political appointees, who serve at the pleasure of the president and can be dismissed at will, but Gidley\u2019s comments this week appeared to go further. <\/p>\n

\u201cTime and time again we see in the media reports from people in the bowels of the federal government working against this president,\u201d he said. <\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is not going to end well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It looks like the Trump administration is planning to subvert the civil service system in order to pursue perceived “disloyalty” bureaucrats. Someone seems to forget that the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act was passed in response to the assassination of James A. Garfield by a disgruntled office seeker. This is not a good precedent: The …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[469,368,573,450,364,374,454],"class_list":["post-176885","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-bureaucracy","tag-corruption","tag-donald-trump","tag-employment","tag-evil","tag-politics","tag-white-house"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176885"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=176885"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176885\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=176885"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=176885"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=176885"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}