Last week saw the passage of a grim milestone in government corruption: Pepperdine University Law Professor Paul Caron’s TaxProf blog marked the 1000th day of
the scandal involving the IRS’s deliberate political targeting of
conservative “Tea Party” groups. There are some lessons in this, and
they’re mostly bad news.
The first sad lesson is that the notion of an impartial, professional civil service is a fiction. The big government designs of Democrats and the federal bureaucracy are aligned, and the bureaucracy often deploys its powers in ways calculated to frustrate Republican presidents and to protect Democratic ones.
This is an open secret in Washington, leading Bloomberg View writer Megan McArdle to comment that even if elected, a President Trump wouldn’t change much because the bureaucracy wouldn’t go along:
“Anything that gets done by Washington must be done by the civil service. These folks are lifers. You can’t fire them. Because of the abovementioned legislative compromises required, you also can’t push a bill through that will let you fire them. And they — not the president, and not the cabinet secretaries — are the folks who do most of what government does. The president can wave his hands like Jean-Luc Picard and say, ‘Make it so.’ But if they don’t wanna, they ain’t gonna.”
http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2016/02/08/irs-tea-party-targeting-lois-lerner-corruption--obama-glenn-reynolds-column/79967098/#
The first sad lesson is that the notion of an impartial, professional civil service is a fiction. The big government designs of Democrats and the federal bureaucracy are aligned, and the bureaucracy often deploys its powers in ways calculated to frustrate Republican presidents and to protect Democratic ones.
This is an open secret in Washington, leading Bloomberg View writer Megan McArdle to comment that even if elected, a President Trump wouldn’t change much because the bureaucracy wouldn’t go along:
“Anything that gets done by Washington must be done by the civil service. These folks are lifers. You can’t fire them. Because of the abovementioned legislative compromises required, you also can’t push a bill through that will let you fire them. And they — not the president, and not the cabinet secretaries — are the folks who do most of what government does. The president can wave his hands like Jean-Luc Picard and say, ‘Make it so.’ But if they don’t wanna, they ain’t gonna.”
http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2016/02/08/irs-tea-party-targeting-lois-lerner-corruption--obama-glenn-reynolds-column/79967098/#
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