The Trump administration isn’t really running the government, but they are trying to keep their eyes on it:
The political appointee charged with keeping watch over Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt and his aides has offered unsolicited advice so often that after just four weeks on the job, Pruitt has shut him out of many staff meetings, according to two senior administration officials.
At the Pentagon, they’re privately calling the former Marine officer and fighter pilot who’s supposed to keep his eye on Defense Secretary Jim Mattis “the commissar,” according to a high-ranking defense official with knowledge of the situation. It’s a reference to Soviet-era Communist Party officials who were assigned to military units to ensure their commanders remained loyal.
Most members of President Trump’s Cabinet do not yet have leadership teams in place or even nominees for top deputies. But they do have an influential coterie of senior aides installed by the White House who are charged — above all — with monitoring the secretaries’ loyalty, according to eight officials in and outside the administration.
This shadow government of political appointees with the title of senior White House adviser is embedded at every Cabinet agency, with offices in or just outside the secretary’s suite. The White House has installed at least 16 of the advisers at departments including Energy and Health and Human Services and at some smaller agencies such as NASA, according to records first obtained by ProPublica through a Freedom of Information Act request.
These aides report not to the secretary, but to Rick Dearborn, the White House deputy chief of staff for policy, according to administration officials. A top Dearborn aide, John Mashburn, leads a weekly conference call with the advisers, who are in constant contact with the White House.
I won’t belabor the point, as long as you get the point:
History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. In this case, the NSDAP is basically a grouping of folks around Wilhelm Frick Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III and Steve Bannon. Rick Dearborn, who manages these Dienstleiters, served as the chief of staff for Senator Sessions from December 2004 until 2016. As they pursue this Daseinkampf and Gleichschaltung of our government, our civil servants will have to decide where their breaking point is. Do they stay and fight, or do they resign on principle?
Once again…right on point.
That’s what’s happening, alright.
The real question?
Who’s gonna do something about it?
The devolved DemRat Party?
Led by people who couldn’t see far enough in front of their own self-involved, profit-taking noses to realize that nominating Hillary “Public and Private Positions” Clinton was going to come back and bite their privileged asses, big-time!!!???
Tell me another bedtime story.
Please!!!
I’m sick of this one.
Time for a new story.
Time for a new party!!!
AG
Marduk, nalbar and whatever other knee-jerk downraters we have here in this troubled pond…
I would be more than happy to see you continue to pollute an already thoroughly devolved DemocRatic Party, if only there was some other reasonably-chanced party to join.
But…so far…there isn’t.
So fuck off.
AG
“Grow up?”
You mean “surrender,” don’t you?
Surrender to a corporate-owned party that cheats its own candidates if they in any way threaten to actually do something to halt the gradual dissolution of this struggling democracy into universal serfhood?
Never.
You?
Not so much, apparently.
Wake the fuck up.
ASG
You have the wit that 13year old twitter trolls are deeply impressed by Arthur.
1) Grow the fuck up.
Then (once you’ve grown up enough to realize your repetitive, rambling, substanceless shtick was already tired years [decades?] ago, and that you never have anything new, different, or sensible to say . . . yet you say it anyway, again and again and again and again and . . . ):
2) Shut the fuck up.
[Cue ‘you can’t censor me {blah, blah, blah}!!!’ stupidity in response. True, I can’t, in fact, censor you. Which is exactly why it would be such a stupid claim. But knock yourself out. My tolerance for ‘conversation’ with you was already exhausted before my first keystroke.]
pretending to think I objected to your oh, so principled critique of . . . what were we? — ‘DemonRats’ or some such? — rather than to your tiresome, juvenile, petulant whining about (earned!) negative ratings.
Repeating (in terms you SHOULD be able to grasp . . . so probably not): Grow. The. Fuck. Up.
I don’t know why AG or anyone else cares about ratings….
After the shock violation of Godwin’s law…I’m a bit baffled by your reasoning by analogy. The Nazis were taking over administration at all levels. (FYI that’s the way things operate in the so-called People’s Republic of China.) But those guys minding Mattis, Pruitt etc. are only watching the top dogs.
The Nazis had been building their party apparatus for years before taking power; the Trumpistas have only had a few months to do likewise and no doubt have been hampered by the Dear Leader’s incompetence, ignorance, and preference for chaos and infighting over organizational proficiency.
Hitler also liked to promote infighting, IIRC.
Okay, for your benefit, I will spell it out.
That excerpt I pulled from an analysis of the Nazi takeover of the German bureaucracy pertains to an early point.
At first, the Nazis were too inexperienced and uneducated and raw to fill out positions in government, particularly the high prestige ones like their versions of the State Department, Treasury, and Pentagon.
They focused instead on taking over lesser offices and gaining control over their version of the Justice Department.
In the meantime, they placed “minders” in the other agencies to check for loyalty and to essentially spy on them.
In our current situation, the Bannonites took a brushback pitch with the National Security Adviser and they had to appoint established military in prestige posts. Tillerson was foisted on them, but they’re just sidelining him. They got the main early prize, which is Justice.
So, the Bannonites are focusing on lower offices and lower prestige cabinet and sub cabinet positions. Their problem is that even these positions are going to people who aren’t true “party” members. Thus, they’re getting minders to run things or to test for loyalty and spy if they can’t run things.
It’s a nearly perfect parallel of how the Nazis began, both as far the challenges they faced and the offices they couldn’t initially control and in their solutions for tackling these problems.
And you cannot roll out a full system of top-to-bottom minders in two months without, um, getting noticed.
To John Stormer’s mind, this political enforcement was a strength of the Soviet system that conservatives needed to emulate. And they have, conducting internal department witch hunts to remove people for political reasons.
The Republican (and Trump model) comes from Stalin’s organization of the Soviet bureaucracy in which there were formally named political commisars whose job was the “political education” of the civil service. The Republicans never got far enough along to have called their folks the “political administrator of the EPA” or some such Soviet parallel. Nor could they have gotten far with “political education” of the US civil service, which for long saw its role as apolitical technocrats.
First, thanks to Booman for the fuller account.
I’m one of those apolitical technocratic civil servants in a science agency. Our whole credibility derives from having nothing like land or resource management functions, and a very long tradition of impartiality. IOW, a nice target for this administration.
An you also have the technical knowledge of your field and the way your agency works to run circle around any commissar.
If you need some imagination in how this is done, reading or rereading Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Švejk will be a relaxing introduction.
In some cases, doing your job to the very best of your ability can be intensely baffling to political commissars. In some cases, even hilariously so.
which I’d completely understand, so fine): USGS?
People on the left need to recognize reality on these concerns. It would be both cruel and pointless to demand that ordinary civil servants “resign on principle” in response to the machinations of Trump and his devotees. These people need their jobs to pay the bills, and in most cases they would not be able to find adequate employment elsewhere. The really harsh pressure needs to be brought to bear on the higher-level folks who have options, especially those who have come out of retirement. Any of these people who serve Trump do so by choice, and they deserve the opprobrium of all honorable and thoughtful people.
Eliot Cohen in particular has been eloquent about how these courtiers will find themselves selling their souls the the Devil on the installment plan. As he put it in “The American Interest” in January (“Truth in the Age of Trump”): “But in any case, our hope or desire to encourage the best of them should not cause us to cut any of them any slack. No one who backed Trump has any excuse for being surprised by what he does; no one who joins his administration can ever be allowed to claim that they did so in ignorance. We all know who and what he is.”
I work closely with both federal civil and foreign service staffs. It is simply not true that these people would not be able to find work outside of government. The overwhelming majority of the technical staff, especially whether they are scientists, engineers, lawyers, communications experts, analysts of various types, etc. are, in fact, highly trained. Many came from the private sector or research/academia in the first place and many go back to that work. Sure there are some that work for life in the federal service but that certainly doesn’t mean they’re unemployable elsewhere. That’s a terribly outdated stereotype.
other political appointees whose loyalty is instead suspect, but could get through confirmation with the bar set on the ground. Presumably, the commissars could not.
“Interesting.”
I have just the song for this news. You know the one.
A day that will live in infamy. 🙁
I’ve never forgotten. I was re-reading some Vonnegut at the time (Slaughterhouse Five), and was struck by his characterization of the bombing of Dresden as something reminiscent of the Children’s Crusade. That struck a nerve with me at the time. Later references to Guernica and so on struck a nerve. History rhymes, regrettably.
Damn, Napalitano should have called me if he wanted to mess around with Larry and win the intelligence operation.
certainly not repetition of history, since nothing like this has happened in America before.
but I damn sure don’t like what it’s rhyming with.
The Republican Party has put political commissars in the agencies it doesn’t like and at DoD for quite some time. Usually they are not so blatantly labeled as White House Advisers but are nominally in the hierarchy of the top appointed leadership.
For its part, the civil service employees have their longstanding internal grapevine as to what is going on at the top.
The thing about leadership is that it requires the consent of the followers or an inordinately expensive enforcement mechanism that about duplicate department size. When nobody but commissars staff an agency, it can be easily killed because it has lost all function to the public and only exists to enforce loyalty to the leader. Most authoritarian leaders collapse before that process is complete.
Interesting question: Who is the commissar in Pence’s office?
Very interesting. Der Fuhrer, of course, attained power via a parliamentary democracy (with a shaky hold over the German military) and had to transform it into an authoritarian dictatorship, ostensibly directed by a single “fuhrer”. There had been a long tradition of a meritocratic civil service under the Prussian kings and ultimately the Emperor. The Empire was kaput in November 1918, but Weimar inherited the Imperial civil service and its traditions (including of course the Prussian Great General Staff, much reduced via Versailles Treaty).
So Hitler, Goring, Himmler and Goebbels had their work cut out for them in taking (executive) control of the German state in 1933 and trying to funnel all power to a single point. They succeeded to a remarkable degree in a relatively short time, but as Booman demonstrates, some agencies retained some maneuvering room for quite some time before they were submerged as well, most notably the Army and Finance.
Der Trumper takes over an executive branch that already has a ready-made model of the “unitary executive” available for deployment, thanks to “conservative” think tanks. Americans have come to think that our federal government is something like, say, Tillerson’s beloved Exxon—a private company that the president has dictatorial power over, without even a board of directors.
Plus, after decades of “conservative” sewage distribution and ingestion by American rubes, our civil service (unlike the German tradition) is now seen by a huge block of Americans as featherbedding make-work job killers, worthless parasitic positions that anyone could accomplish and which are all the product of corrupt patronage. Their expertise has been continually disdained and minimized by “conservatives” for decades now. So there is no broad esteem or sympathy for government workers, to say the least. Just another effect of the endless diet of Gub’mint Hatred prescribed by American “conservatism”.
It is pretty comical to observe that Reichsfuhrer Bannon thinks he needs a “minder” over someone like the monstrous Pruitt at EPA or the Repub nutjob in Interior. You’d think Bannon would have some confidence that these guys (and Price at HHS) had demonstrated their braindead credentials about as strongly as a “conservative” possibly could, yet even THEY have to have a Trumpite commissar?
I suppose it is more understandable to have Trumperian commissars in Energy, Housing and Education, since Bannon is well aware that the unqualified incompetent boobs installed there don’t know anything and may be more apt to be “improperly influenced” by career professionals or concerned Congress members.