While We're Watching the Scandals, Trump Is Quietly Dismantling the Federal Government

[dalton99a]

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2017/02/while_we_re_watching_the_scandals_trump_is_dismantling_the_federal_government.html

The Trump Administration’s Not-So-Benign Neglect
While we’re watching the scandals du jour, the president and his top advisers are dismantling the federal government.
By Phillip Carter



This week, President Trump delighted his base with a pledge to treat deportations like a “military operation.” There were also reports that his administration is urging government officials to cherry-pick intelligence to support their desired policy outcomes and that his White House chief of staff made inappropriate contact with the FBI regarding Trump’s Russia ties. And that’s just the news from the national security sphere.

The rage felt by the president’s critics is real, and understandable, but it also plays into Trump’s broader agenda. His chief strategist Steve Bannon outlined that strategy this week at the Conservative Political Action Conference, describing it as nothing less than the “deconstruction of the administrative state.” Bannon’s comments this week suggest a darker, more nefarious purpose to the nascent Trump administration’s dysfunction. It may be the case that the Trump team is deliberately failing to staff, manage, and provide resources for federal agencies so as to sabotage and slowly dismantle them. To make matters worse, the Trump team might be leveraging the controversies regarding its disastrous national security moves to obscure and conceal that slow and steady demolition of the bureaucracy.

After the election, the administration was slow to deploy its transition teams, pick top officials, develop future budgets, and generally take the reins of government. By almost any measure, the Trump White House lagged behind prior transitions in these efforts—it was the dog that caught the car and didn’t know what to do next. To this day, the Trump administration lags in terms of picking its political appointees, let alone articulating a comprehensive policy agenda that goes much beyond “make America great again.” At the Departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs, the two largest federal agencies by budget and headcount, the Trump imprint on policy remains amazingly light. One can glean more about acquisition, health care, or war-making from presidential tweets than from the White House’s website.

Federal agencies require certain commodities to run: leadership, legislative authorization, funding, and people. The combination of these commodities results in programming, executed either by government employees, contractors, or local governments using federal grant funds. Every part of this formula has been neglected by the Trump administration.

[Laurian]

1. True, that.

[Eliot Rosewater]

2. Republican voters who work as walmart greeters want the govt to take away

their rights, soc sec, medicare, unemployment, etc.

Not sure why, but these guys basically admitted they would do that , well fuckface lied and said he wouldn't but only a complete and total dumbshit asshole would believe that.

I mean bannon is on record saying he WILL eliminate our entire existence as we know it, guys that includes your social security, HELLO!

[putitinD]

3. +1000

[al bupp]

4. Well, except for the immigration, pot and bathroom police, that is /nt

[bdamomma]

5. of course

they are

Bannon and 45

[triron]

6. Better be rid of him soon!

[MBS]

7. Agree 100%. n/t