Until The Mess Trump Made of Government Is Cleared, Biden's 'Build Back' Better Can't Take Off
'Biden's 'build back, better' can't even begin until the mess Trump made of government is cleared.' Daily Kos, Feb. 8, 2021. - Ed. -
You know how bad you thought things were under Trump? It was even worse than you thought for the career civil service people that keep everything running regardless of administration. Because Trump didn't give a damn about most government, unless it was the people working to implement anything President Obama had done or it was interfering in the ability of him and his friends to make as much money as possible. He was dead set on destroying it, and he nearly got there. In the 4 whole years of the previous administration, there was no Senate-confirmed director for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. One third of the permanent staff of the Economic Research Service is gone, same as the staff of the National Institute of Food and Agriculture workforce. This is the direct result of the arbitrary and capricious decision to relocate the 2 agencies from D.C. to Kansas City, Missouri.
"We lost some of the nation's best economists and agricultural scientists in the previous administration," current USDA spokesman Matt Herrick told the Washington Post in an email. "It will take time for the new administration to rebuild USDA's scientific and research agencies and restore their confidence and morale." That is emblematic of the whole of the federal government, just one more challenge for President Biden to have to meet, one more colossal mess left by Trump that he has to clean up. In fact, it's pretty much the most urgent mess to fix because Biden's initiatives and efforts to save the country can't be successful unless there's a government to implement them.
One their options is trying to bring back the staff that Trump and team forced out during the past 4 years, either directly or through totally politicizing and poisoning their departments. Bringing back staff with experience and expertise will help them rebuild and normalize operations more quickly.
But it's not just filling the massive vacancies, it's supporting the people who stuck it out and have been traumatized. For example, the staff of social workers who spent their careers helping immigrants in the Department of Health and Human Services' refugee office who were forced to work with ICE in immigration crackdowns and deportations, taking custody of the thousands of children separated from their parents. For the last 4 years, the Office of Refugee Resettlement has been forced to operate as a junior partner in immigration enforcement," Mark Greenberg, a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute, said. "That was fundamentally counter to its mission as an agency, and the challenge for new people coming in is to restore its mission in service to children."
Other career officials, particularly those who pushed back against Trump in health, environment, and energy were shoved out of their positions into areas out of their expertise and where they couldn't fight back. Others have seen their agencies packed with Trump political appointees to create barriers between them and Congress to hamper their ability to work with lawmakers. "They basically didn’t want anyone in the career staff getting their hands on information," said Matthew Davis, who worked both as a health scientist at the EPA's Office of Children's Health Protection and at the Office of Congressional and Intergovernmental Relations. "They built up this large number of political appointees in congressional affairs particularly, so the career officials didn't handle oversight requests." Which means that there will be career staff in place who really don't know a lot of what was going on in their own departments, because Trump's political appointees were carrying on without them...
More, https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2021/2/8/2014772/-Biden-s-build-back-better-can-t-even-begin-until-the-mess-Trump-made-of-government-is-cleared
- Good news is that he knows how it's supposed to work.