Uneasy Lies the Head

The editors of the Wall Street Journal take note of the pushback that President Biden is receiving from the federal bureaucracy on his policy with respect to Israel. The short version is that he has received letters from the National Security Council, the Department of Justice, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the Department of State demanding he call for an “immediate ceasefire” and “de-escalation”. The number of signatories in total to these letters amount to something like 2,000 appointees and staff.

It should be noted that any ceasefire in the conflict between Israel and Hamas works to Hamas’s benefit. It’s an opportunity to regroup and reload. One wonders how many of those signatories are materially in support of Hamas. It’s quite fashionable in some circles.

The editors remark:

If democracy means anything, perhaps they should lose their jobs or, better yet, they should resign honorably if they can no longer support the boss’s agenda. The malcontents are a sliver of the federal workforce. Yet the job of the executive branch is to implement a President’s policies, not run a pressure campaign to change them via anonymous letters and leaks.

Unhappiness at Mr. Biden’s Israel policy is also circulating at the State Department in dissent cables. One difference is that this is a normal channel for internal criticisms, created amid the Vietnam War and used in recent years to raise alarms about Mr. Biden’s disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal. The signatories on the State Department cables aren’t public knowledge, but they aren’t anonymous.

Part of the problem here is that civil-service protections are so extensive that it is hard to discipline much less fire a dissenting career bureaucrat. This gives them a certain impunity when they want to agitate against an elected President’s policy.

But this isn’t how democratic government is supposed to work. Political appointees and bureaucrats are free to argue up the chain of command for a different course of action. If they don’t succeed, they can continue to do their jobs, or else they can resign. But it’s a dereliction of duty for federal workers to spend their time trying to stymie the policy of elected officials.

which you may notice is similar to things I’ve been saying here for years. It has been over a century since we’ve had major civil service reform. A century ago the federal bureaucracy was a fraction of the size of the present one. The idea behind the Civil Service Act was to create a more competent and conscientious federal workforce not a permanent and unassailable “shadow government”. Regardless of what they may believe it is the job of the federal bureaucracy to implement policy not to formulate it. They may contribute to that formulation but determining what is or is not policy is the president’s job not theirs.