[🎬PREVIEW] James Sherk: How Unelected Bureaucrats Sabotage Presidential Policy

A lot of people are familiar with the stereotype of the incompetent, lazy, poor-performing government employee. There's a good number of those folks. Surveys of federal employees themselves show that there's a lot of those folks, and it frustrates the federal workforce. But they're not actually the biggest problem. The biggest problem are the very smart and capable and highly motivated people who don't like the president's policies and are very capable of using their positions to block it. So the way the government is staffed is you have, it's about 2.2 million people in the executive branch. It's a huge bureaucracy. And there's 4,000 political appointees. So the political appointees are there to provide high-level direction and supervision and sort of policy directions with the expectation that the career staff are going to faithfully implement those orders. If they decide they don't want to carry out those orders and they're protected with these removal protections, they're simply not orders of magnitudes near enough political appointees to do that work instead. So one example, the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division is notorious for having very ideologically motivated career staff. And many, many, many times during the Trump administration, these career staff were told, well, there's projects we want you to work on. And the answer that came back was, no, go pants out. So for example, Yale University, there was an investigation into Yale University and massive, massive racial discrimination in admissions at Yale University. If you're a Caucasian and especially if you're an Asian American. And so the leadership in the Civil Rights Division said, look, the law says there's no racial discrimination allowed. This is unjust. We want to file a suit. And the career staff would not draft the complaint. So it had to be drafted by political appointees. Then after the political appointees drafted it, they turned around to the career staff, the division responsible for policing racial discrimination in educational institutions and said, all right, now we need a team of lawyers to pursue this case. The answer that came back was, no, none of us are willing to work on this. Now, they were able to bring the case at the end of the day, because they were able to poach staff from other components of the Department of Justice that were less political. So they took some employees from the Civil Division, from the U.S. Attorney's Office in Connecticut, where Yale is located, a political appointee, and they're able to bring the case. But you can do that with one case. You can't do that with 50. So let me get this straight. You're telling me that they just simply flat out refused the order? They were asked to assemble a team, and the answer that came back was, no, we're not going to do that. Now, my understanding is they were not ordered to work on it. But if you order them to work on the case, then you've got attorneys working on a case who deliberately want to attack the case. And so it doesn't get you what you need. And in fact, what the political appointees learned subsequently is that the more senior career staff were, in so many words, threatening the junior career staff and saying, hey, anyone who helps the Trump politicals with this case, there will be career repercussions against them when Trump leaves office. Another example, obviously, the abortion debates have been in the news a lot recently. There's a lot of mixed opinion, split public opinion on abortion. But one area where there's overwhelming consensus is that doctors and nurses should not be forced to participate in abortions. This is something, if you take a look at polling for decades now, 80-90% of Americans believe that you should have these conscience protections. And Congress also agrees and passed something in the 1970s called the Church Amendments, named after the Democrat senator from Idaho who introduced them, that says, look, if you're a hospital that takes federal funding, you cannot force your staff to participate in an abortion. But there's no private right to sue. It has to be up to the Department of Justice to sue to enforce these things. Well, the career staff in the Civil Rights Division, they were not willing to work on cases that enforced them. And so again, during the Trump administration, political appointees were able to bring one case that they had to handle themselves against a hospital in Vermont that did that. And you can do that for one or two cases, but you don't have nearly enough political appointees to litigate 15, 20, 30, 50 cases. And again, it's a public record. You can look at the lawsuit that was filed, you can look at the names of the attorneys who were on there, and none of them were career employees in the Department of Justice. They decided for themselves that who cares what Congress thinks? Who cares what the voting public thinks? Who cares what the White House thinks? We don't support these conscience protections, and therefore we will not do anything to enforce them. If you're an attorney, you represent your client. And in the Justice Department, your client is the United States, and you're there to enforce the laws. You don't get to say, you shouldn't get to say, these are the laws I like, these are the laws I don't like, I'm only going to work on these laws.