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It’s impossible to know whether an older and wiser Donald Trump will be able to tame the Washington bureaucracy in his second time around as president. But it’s nice to see bureaucrats acting like they’re afraid he just might. It’s not just about the money—although today brings yet another official warning about federal debt. It’s also the principle of the thing. Under the U.S. Constitution, people who were never elected do not get to dictate federal policy. Over the course of the last year, whoever runs the Biden
administration has been seeking to “Trump-proof” Washington, in part by trying to make federal bureaucrats even harder to dislodge from positions of great undeserved influence. Whoever has been in charge at the White House obviously wasn’t wildly optimistic about the chances of defeating Mr. Trump at the ballot box. Today brings new hope that the mystery chief executive also failed in the antidemocratic effort to insulate bureaucrats from voter accountability. Hadas Gold and Rene Marsh report for CNN: As President-elect Donald Trump’s administration prepares to take over Washington, some federal employees are quietly changing the language of job descriptions and performance reviews in an effort to protect roles and critical government functions in the face of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. Tech billionaire Elon Musk and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, who Trump tapped to lead the outside
initiative, have said they plan to recommend slashing the federal workforce, cutting the government’s annual budget by at least $1 trillion, and curbing regulations. Ahead of the initiative’s deployment, five sources familiar with the effort, including senior staffers from multiple agencies, told CNN that some workers are removing mentions of “policy” decision-making and terms related to diversity programs from written job descriptions, duties, and performance reviews to protect the roles from possible cuts.
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