New Orleans There are clear lessons in the first ten days of Trump II. Most people who run for the top office in the United States at least pretend it’s because they want to achieve some aspirational goal. Power comes with the victory, but most don’t run simply because they want to exercise power, which seems to the be case with President Trump. Most presidents want to actually govern, not destroy the government. This is something new.
Using one imperial order after another, Trump has either frozen most existing governmental programs or created such chaos that federal agency employees have ceased many operations, because they aren’t sure what they are supposed to be doing. Virtually all of the federal workforce of two-million received emails offering them a severance package if they resigned that would pay them through the month of September, applying a standard corporate buyout model for reducing the ranks. The fact that the stated intention is to boil the workforce down to only those who are “loyal” and “trustworthy” is autocratic, not corporate.
Lawsuits are falling like rain over these Trump initiatives since many of them are clear breeches of the statutes. In the world of checks and balances, can a president undo what Congress has legislated and funded with his signature on a piece of paper? Unlikely, but the chaos sends its own message, and the wrecking crew will succeed in gutting some programs in the fog of this war. Take a little thing, relative to all of this, in the removal of a National Labor Relations Board member to destroy the quorum necessary for some of the board’s actions. Language in the statute seems clear that the president does not have that authority, but running it through the legal mill takes time, and achieves the purpose intended by the administration.
Injunctions on other matters have already been issued by federal judges on his attempt to end birthright citizenship as well as shutting down programs, but that doesn’t mean that immigrants feel secure, or that workers are able to move forward and deliver government services. Looking through the list of 2800 program under siege, Head Start, where we represent workers in Houston and Shreveport, was supposedly unaffected, yet some agencies report the funding portal is closed. Explain that, please.
Break-the-bank or “flood the zone” strategies are common in trying to make change. When attempted by the powerless, as we did with welfare rights, applicants flooded welfare offices, but rather than winning increased benefits and entitlements, it went the other way. Now, as the president and his men try the same strategy, not from the bottom up, but the top down, their odds seem better. It’s a football allusion, where the offense is sending so many receivers into a certain zone in the field that the defenders are unable to keep up with all of them, allowing, in the best case, that the quarterback finds the open man for a gain or a score. It doesn’t always work, but sometimes someone slips through. Applied in this situation, many of these programs will survive, but not all. Some workers will take the package and be through with working for the government, or at least this government, but most will not. There simply aren’t hundreds of thousands of jobs in lower level governments or the private sector as good as the jobs they are doing in terms of mission, wages, and benefits.
Sorting out the loyalists in government in this new witch hunt and “red scare” is reminiscent of the McCarthy era and the House Un-American Activities Committee. These purges have been proven not to work, will be resisted, and eventually stopped, but that doesn’t mean that damage to citizens, government workers, and critical programs won’t be done. In fact, that seems the point. Power is never absolute. This will backfire, but the price and pain will be huge in the meantime.