The United States Attorney is the representative not of an ordinary party to a controversy, but of a sovereignty whose obligation to govern impartially is as compelling as its obligation to govern at all; and whose interest, therefore, in a criminal prosecution is not that it shall win a case, but that justice shall be done. As such, [the prosecutor] is in a peculiar and very definite sense the servant of the law, the twofold aim of which is that guilt shall not escape or innocence suffer.
Over the years, my colleagues and I were frequently reminded of the words of former Chief Nuremberg Prosecutor, Attorney General, and Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, who told the Second Annual Conference of United States Attorneys in 1940:
A sensitiveness to fair play and sportsmanship is perhaps the best protection against the abuse of power, and the citizen’s safety lies in the prosecutor who tempers zeal with human kindness, who seeks truth and not victims, who serves the law and not factional purposes, and who approaches his task with humility.
Although the President appoints each U.S. Attorney, the entire staff at each office consists of non-political civil servants. In my eighteen years as an AUSA, I worked for Republican and Democratic administrations and served for five separate U.S. Attorneys appointed by four different presidents. I still have the handwritten notes from one of my early training sessions. On the topic of prosecutorial discretion, my notes reflect: “non-political judgments, enforce law – equal application; legislature decides what a crime is – prosecutor decides only whether crime [was] committed & sufficiency of evidence.”
This dedication to fairness and objectivity was shared by all my colleagues (including my wife, who was a talented and devoted federal prosecutor for 31 years), and by the hundreds of federal law enforcement agents who investigated and developed the evidence in cases assigned to me. I worked closely with countless agents from the FBI, DEA, ATF, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, Customs, Immigration, IRS, U.S. Secret Service, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and many local and state law enforcement officers.
Although my professional responsibilities focused on federal criminal prosecutions, over the years I have become friends and interacted with dozens of career federal employees, from foreign aid workers to diplomats, lawyers, doctors, scientists, economists, researchers, intelligence analysts, air traffic controllers, and many others. In every case, I have been impressed with how sincerely they believed in what they were doing, how much they loved serving their country and the public good. Many were highly specialized and possessed unmatched expertise in their fields. Almost all of them could have made more money in the private sector, but they were driven by a sense of mission and public service.
I point this out to emphasize how disheartening and devastating are the recent actions of Elon Musk and the Trump administration to purge or fire hundreds of experienced career federal employees, and their attempts to coerce the resignations of a large segment of the federal workforce. The day before the tragic air collision between an American Airlines jet and a U.S. Army helicopter that killed sixty-seven people, all air traffic controllers working for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) received an email from the White House titled “Fork in the Road.” The memo, which was sent to federal employees throughout the country, encouraged the employees to resign and gave them eight days to accept a payout. The memo implicitly threatened that those who did not agree to resign could be fired, noting that “the majority of federal agencies are likely to be downsized through restructurings, realignments, and reductions in force. These actions are likely to include the use of furloughs and the reclassification to at-will status for a substantial number of federal employees.”
As one FAA employee wrote in a letter to the Washington Post, “How do you think this letter would sit with anyone in any job? I will tell you that everyone at the Indianapolis Air Route Traffic Control Center was talking about that email Wednesday” [the day of the accident]. Only days earlier, Trump had fired the head of the Transportation Security Agency and all members of the Aviation Security Advisory Committee, froze hiring of new air traffic controllers, forced out the head of the FAA, and illegally fired the inspector general of the Department of Transportation (along with 17 other inspectors general), a non-partisan position with the sole responsibility of detecting “waste, fraud, and abuse” within federal agencies. Of course, rather than express concern for the victims or address any actual evidence of the accident’s causes, President Trump childishly blamed “DEI” (diversity, equity, and inclusion) on the accident.
Unfortunately, the Trump/Musk effort to spur mass resignations is only one of many ongoing attacks on federal employees, as Trump seeks retribution against his perceived political enemies, which includes the professional civil service that he so often fantasizes constitute the “deep state.” Trump’s attack on the federal workforce is premised on the notion that the professional civil servants who perform the everyday work of government are either useless “bureaucrats” or people secretly aligned against him. He and Musk believe that they can get rid of most civil servants, regardless of their experience, dedication, and expertise, and permanently shrink the size of government without any consequences. He is gravely mistaken.
Hitting close to home for me is the recent firing of thirty career federal prosecutors by political hack Ed Martin who Trump appointed as the Interim U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia. Martin has never been a prosecutor and most recently served as head of Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum (i.e., anti-feminist, anti-LGBTQ, ultraconservative). For the past four years he falsely promoted Trump’s claims that he won the 2020 election. Martin dismissed these career prosecutors because they helped successfully prosecute and convict some of the January 6th rioters. He also ordered an internal review of all AUSAs in the office who had any involvement in the 250 cases that charged rioters with obstructing an official proceeding of Congress (a charge that was approved by nearly all federal judges who ruled on the issue until the Supreme Court overturned them on highly questionable legal grounds). Martin has threatened subordinates who criticize his actions, and he is determined to spur an exodus of veteran prosecutors, which will only serve to threaten public safety and create a more docile office less likely to resist Trump’s avowed desire to seek legal retribution against his perceived enemies.
Equally troubling was Trump’s firing of dozens of top-level FBI officials, including the six most senior FBI executives and dozens of Special Agents in Charge of field offices across the country. He has also threatened to purge potentially thousands of agents who had anything to do with the investigations that led to his indictments in Florida and DC or who worked on the investigations resulting in the prosecution of the 1,600 January 6th rioters whom Trump disgracefully pardoned (including 600 violent rioters who attacked and assaulted police officers).
The threats to our democracy, national security, and ability of the federal government to perform the everyday tasks that help ensure the health and safety of the United States, are so vast that they cannot be overstated. As Stacey Young, an 18-year veteran of the Justice Department told the New York Times, “The animus coming from the administration is unprecedented. . . employees are terrified about the stability of their jobs. They’re worried about being fired or transferred or demoted or demeaned or doxed. . . the fear and confusion is palpable and may only grow.” Young, who resigned from her DOJ position, recently formed Justice Connection, a non-profit organization that provides guidance to current employees on legal issues, whistle-blowing, and digital and physical security, among other concerns.
Along with many Republicans, Trump has long sought to shrink the size of the federal government and restructure it to serve his purposes. He seeks to impose loyalty tests and remove anyone who might disagree with him from the ranks of the civil service. He has reclassified Senior Executive Service employees, some of the most experienced and important members of the federal workforce, as “at will” employees serving at the discretion of the President, thus attempting to strip them of civil service protections. He is attempting to eliminate the appeal rights of a whole range of civil servants should they be fired for no justification. As Joe Davidson of the Washington Post noted, “due process for feds facing discipline or termination is meant to protect not just individual workers from unfair actions, but more broadly and more importantly to protect the public from a government staffed with partisans loyal to a political party or individual instead of to the nation and its Constitution.” Indeed, the harmful narrative that seeks to turn dedicated civil servants into villains threatens the ability of government to function and endangers our democracy.
The attempted workforce purge is being led by the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, and the “Fork in the Road” email mirrors precisely what he did when he took over and nearly destroyed Twitter/X. Unfortunately, Musk, like Trump, has a vendetta against government regulators and knows nothing of the complexity of the federal government or the importance of maintaining an apolitical workforce that includes a wide-range of technical expertise and experience. Musk intends to ruin the federal government the same way he ruined Twitter – only now the people he is targeting do things that benefit ordinary Americans.
Close to 16% of our federal workforce consists of health care professionals – physicians, nurses, physical therapists, pharmacists, dental officers, veterinarians, and many other public health occupations. Many of these professionals work for the Department of Veterans Affairs, which runs our VA Hospitals, and an assortment of agencies within the Department of Health and Human Services. The federal government employs a significantly higher number of people with advanced degrees than does the private sector. This includes biomedical and cancer researchers at the National Institutes of Health, safety inspectors at the Food and Drug Administration, epidemiologists at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, and doctors and nurses working for the Health Resources and Services Administration, which provides health care to people who are geographically isolated or economically vulnerable.
Scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency collect data on air, water, and land quality, identify pollutants, assess environmental risks, and develop solutions to mitigate these risks. Toxicologists, chemists, and product safety engineers at the Consumer Product Safety Commission help keep children’s toys and all the consumer products we buy safe. Safety managers at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration identify workplace hazards, implement preventative measures, train employees, investigate accidents, and promote a culture of safety within the workplace. Nuclear safety regulators have kept our nuclear energy facilities free of fatalities since 1961. The Social Security Administration and the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services facilitate the services that allow millions of Americans to afford the necessities of life (72 million Americans receive Medicaid; 68 million receive Medicare; and 67 million receive Social Security). The Federal Emergency Management Administration responds to natural disasters. The list goes on and on.
And it is not only people in the United States who are badly impacted by the Trump/Musk purges. Musk and Trump have set their sights on career staffers at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), approximately one hundred of whom were suspended, with more severe personnel and funding cuts expected. President John F. Kennedy formed USAID in November 1961 to place all foreign aid functions under one roof. Since then, the agency has provided desperately needed and life-saving humanitarian assistance to the world’s poorest countries. The work it does supports many nonprofit organizations and enhances the reputation of the United States around the world. USAID provides disaster relief, health services, anti-poverty funding, and technical assistance on a host of issues, and promotes democracy and civil society efforts in Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe. More than three million lives are saved annually through the USAID Immunization Program.
USAID was an instrumental weapon in fighting the Cold War and has more recently helped stem the rising influence of China, which has been increasingly advancing its foreign aid efforts in the developing world. But Chairman Mao, I mean Musk, who has strong financial ties with China, has said that USAID is a “criminal organization” (of course, providing no evidence) and that it is “time for it to die.” Meanwhile, according to the USA Today, “Field hospitals in Thai refugee camps, landmine clearance in war zones, and drugs to treat millions suffering from diseases such as HIV are among the programs at risk of elimination.”
Efforts to enact good faith reforms and improve how efficiently the federal government is managed are always welcome. But it is the job of Congress to enact a budget and appropriate funds, and to approve federal programs. It is an essential function of the democratic process, one that the framers of the Constitution did not delegate to the President, and certainly not to an unelected vengeful billionaire with no security clearance, Congressional vetting, or any government experience.
Most of the day-to-day work of the federal government is performed by career civil servants who are motivated not by politics, money, or fame but by public interest. When things work well, it is because of the committed and experienced professionals in our federal agencies. Their work is invisible to most people. But if no one prevents Trump and Musk from breaking things just for the hell of it, the damage to our economy, our society, and our way of life, will be immense and irreversible. As Ben Raderstorf of Protect Democracy writes:
We should aim to make government work better — find ways to recruit more talent; better retain star performers; improve ways of operating and delivering services; enhance transparency and responsiveness. All of those things would make us safer.
That’s not what Trump’s team is doing with the civil service; they are instead working to "dismantle” it because it might stand in the way of their ability to consolidate power. That makes us less safe.
It also makes us much less democratic.
There is so much wrong with this post, but sadly, I haven't the time to address it. I would like to correct one thing and ask one question. Your statement, "Although the President appoints each U.S. Attorney, the entire staff at each office consists of non-political civil servants," is simply not true. It's not true of the US Attorney's Office, not true of the FBI, not true of the gang at the local barbershop, and not true anywhere two people gather and do more than nod to each other. Suggest you read "The Russia Hoax" by Jarret. Lisa Page, non-political? Her boy-toy Agent Strzok, non-political? The Russian Collusion Hoax was nothing if not proof of a "Deep State" where Trump haters allowed their psychosis to override their professionalism. By the way, your "evidence" for this statement and many more seems to rest on the fact that you worked with a lot of people and they were all good guys. Not a solid foundation to make a case.
ReplyDeleteAnd question: How, exactly, did Musk "ruin" twitter? Because the Left no longer controls it? Because there is infinitely less censorship? Has something replaced Twitter/X, which usually happens when something is "ruined"? Or do you mean ruined it for you?
Rich,
DeleteThere is so much wrong with your comment that, sadly, I must limit my response. First, I could care less about Twitter and have never used it. However, as anyone in the tech industry can tell you, that Musk “ruined” Twitter as a business is almost undisputed. He ripped apart its infrastructure without understanding it (much like he is trying to do to the federal government) and he transformed a social media platform that was used by hundreds of millions of people into a platform for his personal megaphone (and that of white nationalists). Since Musk took over Twitter/X, it has lost by most estimates between 60-85% of its revenue. A quick scouring of news reports on the topic reveal that Twitter's value has dropped significantly since Musk acquired it; ad revenue has declined 40%, as reported by Fortune; Musk laid off 75% of the staff, including half of its data scientists; he allowed neo-Nazi and other notorious bad actors to return to the platform; and he reportedly made much criticized changes to the platform’s algorithms. If that were my business, I would consider that a failure. (BTW - Bluesky has replaced Twitter for over 30 million users).
Second, you apparently miss the point of a non-political professional civil service. Civil service reform occurred in the late 19th century to eliminate the political patronage system that used to dominate how people were hired for federal positions. It used to be that the party in power gave all their political cronies, friends, and relatives jobs in various government positions regardless of competence or skill in order to curry favor with their “people.” That all changed in the late 19th century with the Civil Service Reform Act of 1883, which was strengthened and solidified through the efforts of Teddy Roosevelt as Civil Service Commissioner in the 1890’s. That is why there are now civil service protections for most government workers and why, except for political appointments, positions are filled based on merit with non-political criteria. That doesn’t mean federal employees don’t have political leanings (there is nothing wrong with that, if it doesn’t interfere with how they carry out their tasks) or that some employees don’t occasionally act outside the norm, in which case they can be appropriately disciplined or fired. These are human and imperfect institutions. But what Musk and Trump are trying to do is take us back to the pre-1883 system and inject political loyalty and politics throughout government. The firings of career prosecutors, who pledge fealty not to any president but rather to the Constitution and the law, are unprecedented and dangerous.
Finally, my personal experience over 18 years, and that of Andrea over 31 years, is indeed evidence. In fact, it is direct evidence – the equivalent of eyewitness testimony. I would have hoped you knew that. I can’t prove that every government worker throughout every agency throughout all the years was as dedicated and committed to duty and the constitution as were the hundreds of people she and I worked with, but our experiences are more reliable than the highly partisan book you cite.
So how do you know that "The Russia Hoax" is "highly partisan"? I'll wager you have not read it, which is sad because I have to assume you've come around to the fraud that was Russian Collusion, something I've been trying to tell you since I begged you years ago to read the first Carter Page affadavit (did you?). And if you, like much of the MSM with maybe the exception of Media Matters (are they still around?) now understand the Obama-led treason that was that deep state plot, I would think you'd be hungry to finally read all those who were years ahead of the fake news of Rachel Maddow and her fellow corrupters. So please make the case that the thoroughly researched and footnoted book by Gregg Jarrett is "highly partisan."
ReplyDeleteRich - This blog is not for the purpose of you giving me reading assignments. Once again, you have completely missed the essence of this essay. Gregg Jarrett's book has absolutely nothing to do with it. I am grateful that you take the time to read my blog and I welcome a respectful dialogue with you. But your comments must stay relevant.
DeleteI brought up the Russian Collusion Hoax as a rebuttal to your belief that every government worker is irreplaceable and above reproach and I offered the book has a much needed primer to understand the rampant corruption with which you seem unaware and which motivates Trump's attempts at cleaning house. I could have used Hunter's laptop and the 51 filthy intelligence officers, but we never discussed that before, so I sought a common frame of reference. Also the reason I didn't start with the Dr. Mengele-like corruption and barbarity of Dr. Fauci's 40-year reign of horror. But I get your point and I am done, I promise (until the next essay). Please tell Andrea that!
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