Joe Biden will publicly express confidence in his chances in 2024 (and his ability to make it through another campaign and another term) until someone pulls the plug on his candidacy. But make no mistake about it: he and his handlers are preparing for Trump’s return to the Oval Office.
In recent weeks, we’ve seen a slew of new polls showing Biden and Trump neck and neck, with Trump leading in the battleground states that will ultimately decide the election. Democrats are panicking. The media is panicking. And now it appears that Joe Biden is panicking.
Of course, if you ask Joe Biden, the reason he’s running again in 2024 is because he thinks he’s the only candidate who can beat Donald Trump. True, when you look at the alternatives, it’s hard to see anyone else having a prayer next November. However, at this point, I don’t think Joe Biden really thinks he can win.
The New York Times recently reported that the Biden administration is in the process of trying to “Trump-proof” the federal work force via regulation. The White House proposed a new rule that would make it much more difficult for Trump to reinstate an executive order that Biden nixed when he took office. That executive order would have enabled Trump (or another Republican who might win the election) to fire tens of thousands of federal workers to purge the bureaucracy of rabid leftists and unaccountable civil servants.
“The proposed rule addresses the move Mr. Trump tried to make late in his presidency by issuing an executive order known in shorthand as Schedule F,” the New York Times explains. “It would have empowered his administration to strip job protections from many career federal employees — who are supposed to be hired based on merit and cannot be arbitrarily fired. While the order said agencies should not hire or fire Schedule F employees based on political affiliation, it effectively would have made these employees more like political appointees who can be fired at will.”
Related: Joe Biden’s 2024 Prospects Are Starting to Look Bleak
Of course, such an effort isn’t exactly foolproof, as a second Trump administration could simply use the same rule-making process to roll back the Biden regulation and go ahead with the mass layoffs.
“The Biden administration can, if they want, make removing intransigent or poorly performing senior bureaucrats harder on themselves,” James Sherk of the America First Policy Institute told the New York Times. “The next administration can just as easily rescind those restrictions. With regards to reissuing Schedule F, this proposed rule would be a speed bump, but nothing more.”
The New York Times conceded that legal experts agree on this.
But the fact that the Biden administration is trying suggests that they are concerned that Trump may succeed in ousting Joe Biden and reinstate his executive order in order to purge the swamp of its most vile creatures. As Betsy McCaughey noted over at Townhall, there are 2.2 million federal civil workers, only 4,000 of whom are presidential appointees. So the rest stay in their jobs across multiple administrations, largely unaccountable because it’s extremely difficult to replace them or even discipline them. And they overwhelmingly favor the left. “A staggering 95% of unionized federal employees who donate to political candidates give to Democrats, according to Open Secrets,” McCaughey notes. “Only a tiny 5% support Republicans.”
These civil workers have more power than you realize, and can easily derail a Republican president’s agenda. And there’s nothing that can be done about it. This is why Joe Biden wants to protect them, and why it’s clear that the Biden administration is worried that Trump is about to return to the White House.
