The next bastion of the Deep State to get targeted for its bureaucratic bloat is the National Security Council, and this battle is not starting a moment too soon. The NSC is a hornet’s nest of appeasers, advocates for endless wars, and far-leftists who despise President Trump and his administration, think they know better how to conduct foreign policy despite their ever-lengthening string of failures, and will do everything they can to undermine what Trump tries to do. But now, enter Marco Rubio.
Fox News reported Friday that Trump and Rubio “are continuing to overhaul the National Security Council and shift its main functions to other agencies like the State and Defense departments.” Former National Security Advisor Mike Waltz started the ball rolling when “he ordered 160 NSC staffers off the job pending a comprehensive review of the agency's alignment with Trump's agenda.” Now, as Waltz moves on to become UN ambassador in the wake of the Signal kerfuffle, the resistance against the Deep State at the NSC will continue.
The left will, of course, howl yet again about Trump’s fascism, but if the roles were reversed, we would be hearing endless tales from the establishment media about the coterie of reactionary subversives in the NSC who were wildly exceeding their authority and trying to subvert the noble leftist president’s agenda. Like all other presidents, Trump deserves to have a governmental apparatus that does his lawful bidding and doesn’t try to obstruct it. After all, it was he who was elected to the presidency, not the faceless leftist NSC bureaucrats who decide that his policies are unwise and that the opposite of them will be implemented.
And so “the current plans to upend the agency would include whittling down the size of the National Security Council, which the Trump White House believes is full of long-term, bureaucratic staffers who don’t align with Trump’s agenda.” An unnamed White House official said: “The NSC is the ultimate Deep State. It's Marco vs. the Deep State. We're gutting the Deep State.” According to Axios, Trump and Rubio plan to “cut the NSC staff to about half of its current 350 members. Those cut from the NSC will be moved to other positions in government, officials said.
Rubio explained: “The right-sizing of the NSC is in line with its original purpose and the president's vision. The NSC will now be better positioned to collaborate with agencies." And better positioned, one hopes, to do what it was supposed to do when it was originally established: enact the president’s agenda, rather than interfere with it on behalf of the president’s political opponents.
Another unnamed White House official added that there was a "bottom-to-the-top approach that doesn't work. It's going away. All those things feeding up to principals are the unnecessary piece." Yet another said that henceforth, the NSC's job would be to "coordinate and advise — not carry out — policy." That was the way it was always supposed to be, until America elected a president who wasn’t a member of the uniparty.
Yet although the Deep State only came to the attention of most Americans over the last few years, the controversy over the hiring and firing of civil service employees is one of the oldest controversies of the republic. As “Rating America’s Presidents” explains, Andrew Jackson was elected president in 1828 on promises to end the hegemony of a privileged aristocracy, and, to drain that swamp, he would need his own men in key positions. He removed a large number of civil service employees and replaced them with men of his own faction, which came to be known as the Democracy, or Democratic Party. This came to be known as the spoils system, after the old adage “To the victor belong the spoils.”
The term “spoils system” is today practically synonymous with government corruption, but Jackson began it as a blow against corruption, preventing the establishment of an entrenched bureaucracy that would oppose the president. The Trump administration has made it clear that such a bureaucracy, determined to thwart the president at every turn, is a genuine concern; it is time to bring back the spoils system.
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The proponents of civil service reform, which ended the spoils system, never envisioned a situation in which unelected and unaccountable opponents of a sitting president in the FBI, the Justice Department, and elsewhere would be determined to destroy the president — or at the very least make it impossible for him to carry out his policies — and could not be removed from their jobs because of civil service regulations.
Wouldn’t government work more smoothly, and the executive branch be able to operate more effectively in the way the Founding Fathers envisioned it would, if the president were able to clear out the employees of these agencies who opposed him and replace them with people more in line with his vision? That’s what Trump and Rubio are trying to do at the NSC, and elsewhere. More power to them.
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