"In this new season, I'm asking how the Trump White House is rewriting the rules of U.S. politics, and talking to Americans whose lives have been changed as a result. Today's episode examines the destruction of the civil service: the removal of professionals, and their replacement with loyalists. I've seen this kind of transformation before, in other failing democracies. Everyone suffers from the degradation of public services."
"I thought I would be at the IRS for six months when I joined, and those six months turned into almost two decades. My name is Kathleen Walters, and I was an executive at the IRS for nearly 20 years, most recently serving as the agency's chief privacy officer. I've kind of worked with every administration all the way back to the early '90s. No other administration has personally ever asked me to do anything that was illegal, no. No."
Kathleen Walters quit the IRS 23 days before qualifying for early retirement rather than comply with a Trump-administration request that would have broken the law and compromised millions of people's privacy. Hundreds of thousands of civil servants have left or been fired in the past year. Career professionals are being removed and replaced with loyalists, degrading public services and institutional competence. A government staffed by loyalists is easier to manipulate, erodes privacy protections, and undermines democratic checks. The replacement of experienced civil servants represents a coordinated effort to remake government power and destabilize democratic governance.
Read at The Atlantic
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