Wednesday, July 20, 2016

As President, Donald Trump Could Purge U.S. Government Of Obama Appointees

Via Billy


Reuters published an exclusive report today which suggests that if Trump is elected president, he would take legal steps to purge the federal government of Obama appointees.

From the report:

If he wins the presidency, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump would seek to purge the federal government of officials appointed by Democratic President Barack Obama and could ask Congress to pass legislation making it easier to fire public workers, Trump ally, Chris Christie, said on Tuesday.

Christie, who is governor of New Jersey and leads Trump’s White House transition team, said the campaign was drawing up a list of federal government employees to fire if Trump defeats Democratic rival Hillary Clinton in the Nov. 8 presidential election.

Trump’s transition advisers fear that Obama may convert these appointees to civil servants, who have more job security than officials who have been politically appointed. This would allow officials to keep their jobs in a new, possibly Republican, administration, Christie said.

“It’s called burrowing,” Christie said. “You take them from the political appointee side into the civil service side, in order to try to set up … roadblocks for your successor, kind of like when all the Clinton people took all the Ws off the keyboard when George Bush was coming into the White House.”

Read the rest here.

A related topic that the Reuters report doesn’t mention, is that since so many of Obama’s actions as president have been based on executive orders, the next president could virtually erase much of Obama’s legacy.

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