Why Didn't Trump Fire Fauci?

The Swamp runs much deeper than anyone imagined

Why didn’t Trump fire Fauci when he had the chance? That’s the question Florida governor and Republican hopeful Ron DeSantis has been asking on the campaign trail, hoping to dislodge Trump from the top of the Republican Primary leader board.

While it may be a good campaign tactic (certainly it’s getting people riled up), the answer is actually so surprisingly simple that either DeSantis knows what it is and is being disingenuous, or he doesn’t know and is therefore not fit to be President.

The truth is: Trump had no power to fire Fauci.

As CNN explained at the time: “Under federal law, Trump doesn’t have the power to directly fire Fauci, a career civil servant, and remove him from government. And while Trump could try ordering his political appointees to dismiss the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Fauci could appeal — a time-consuming process.”

As every American schoolkid knows (or at least should know), America was created with three ruling institutions, each designed, like the legs on a stool, to keep each other in balance: the President, Congress, and the Supreme Court. Each of these three has a democratic component: President and Congress are directly appointed by the people, and the Supreme Court is appointed by the sitting President for life, keeping the political balance on the court roughly equal while reflecting the mood of country.

However, over the intervening years a fourth, much larger, crucially undemocratic institution has arisen which has grown to overshadow the three legitimate institutions. It is none other than the behemoth that is the administrative state.

Speaking to CNN, Max Stier, president and CEO of Partnership for Public Service explained how this happened:

It goes back actually to 1881 when President James Garfield was assassinated by a would-be job seeker.

We had a spoils system that had dominated the government employment base and it didn’t work. You had people coming into positions of public import who were there not because of their capability but because of their political connections and in a remarkable turnaround, then-Vice President Chester Arthur, who was a product of that spoils system himself supported legislation — the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act [of 1881] — that was a game-changer and professionalized the government employee base.

And it began a long process of making it more and more merit-based. And part of the outcome of that assassination then was a rule system that does not allow political leaders to remove or demote career civil servants without justification. And the justification has to be around poor performance, or failure to follow orders. And then there is a process that has to be followed even if there are allegations of performance or misconduct issues, and that process requires written notification and opportunity to respond.

So the President would not in this context be able to fire Dr. Fauci on the basis of not liking what Tony Fauci had to say.

In comments indicative of the game he’s playing, DeSantis has in fact tacitly recognized that Trump had no powers to fire Fauci. Speaking to Fox News’s MediaBuzz recently, he said:

“We have to recognize; the media will typically refer to these people [i.e. the administrative sector] as ‘non political career people’. Now it’s true they’re not political appointees, and we can agree on that, but some of these people have been proven to be fiercely partisan in how they’ve actually applied power and that is a huge huge problem because you can win the electoral college as a Republican, you get in there, and then what, the executive branch continues to go left? because these are quote supposedly ‘non-partisan people’, but they’re acting partisan.”

One of the most fascinating aspects of Covid, from a political point of view, was that in attempting (and arguably achieving) their freedom-demolishing power grab, the administrative state was forced to out itself to the people.

Hitherto, it had been quietly hiding away in the shadows, regulating activities that most people never much think about. Unless you happened to fall foul of their petty diktats, say you’re a farmer who just wants to sell raw milk to a willing customer, or a doctor with an alternative cancer therapy that actually, y’know, works, you’d never really notice that the administrative state was busy working away in the background for their corporate paymasters.

But during Covid, the measures it took — keeping people in their homes, shuttering whole sectors of the economy, forced wearing of face masks, forced vaccines, preventing children from receiving an education — were so massively out of all proportion, and were so clearly designed to instill needless fear in ordinary people to the financial benefit of huge corporations, that millions of people worldwide couldn’t help but notice what was going on.

Clearly, these measures were not in keeping with what it means to live in a free state. All form of choice was thrown out of the window; people were not allowed to weigh the risk of Covid against other real risks, like the risk of having no income for two years, or the risk of taking part in a mass trial for a novel gene therapy.

Millions of people have now seen the administrative state with their own eyes, not just in America but in every formerly free nation around the world, and having seen it, they are neither willing nor able to unsee it.

But this has put Republican (and broadly conservative) politicians in something of a bind. On the one hand, their voter base now expects action. On the other, they know that the full force of the administrative state and its cronies in government and the media will denounce them in the most furious terms if they dare pledge to tackle it. One has to think only of the way the word ‘freedom’ itself was scoffed at during Covid to get a feeling for what lengths the deep state will go to to protect itself. Any politician wanting to wrestle power away from it, and back to elected officials, will immediately be accused of being a ‘dictator’ intent on staging a ‘coup’ or some other form of power grab. They’ll be literally worse than Hitler. Any of this already sounding familiar?

Presumably mindful of this, DeSantis’ own plans to drain the swamp are decidedly tepid.

“We’re going to reduce through attrition,” he said. “We’re going to order every cabinet secretary to reduce the footprint of employees within DC by 50%. So some of that may mean more people retire, some you don’t fill the positions, [and some] people are going to be transferred to other parts of the country.”

There are 2.9 million federal employees working across 432 federal agencies in America, not including in the military and post office. Not all of those employees have decision making capabilities — although try applying for food stamps if you want to discover how much power your local Food and Nutrition Service bureaucrat actually wields over you — but those that do number far more than the 4,000 officially political appointees, the ones the President currently has the power to hire and fire.

Of those 2.9 million, just 364,000 work in the Washington metropolitan area, according to a November 2017 report, of which about 54% of were in the District itself. So DeSantis’s big plan to ‘drain the swamp’ is to move at most about 3% of the total Federal employment roll out of DC to other parts of the country, where they’ll carry on working regardless.

Perhaps aware that a promise to move a few of the Federal employees from Washington DC to SmallTown, Ohio, is less ‘draining the swamp,’ more ‘making a big splash at a kiddie’s water-tray table’, DeSantis continued:

“I do think Presidents have more ability to fire bureaucrats than they’ve tried. So for example, we’re going to create something called ‘Schedule F’. Anybody that has any policy making role is going to be re-categorized ‘not subject to civil service’, and can be fired at will.”

Anybody who heard this would be forgiven for thinking that Schedule F is DeSantis’s invention. In fact, it was Trump’s.

According to Jeffrey A Tucker, writing for the Brownstone Institute, “Two weeks before the 2020 general election, on October 21, 2020, Donald Trump issued an executive order (E.O. 13957) on “Creating Schedule F in the Excepted Service.”

“Following the lockdowns of mid-March 2020,” Tucker continues, “Trump became increasingly frustrated with the CDC and Anthony Fauci in particular. Trump was profoundly aware that he had no power to fire the man, despite his epicly terrible role in prolonging Covid lockdowns long after Trump wanted to open up to save the American economy and society. Trump’s next step was radical and brilliant: the creation of a new category of federal employment. It was called Schedule F. Employees of the federal government classified as Schedule F would have been subject to control by the elected president and other representatives.”

Executive Order 13957 did two things: it re-classified any federal position of “a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating character,” and which was not subject to turnover following a presidential election, as a Schedule F position. These would have been subject to hiring and firing by the president. It also ordered all heads of agencies to do an audit of their staff, and identify which positions should be designated as Schedule F.

As it happens, Trump’s understanding of what was needed to drain the swamp came too late. The order came into force on January 19, 2021, a day before the inauguration of President Biden. Two days later, on January 21st, Biden overturned it, saving the bureaucratic class from scrutiny.

Tucker again: “How many federal workers in agencies would have been newly classified at Schedule F? We do not know because only one completed the review before their jobs were saved by the election result. The one that did was the Congressional Budget Office. Its conclusion: fully 88% of employees would have been newly classified as Schedule F, thus allowing the president to terminate their employment. This would have been a revolutionary change, a complete remake of Washington, DC, and all politics as usual.”

So had Trump remained president and continued his mission to drain the swamp, potentially he could have gained the powers to fire at will some two and a half million federal employees, including the nefarious Dr Fauci.

But again, there’s a problem here too because — as mentioned above — any effort to reclassify these positions in order to give the President firing powers will inevitably lead to accusations of the President acting like a dictator. The Democrats and the media would have a field day if either Trump or DeSantis tried to fire 90% of the Federal payroll on political ideological grounds.

For a foreshadowing of this, one only has to read the Washington Post’s critique of Order 13957, which reads, in part:

The directive from the White House, issued late Wednesday, sounds technical. [...] Its implications, however, are profound and alarming.

Not only will politically motivated firing become easier, but it will also be easier to hire those who meet Mr. Trump’s standards: obsequiousness and, more often than not, a lack of qualifications. With no competitive process in place, leaders can appoint whom they please — or rather, who pleases them.

This scheme, if it stands up in court, would transform a substantial portion of the professional federal workforce into a political federal workforce. Evidence-based decision-making would fall to cronyism; expertise would go out the window and patronage would fly in.

Yet, while the Post’s editorial is clearly itself politically motivated — “Think of the Food and Drug Administration employee evaluating the efficacy of a vaccine,” they lament — it is not actually wrong. Dismiss the thought of the FDA employee, and think instead of what would happen if this order were wielded by Biden, or Harris, or Gavin Newsom, or Maxine Waters. Think of every policy role in the administrative state being a Democrat political appointee, all 2.5 million of ‘em. Woke would go into overdrive. It would make the bureaucracy that characterized Stalinist Russia look like a boy scout jamboree.

So if relocating apparatchiks away from Washington won’t work, and creating a whole army of political appointees won’t work, what will work? How can the swamp actually be drained?

One obvious solution would be for the vast majority of those 432 federal agencies to be ditched completely. Lights off, doors locked, every employee out on the street holding a cardboard box.

It’s a happy idea, and in my more whimsical moments I allow myself the pleasure of imagining the Cabinet Office empty, quiet, slowly gathering dust as in some post-apocalyptic drama. I’ve also taken, lately, to a new blood sport: that of goading members of UKIP, Reform, and the other upstart parties on their lack of ambition in this area, and I encourage you to do the same. But it’s not a complete solution, for two key reasons:

1. Although they’re unarguably fully captured by corporate interests now, many (though by no means all) of those agencies were set up for a legitimate purpose. The Food and Drug Administration is supposed to play a vital role in evaluating whether a product is safe for people to put in their bodies, because we sure as hell know that companies have a financial incentive to sell you poison and promise it’s good for you. Now that the FDA has abdicated that responsibility, we need a new way to ensure that what we eat and the drugs we take are safe.

2. No politician will do this. Indeed, no politician can do this.

It has been tried. In 2010, the newly elected Con/Lib coalition government promised a ‘bonfire of the quangoes’, with then chancellor George Osborne promising to save £500 million by merging or cutting a number of ‘Arm’s Length Bodies’, the UK’s equivalent of the US’s federal agencies.

Eleven years later, Westminster’s Public Accounts Committee found that, while the number of quangoes had been cut from around 600 to 295, spending on them had tripled, rising from £90 billion a year to £265 billion. It also found that the Cabinet Office, which is run by civil servants, the UK’s equivalent of Federal employees, has “not been enforcing the code for public appointments”. What a surprise!

One could argue that the government didn’t exactly try very hard — even the target of a £500 million cut from a total £90 billion budget was risible — but the fact remains that the establishment (call it what you will: the administrative state, the civil service, the deep state, the swamp), will defend itself rigorously from any attack by government, aided and abetted by a captured media. It’s more than one President, or even one government, can realistically take on, especially with just four years to get the job done.

In other words, the swamp is too big to drain. Trump can’t do it, DeSantis can’t do it, Farage and Fox wouldn’t be able to do it, even if they could get elected (which they can’t).

No one is coming to save us.

The sooner we realise this, the sooner we can get on with the hard work of saving ourselves. Together, we can take steps to free ourselves from the apparatchiks, the busybodies, and the pencil pushers. What it needs is peaceful mass resistance and non-compliance. We need to have the courage to stand up to the people within the system and tell them: we’re not going to play your game any more.

It will also require a willingness to take the responsibility of regulation upon ourselves. We need to be our own FDA, researching the food and drugs we put into our bodies. We need to be our own environmental agency, going out in force to ensure our local environments are properly cared for. We need to be our own food stamps agency, helping others who live in our neighbourhoods to thrive through help and charity.

None of this will be easy. It means completely jettisoning the comfortable way of life we’ve all known until now, safe within the bosom of Mother State, for a new life on the outside. It will mean losing jobs, bank accounts, friends, potentially homes. But it also means gaining freedom.

I want to end with a comment posted in the How to Survive the Apocalypse telegram group (which you can join by clicking here), which sums up perfectly the situation we’re now in, and the courage we need to find at this moment:

“I'm a yoga teacher and P is a nutritional therapist. We’re starting to see our friends and peers really decline, which is shocking, and it’s so clear that mainstream lifestyle is just rotting us. Jabbed, drugged, desk-bound people with no skills in real life, like cooking, growing food, putting up a fence, fixing a car... let alone the critical thinking to be able to see the bars of their own prison, in which they’re held by the comfort of a regular income, mortgage, car payments etc. People believe they need these things. The elite have done a great job of poisoning and infantilizing the majority of all westernised populations.

“I think a lot of people are getting burnt out, or finding that their life just isn't what they want any more. Covid really ripped off the veil in a way. You can certainly feel that life is different now and won’t go back to how it was.

Covid was a breeze for me compared to the challenges (mentally & emotionally) of the last 12 months since we started our farm. I guess in a way, it’s how I know we're on track. Sitting around resisting the narrative, not wearing a mask or getting jabbed was a walk in the park compared to actively working to be the change.

We’ve set up a non-profit to do nature based therapy at the farm as well as educational events and course on growing and healing. P got made redundant a month ago so we’re now all in on the market garden and he’s doing handyman work too. I’m still home educating, which is brilliant. Although it’s very tough breaking away from the system as we’re totally broke it does feel good.

“Our overall guiding principle is to be working towards building the kind of life and world we want to have in the future rather than giving energy to fighting the broken fucked up world that’s disintegrating around us. Hopefully it’ll work out... I said to my friend the other day, it’s like living life walking along a tightrope. It’s fine and positive when you keep your eyes right ahead on the destination but if you look left or right and allow yourself to wobble it’s terrifying.

Terrifying, but also thrilling. Do you want to be ruled, or do you want to be free?