He just has to use every tool he has to punish the Deep State:
The Trump administration is canceling the Presidential Rank Awards, one of the nation’s highest annual honors for career civil servants that two years ago recognized a government official who later testified during President Donald Trump’s impeachment proceedings, Insider has learned…
The demise of the Presidential Rank Awards is “very disappointing” and a “missed opportunity” to honor the work of senior government executives tirelessly implementing COVID-19 programs alongside their other duties, said Jason Briefel, director of policy and outreach for the Senior Executives Association, a nonprofit organization that represents the interests of career federal executives.
Word of the awards’ cancellation surprised Briefel, who said he learned the news from an Insider reporter.
[…]
Nothing seemed awry with the Presidential Rank Awards in February, when then-OPM Director Dale Cabaniss officially called for nominations.
Nominees, she wrote, should be “extraordinary leaders who have made significant contributions in delivering mission critical solutions, providing excellent customer service and being good stewards of taxpayers’ dollars.”
The award nomination process proceeded as normal into March, according to an email exchange involving Boehm, Interior Department Inspector General Mark Lee Greenblatt, Federal Election Commission Inspector General Christopher Skinner and Corporation for Public Broadcasting Inspector General Kimberly Howell.
But OPM in late March suspended the award nomination process with an eye toward canceling the 2020 awards entirely, according to another email exchange among the inspectors general.
Cabaniss resigned in May, with Politico reporting at the time that she felt poorly treated by Trump loyalists.
[…]
In November, Trump recognized 146 Presidential Rank Awards winners for 2019. There are roughly 9,000 government employees eligible for the awards.
The year before, in 2018, Trump presented Office of Management and Budget official Mark Sandy with a Presidential Rank Award. Sandy made headlines in 2019 for testifying before US House impeachment investigators about military aid the Trump administration had for weeks withheld from Ukraine.
The election-year rejection of the civil service’s annual awards is the latest example of the Trump administration squeezing a federal bureaucracy that the president has deemed as bloated and disobedient.
Trump himself has suggested his own government even houses shadowy elements conspiring against his presidency.
“We are finally putting America first. Yet the ‘deep state’ and the failed ruling class are trying to resist any changes to their failed policies of the past,” Trump said during a November campaign rally in Lexington, Kentucky.
In March, the president referred to the State Department as the “Deep State Department” during a White House press conference and soon after began peddling an “Obamagate” conspiracy theory that holds Obama and his allies are attempting a “coup” against him.
Trump has also heartened adherents to the QAnon conspiracy theory, which the FBI named in a May 2019 intelligence document as a potential terrorism threat. Trump, for example, hosted a QAnon advocate in the Oval Office, and last year he invited to the White House conservative social media influencers who promote QAnon content.
The last three-plus years have also seen a dramatic remaking of the federal workforce under Trump.
In June, the president issued an executive order that directs OPM to “review and revise all job classification and qualification standards” for competitive civil service jobs. The order says “skills- and competency-based hiring” should be a high priority akin to a college degree.
Trump has fired or marginalized several prominent inspectors general, the independent, internal government watchdogs tasked with addressing waste, fraud, abuse and potential illegality within the executive branch.
Like Trump knows what “skills and competency based” anything is.
I’m sure they canceled this when they realized Trump had given the award to Mark Sandy. It’s just another punitive act of retribution for the impeachment.