Catch-2025
This I learned from 35 years working in the corporate world: Employees who start hearing “shareholder value” had best update their resumes. Layoffs are coming. The same could be said for “efficiency.“
Season 2 of “The Apprentice Goes To Washington” will feature not only the firing of cabinet officers and West Wing advisers from “central casting,” but the wholesale purging of federal employees who have dedicated their lives to serving the American public no matter which president’s photo hangs on the office wall.
Except the Project 2025 team isn’t using euphemisms to signal the coming purge. They submitted a bill under the pretext of dismantling diversity, equity and inclusion programs. The House Oversight Committee held a hearing on the Dismantle DEI Act on Wednesday. Sen. J.D. Vance’s June announcement alleges his bill means to “restore merit” to government hiring practices, and to ensure only “the most qualified candidates” get hired.
“We’ve got now a World Wide Wrestling Executive who’s gonna run education,” said recently reelected Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D) of New Mexico. “We’ve got a Fox News commentator who’s gonna run the military for us!” she said in exasperation:
Call it the Catch-2025.
President-elect Donald Trump’s Republican loyalists were called out Wednesday by a frustrated Democrat over a paradox concealed within their promised purge of federal government professionals.
Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D-NM) told the Oversight Committee she was confused by Vice President-elect J.D. Vance’s bill to dismantle Diversity, Equity and Inclusion protections on the grounds it burdened the federal government with unqualified workers.
Her problem? Trump’s chosen appointees.
“If this is really about making sure that we have qualified individuals inside the federal government,” she asked, “Why is the president-elect choosing absolutely unqualified Cabinet secretaries to be at the head of every single agency?”
Stansbury, a former federal employee with the Office of Management and Budget, issued a damning rebuttal to Vance’s Dismantle DEI Act of 2024 which was brought to a mark-up without a hearing, as is usual.
The New Mexico Democrat noted the bill would amend the Civil Rights Act and the federal code as well as require a list be drawn up of federal workers and contractors no longer eligible for such employment.
She called the requirement “blacklisting” and likened the bill to policies pushed by the notorious Sen. Joe McCarthy, the notorious perpetrator of America’s 1950s “Red Scare.”
“Welcome to the new House Committee on Un-American Affairs and the new McCarthyism,” she said. “We have arrived here today with this bill.”
Stansbury wasn’t done.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green (R) of Georgia said, “Let the purge begin!”
Trumpism, yes. Competence, no. The “spoils” system is back.”