OPINION:
It’s a bright new dawn in America, but President Trump has his work cut out for him.
Removing the woke mind virus from the federal government won’t be easy. My new book, “The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government,” explains why and helps lay the path forward for the administration and Congress.
The Woketopus works like this: Influential donors like George Soros — and his son, Alex, who now runs the Open Society Foundations — bankroll a system of woke nonprofits that infiltrate and brainwash the administrative state, getting their agenda enshrined in the regulations Americans must live by. Because bureaucrats write far more regulations than Congress passes laws, this gives the left’s influence campaign a stranglehold on policy that Mr. Trump will struggle to untangle.
After the deep state opposed Mr. Trump’s first administration from within, the president is clear-eyed about the massive threat he faces. My book can help equip him, his nominees and his allies in Congress to root out the woke forces that seek to oppose him from within.
In the book, I highlight the far-left groups with the most influence in the bureaucracy that President Biden oversaw — and some of those who opposed him, sometimes from within. Groups like the Center for American Progress, the Southern Poverty Law Center, Demos and the Human Rights Campaign spread their tentacles into the administration. These organizations drove the Biden administration’s war on fossil fuels, its demonization of conservatives, its effort to federalize elections and its radical transgender agenda.
The Trump administration needs to be aware of the many organizations in my book and wary of their woke influence.
Many of Mr. Biden’s appointees are leaving the administration, returning to the woke nonprofits from whence they came and creating a government in exile. Other woke bureaucrats are planning to entrench, however. Some federal employees hired for jobs with “diversity, equity and inclusion” in their titles are dropping those titles to remain employed in the new administration.
A whopping 64% of Washington-based federal workers who voted for Kamala Harris said they would not obey a lawful order from Mr. Trump.
Russ Vought, Mr. Trump’s pick to head the Office of Management and Budget, will tremendously impact preparing the administration to face this gargantuan challenge. He should resurrect the Schedule F designation to rightly classify federal workers who impact policy, making them more like at-will employees and easier to fire.
Congress can also help Mr. Trump root out the deep state.
Legislators should seriously question whether public-sector unions should be allowed to represent federal workers. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, no conservative, opposed the idea of public-sector unions because they set up an adversarial relationship between civil servants and the people’s elected representatives. FDR’s concerns were born out as federal government unions like the American Federation for Government Employees loudly opposed efforts to make the bureaucracy more accountable to the people’s elected president.
Public-sector unions were once illegal in the federal government. Congress should consider returning to that standard.
Congress should also consider bills like the Regulations from the Executive in Need of Scrutiny Act. This bill would require every regulation that broadly impacts the economy to pass both houses of Congress as if it were legislation. That would help restore Congress’ lawmaking authority and pare back the administrative state.
Finally, Congress should reconsider the freedoms that agencies like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau enjoy. While the Constitution gives Congress the power of the purse — the ability to determine how much money each agency receives — the CFPB is insulated from Congress’ oversight through a funding scheme designed to make it independent. This creates a bureaucracy untethered to the people’s elected representatives.
Mr. Trump is again president, but that doesn’t mean the Woketopus will disappear. The new administration and its allies in Congress need to be clear-eyed about the threat, and my book helps explain how to identify and defeat it.
• Tyler O’Neil is managing editor of The Daily Signal.
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