After President Barack Obama exits office, at least 88 of his political appointees will likely remain working in the federal government under a Donald Trump administration, according to numbers from the Office of Personnel Management.

From Jan. 1, 2010, through Sept. 30, 2016, federal agencies selected 112 political appointees for career civil service jobs. Of those, the Office of Personnel Management approved 88 and rejected 24.

Unlike political appointees, federal workers in the civil service system are hired through a merit system, are difficult to fire, and carry over during administration changes, Republican or Democrat.

Political appointees are allowed to transition to career federal jobs, but under the law, they are supposed to go through the same merit-based selection process as other applicants.

“Selecting civil servants based on ideology instead of qualifications results in a less effective, more politicized bureaucracy,” Henry Kerner, assistant vice president of Cause of Action Institute, said in an email to The Daily Signal Tuesday. “Burrowing also provides the outgoing presidential administration the ability to reward its allies by stacking agencies with politically-aligned people who will be less inclined to help implement the new administration’s priorities.”

After an agency has hired a political appointment to a career position, the conversion has to face final approval by the Office of Personnel Management.

“Federal guidelines require agencies to seek approval from [the Office of Personnel Management] for such moves, but it’s unclear how often these rules are followed,” Kerner added.

Office of Personnel Management spokeswoman Laura Goulding said the number could be higher.

“It’s difficult to provide an accurate number of Obama administration employees who may be in the process of converting, since it changes by the day,” Goulding told The Daily Signal.

She added, “We don’t know how many political appointees apply for permanent federal positions; we just see the number of selectees. [The Office of Personnel Management] has checks and balances in place to ensure cases requiring pre-appointment review are submitted to OPM for approval.”

An Obama administration political employee, who converted earlier this year to a civil service job in the Department of Veterans Affairs, could be playing a role in the presidential transition.

This could at least violate the spirit of the policy on presidential transitions, which is supposed to minimize partisanship, according to the Cause of Action Institute, a conservative government watchdog group.

The organization is more broadly investigating how many political appointees are moving into career civil service positions, a practice known as “burrowing.” The watchdog has made a Freedom of Information Act request to both the Office of Personnel Management and the VA.

Obama appointed Gina Farrisee in September 2013 to serve in the political job of VA assistant human resources secretary. In May, she converted to the career civil service position of deputy chief of staff—a role she will continue in after Trump takes office.

Before serving in the VA, Farrisee was an Army veteran and was awarded several military decorations. She served as the commanding general of the U.S. human resources command at Fort Knox, Kentucky.

“According to information obtained by [Cause of Action] Institute, Gina Farrisee, the deputy chief of staff at VA, is apparently a key member of the VA White House transition team that is preparing the agency for the next administration,” wrote Lamar Echols, counsel for Cause of Action, in a FOIA request to the VA. “If true, this arrangement creates the appearance that the transition process will be managed by Obama administration political appointees because Ms. Farrisee was an Obama administration appointee until May 2016.”

That could be a problem because each federal agency is supposed to have two transition leaders, one from the political level and another from the career level.

“In this case, it appears a former political appointee will be playing the role of a nonpartisan career employee, an apparent conflict of interest,” Echols wrote.

Echols’ letter said this could also go against a May executive order by Obama, which said:

The peaceful transition of power has long been a hallmark of American democracy. It is the policy of the United States to undertake all reasonable efforts to ensure that presidential transitions are well-coordinated and effective, without regard to party affiliation.

The VA did not respond to phone and email inquiries from The Daily Signal as of post time to confirm whether Farrisee is part of the transition team.

Goulding, with the Office of Personnel Management, said, “We can’t confirm any specific members of transition teams; we don’t have that information.”

The Obama administration did not follow the rules to avoid political favoritism in hiring a quarter of all Obama administration political appointees into career civil service jobs, according to a Government Accountability Office report issued in September.

The report covered 30 federal agencies from Jan. 1, 2010, through Oct. 1, 2015. According to the report, agencies failed to get final Office of Personnel Management approval when hiring political appointees to career jobs.

“In those instances where the agency did not submit a request for pre-appointment review, [the Office of Personnel Management] informs the agencies in writing of the requirement to conduct a review of the selection post-appointment,” Goulding said, adding:

OPM also works with agencies to increase awareness and understanding of OPM policy in this area. In addition, we are required by law to report to Congress when those individuals who underwent a pre-appointment review were appointed to the career position.

(For more from the author of “Obama Political Appointees to Continue as Career Employees Under Trump” please click HERE)

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President Barack Obama sent high-level administration officials to Cuban dictator Fidel Castro’s funeral procession last week, a gesture of respect he did not offer for former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s funeral.

After Castro’s death, Obama released a statement saying: “History will record and judge the enormous impact of this singular figure on the people and the world around him.”

The carefully guarded words made no reference to the legacy of tyranny and destruction Castro left for the Cuban people, nor did it explain how much Castro’s communist ideology played a role in the half-century of humanitarian catastrophes during his regime.

As reported in Conservative Review, “Ben Rhodes, the White House deputy national security adviser and one of the president’s closest aides,” was sent to attend Castro’s funeral service along with the U.S. ambassador to Cuba, Jeffrey DeLaurentis.

Rhodes became notorious this spring when he boasted of selling a “narrative” about the U.S.-Iran nuclear deal to journalists to push the president’s agenda through Congress.

He was also a key player in opening up relations between the U.S. and Cuba in 2015, ending a long-standing American policy to isolate the communist nation.

The Obama administration failed to send high-level members to Thatcher’s funeral in 2013, which many British saw as a “snub” of their famous leader. Nor was that the first sharp elbow thrown at legendary British leaders by the Obama administration.

The words and actions of an administration, such as who a president chooses to send to a funeral, have a heightened influence on the global stage without the chief executive ever having to act officially.

As historian Richard Neustadt wrote, paraphrasing President Harry Truman, “presidential power is the power to persuade.” And as Neustadt noted, this power to persuade leads to the more tangible power to negotiate—perhaps the most important presidential role in foreign relations.

That the president seems so willing to symbolically and concretely abandon the “special relationship” the U.S. has had with Britain while going out of the way to tiptoe around the sore spots of the Cuban regime is a reversal of priorities for a nation that stood as a beacon for the free world.

Of course, Castro and Thatcher stood at opposite ends of the Cold War in the ultimate test of freedom against authoritarianism—Castro was a revolutionary communist who battled with the United States for decades and Thatcher was a legendary Cold Warrior who stood shoulder to shoulder with President Ronald Reagan against international communism in the 1980s.

When Thatcher was elected prime minister in 1979, she, along with Reagan, pursued a more confrontational approach to the Soviet Union, which she viewed as a primary global threat to human liberty.

She saw the difference between free countries like the United States and Great Britain and authoritarian regimes like under the Soviet Union and Cuba as fundamental.

Like Reagan, who called the Soviet Union an “evil empire” in a famous 1983 speech, Thatcher rhetorically undermined the tyrannical regimes and indicated that a mere détente with them was unacceptable.

When negotiating with the Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War, Reagan and Thatcher came from a position of strength.

In a 1983 television appearance, the Iron Lady, as Thatcher came to be called, explained the radically different outcomes for people living under these nearly opposite systems of government:

[Nations] that have gone for equality, like communism, have neither freedom nor justice nor equality, they’ve the greatest inequalities of all, the privileges of the politicians are far greater compared with the ordinary folk than in any other country. The nations that have gone for freedom, justice, and independence of people have still freedom and justice, and they have far more equality between their people, far more respect for each individual than the other nations.

Castro’s Cuba has been the very picture of this despotism based on a false “equality,” as Thatcher described.

“Castro’s communism has not just left Cubans economically pauperized, but politically bereft, a situation that Obama’s unilateral concessions to Castro’s little brother, the 85-year-old Raul, Cuba’s present leader, has only made worse,” Heritage Foundation senior fellow Mike Gonzalez wrote for The Daily Signal.

Cuba’s pursuit of communism under Castro crippled the island nation and pushed hundreds of thousands to risk their lives to escape. Thatcher and Reagan’s rhetorical stands against autocracy helped break the power of communism as an international threat as they pushed the Soviet Union to collapse.

But the Obama administration now has sent high-ranking officials to the funeral service of the man who pleaded with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev to wage nuclear war against the United States during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. The system the now-deceased Castro created still exists after his death and continues under his brother.

The simple act of administration officials attending or not attending a state leader’s funeral service communicates a great deal to the world about what a president’s intentions are.

Signaling that free countries like the United States will back off in their condemnation of oppressive, communist regimes like the one propped up by the Castro brothers helps breathe new life into their failed ideology. (For more from the author of “Obama Sent Someone to Castro’s Funeral, but Not Thatcher’s. Why It Sends the Wrong Message.” please click HERE)

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