Recent scandals in the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Internal Revenue Service demonstrated that it’s almost impossible to fire federal employees, many of whom reportedly intend to go rogue by not implementing President Donald Trump’s agenda.

Conservatives are hopeful the time has come for civil service reform that would rein in this permanent class of government workers who have voiced outright hostility to the new administration. Some have even called it the “fourth branch of government” or “alt-government.”

“This is a situation where people voted and elected a president who is lawfully trying to complete those tasks [he promised in the campaign], while unelected bureaucrats are willing to overturn the will of the people,” Ben Wilterdink, director of the American Legislative Exchange Council’s (ALEC) Task Force on Commerce, Insurance and Economic Development, told The Daily Signal.

Among federal employees, about 95 percent of political contributions went to Democrat Hillary Clinton during the presidential race, according to an analysis by The Hill.

Some of those federal workers are now in consultation with departed Obama administration officials to determine how they can push back against the Trump administration’s agenda, The Washington Post reported last week.

At the State Department, for example, nearly 1,000 government workers signed a letter protesting Trump’s executive order on refugees. A few days later, Trump had to fire acting Attorney General Sally Yates after she announced she wouldn’t defend the administration’s refugee policy.

White House press secretary Sean Spicer said State Department employees who oppose the policy “should either get with the program, or they can go.”

“If a federal employee doesn’t like the ideological foundation or likely outcomes of a presidential directive, it doesn’t mean that the directive is not legal. It means that the views of the federal employee are in conflict with the views of the president who runs the federal government,” said Neil Siefring, vice president of Hilltop Advocacy and a former Republican House staffer, in a column for The Daily Caller.

“In that instance,” Siefring added, “the solution should not be to resist the actions of the president in their professional capacity as a career civil servant in the workplace. The solution is for that federal employee to honorably resign, not actively or passively hamper the White House.”

What if an employee won’t resign? Addressing the problem with the federal workforce won’t be easy, according to experts interviewed by The Daily Signal.

“You can fire federal employees, it’s just that nobody wants to put up with the process,” Don Devine, former director of the Office of Personnel Management during the Reagan administration, told The Daily Signal.

Multiple appeals can be made through the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), and the National Labor Relations Board.

“It’s almost impossible to discipline employees because it can be appealed to through the merit system, the labor relations systems, or through the EEOC,” Devine said. “We don’t have a civil service system; we have a dual civil service-labor relations system.”

During the Obama administration, two of its biggest scandals involved the IRS and Department of Veterans Affairs. In 2013, a Treasury Department inspector general report determined the IRS had been targeting conservative groups. In 2014, a VA inspector general’s report revealed falsified appointments in which some veterans died while waiting for care.

Years later, conservatives remain frustrated that federal workers weren’t held accountable.

“I will take your IRS employees and raise you the EPA, where story after story, a worker was viewing porn on work time and couldn’t be fired because the process is fraught with appeals,” Wilterdink said. “It’s hard to argue we have an accountable government when someone can’t be fired for years at a time.”

Earlier this year, the U.S. House revived the Holman Rule, named after a Democrat congressman who introduced it in 1876. It would allow lawmakers to cut the pay of individual federal workers or a government program.

There are other proposals for holding federal workers accountable. House Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, introduced a bill in January to hold seriously tax delinquent people ineligible for federal civilian employment, federal contracts, or government grants. This bill was proposed in response to IRS data that found more than 100,000 federal civilian employees owed more than $1 billion in unpaid taxes at the end of fiscal year 2015.

Adding to the challenge is the process commonly known as burrowing. Frequently, political appointees from one administration convert to a career position that comes with civil service protections, allowing them to continue implementing policy—or resisting the new administration’s approach.

The Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883 was passed to stop raw political party appointments from securing federal government jobs, or a spoils system. The law introduced the merit system into hiring practices and made numerous civil service positions untouchable after they were filled.

However, burrowing has caused a de facto spoils system, Wilterdink said, because, “the pendulum has swung so far to protecting federal employees” that it allows administrations to keep their people in office long term.

Significant reform doesn’t mean recreating a spoils system, according to Robert Moffit, a senior fellow at The Heritage Foundation who was an assistant Office of Personnel Management director during the Reagan administration. Moffit said a balanced approach would be more desirable.

“You need to have strong managers in each agency to make sure the president’s agenda is properly executed,” Moffit told The Daily Signal. “You must also have a bright line between career and non-career staff so there is no politicization of the merit system.”

Moffit also supports legislation to allow the president to order the firing of career officials who either “broke the law or severely undermined the public’s trust.”

“Even President [Barack] Obama referred to what IRS officials did as outrageous and nothing happened,” Moffit said. “The VA matter is still unresolved. The people responsible for those waiting lists aren’t accountable and people died.” (For more from the author of “Rogue Federal Bureaucrats Threaten Trump’s Agenda” please click HERE)

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The anticipation behind a Pres. Trump executive order protecting religious liberty within the federal government would appear to be all for naught, according to a recent report, leaving social conservative concerns out in the cold.

As Politico’s Annie Karni reported Friday:

Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump helped lead the charge to scuttle a draft executive order that would have overturned Obama-era enforcements of LGBT rights in the workplace, multiple sources with knowledge of the situation told POLITICO.

A draft executive order on LGBT rights — which outlines how to roll back former president Barack Obama’s protections and expand legal exemptions based on religious beliefs has been circulating among journalists and worried progressive groups this week.

Put simply, the draft executive order is balanced, solid, commonsense, and worthy of immediate signage. Others in the White House, however, see things differently.

“There are some in Trump’s family that have some views on these things,” a source close to the discussions told Karni. “That’s where the decision is ultimately being made.”

If true, this is horrible news for the voters who helped bring Trump across the November finish line on his promises to protect religious liberty (among other social conservative concerns). In fact, such a blatant reversal would constitute nothing short of a betrayal of those coalitions.

“This president’s number one priority is demonstrating to the people that got him elected that he is doing the people’s business,” the Heritage Foundation’s James Carafano told Politico.

And Carafano’s right — the 2016 election was a referendum on Barack Obama and the Left’s criminalization of Christianity. And countless social conservatives were willing to look past a great many things of their GOP nominee in pursuit of those promises.

During his RNC acceptance speech in Cleveland, Donald Trump recognized that it was evangelicals who brought him to the ball. Right alongside the assuaging promises for a worthy successor to Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court were irrefutable promises to protect human life and the consciences of private-sector businesses to service ideas that violated their deeply held convictions rooted in our history and tradition.

The people elected a president who promised to 1) protect their religious liberty, by signing the First Amendment Defense Act; 2) abolish the Johnson Amendment; and 3) ending the taxpayer funding of the abortion giant Planned Parenthood. Had those voters really wanted a continuation of Obama’s extreme anti-religious zealousness, they could have easily voted for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton instead.

Overturning prima facie discrimination against anyone who doesn’t subscribe to the Left’s sexual identity agenda is more important than changing longstanding Johnson Amendment policy. And, in fact, administration officials promised conservatives this would be done. This is why conservatives backed off the legislative fight to overturn Obama’s discriminatory order in the national defense bill after the election.

While religious liberty opponents claim that because Trump made overtures to the sexual identity lobby during the campaign — and that this promise would contradict the other — is made on a patently false (albeit popular) assumption that rests on the gross mischaracterization that religious liberty protections are “anti-LGBT.”

Rather, as The Heritage Foundation’s Ryan Anderson explains at The Daily Signal: “Opponents to the executive order misrepresent the order by claiming it would repeal an Obama-era executive order elevating LGBT status to a protected class in federal contracts … Rather, it protects the religious liberty rights of all Americans in very tailored ways that address problems of today.”

The notion that barring government contracts with businesses that believe in authentic marriage or don’t have men use female bathrooms in their corporate offices is somehow “anti-” anything is absurd. Quite the contrary. Doing business with any contractor irrespective of their views is the default position. Barring those who don’t have transgender bathroom accommodations is itself discriminatory and sets a horrible precedent in the private sector. Let liberty work.

Pres. Trump would be the best ambassador for this message; it would fit right into his branding. He could sign this executive order and say, “Look, I’m a businessman and I want to get the job done. If you are a contractor who gets the job done, you’re hired. If not, you’re fired! I don’t care about what you do in your offices, and I have no plans to discriminate against any side of social debates in this country. In order to get government out of this debate, I’m repealing Obama’s discriminatory and ill-conceived order that has only further divided this country.”

Trump must also remember that by catering to the sexual identity boycott lobby, he will never win a single new vote and will only divide and demoralize his own base. The same individuals and powers behind the immigration-related protests and boycotts are behind the boycotts against religious institutions.

In the first few weeks of the Trump administration, there have been some soundly fulfilled promises worthy of applause from conservatives.

This, however, does not look like one of them.Some might just call anything they read in Politico “fake news.” But this is not just coming from Politico. Everyone knows that these liberal forces are in the White House and conservatives will not win these policy fights by remaining complacent. Conservatives must remember: We can’t be like liberals and hope for change. We must ensure of change. Trust, but verify™.

This is doubly true when it comes to social conservatives, who have essentially been relegated to the back of the bus in the Republican Party … even though their ideas are codified in the GOP platform that Trump praised.

This current situation could be very well be, as The Heritage Foundation’s James Carafano told Politico, the avoidance of an “unforced error” early in the administration. This could very well just be one piece of an “Art of the Deal” brand puzzle that will dazzle us all in due time.

But “hope,” warns Francis Bacon, “is a good breakfast, but … a bad supper.” (For more from the author of “Will Trump Defy Pressure to Betray Promises on Religious Liberty?” please click HERE)

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President Donald Trump has vowed to dismantle the Dodd-Frank Act, and on Friday he signed two executive orders to get that process moving. All Americans should be encouraged by this start, especially since the President is only two weeks into his administration.

One of Friday’s executive orders deals with a single Obama administration rule, but the other one sets the table for much broader reforms.

The former order lays out a path to rescind or revise what’s known as the fiduciary rule, a regulation designed to provide a single standard for anyone providing retirement investment advice.

The Dodd-Frank Act required the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to study the need for a new, uniform federal fiduciary standard for brokers and investment advisers. Despite this provision and a lack of evidence that there was any problem to fix, former President Barack Obama’s Department of Labor (DOL) issued its own fiduciary rule.

In general, a fiduciary standard requires financial advisers to put their individual client’s interests above their own. As simple as that sounds, imposing a one-size-fits-all approach on investors is likely to lead to many unintended consequences, such as less investment advice for average Americans.

Trump’s executive order puts the Department of Labor’s fiduciary rule on a clear path to its demise, and makes it known that the administration wants to “empower Americans to make their own financial decisions.” This statement marks a sharp break from the Obama administration’s paternalistic view that Americans cannot sufficiently educate themselves on even basic investment issues.

The second order has much broader implications for a White House that expects “to be cutting a lot out of Dodd-Frank.”

This order makes it the official policy of the Trump administration “to regulate the United States financial system in a manner consistent with” seven core principles. These principles are as follows:

empower Americans to make independent financial decisions and informed choices in the marketplace, save for retirement, and build individual wealth;

prevent taxpayer-funded bailouts;

foster economic growth and vibrant financial markets through more rigorous regulatory impact analysis that addresses systemic risk and market failures, such as moral hazard and information asymmetry;

enable American companies to be competitive with foreign firms in domestic and foreign markets;

advance American interests in international financial regulatory negotiations and meetings;

make regulation efficient, effective, and appropriately tailored; and
restore public accountability within Federal financial regulatory agencies and rationalize the Federal financial regulatory framework.

Many of these principles closely track the ideas in the Financial CHOICE Act, a bill that Financial Services Chairman Jeb Hensarling, R-Texas, proposed to replace large parts of Dodd-Frank.

The mere fact that the president stated these principles 15 days into his administration is a great sign for anyone who wants to get rid of bureaucratic red tape, government mandates, and taxpayer backing of losses.

Combining these principles with strong actions in new executive orders would be even better, but there’s no reason to suspect the Trump administration will remain idle. (For more from the author of “Trump’s Executive Orders on Financial Regulation Are a Great First Step” please click HERE)

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